If Naz Shah’s idea of moving Israel to the USA had been implemented not only would there be peace in the Middle East but Trump would still be President!!

70% of Israelis would, if they could, have voted for Trump and just 13% of Biden! This is Israel today 

Cast your mind back to 2016 and the ‘discovery’ that in 2014, at the height of Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, when 2,200 people, including 550 children were murdered, Naz Shah, not yet an MP, dreamed of transferring Israel to the United States realizing that Israel would finally be rid of the Palestinians and have no more excuse to engage in blood letting.

The two states get on so well, and the USA has land in abundance. It seemed an obvious solution. It would also save the USA a small fortune in military aid.

By 2016 we were in the middle of the fake Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ attack on Corbyn so Naz was forced to humiliate herself and apologise for ‘anti-Semitism’ to the ‘Jewish community’ (i.e. the Israel lobby) in order that she could stay in Parliament.  Ken Livingstone got suspended defending her and Corbyn went along with all this and ended up getting suspended himself.

However imagine what might have happened if Naz Shah’s fantasy had been acted out.  Is it a crime to fantasize? We all dream of a better world!

A brilliant idea

I have to confess I never understood this ‘anti-Semitism’ stuff.  All Naz Shah and others were suggesting was a change of scenery for Israeli Jews!  There was no hint of extermination or anything. Now today, just imagine what would have happened if that dream fantasy had been fulfilled. 

70% of Israelis supported Trump compared to just 13% for Biden.  Even Jeremy Corbyn got more Jewish voters than Biden got Israeli Jewish voters!!  Imagine what would have happened if we had put half Israel’s Jewish populace in Michigan and the other half in Pennsylvania?  Between them they had 38 electoral college votes and that would have enabled Trump to win by a slender 2 votes.

McDonnell and Owen Jones did more to destroy the Corbyn Project than Boris Johnson - this was the time to tell the Zionists the difference between satire and anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitic? Why?  There’s plenty of rustbelt land filled with abandoned factories and foreclosed land that Israel could colonise and call home. They could establish settlements galore on the ruins of rusting factories.  Indeed they could have rejuvenated them and put back life into America’s industrial economy.

Meanwhile the Palestinians could return to their own home.  Even better the Israeli settlements could be demolished, brick by brick and in that way the old Biblical scenery of the West Bank could be restored to what it was before these ugly concrete structures.

In other words everyone would benefit!

The fact that 70% of Israelis would have voted for the anti-Semitic Trump demonstrates once again that the best friend of Zionism is anti-Semitism. Trump has claimed that Henry Ford, the legendary anti-Semite who printed the Czarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his Dearborn Independent, was his ‘inspiration’. The same Henry Ford that Hitler also claimed as his inspiration and who hung a life-sized portrait of him by his desk.

This is the man that Israeli Jews would have voted for by a factor of over 5-1. So when you see someone like Keir Starmer describe themselves as a ‘Zionist without qualification’ then you know that what they mean is that they are a racist ‘without qualification’.

So loved was  Trump that West Bank mayors and settlers held a religious ceremony, complete with the blowing of the shofar (a ram’s horn) to pray for the re-election of Trump.  Unfortunately god seems not to have been listening!  If this is god’s attitude then if I were a settler I would be very worried that the great bearded one might be angry again with his people! Exile to the United States would be a fitting punishment - again!!

Below are 3 articles, two  from the Times of Israel and one from Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz.

Tony Greenstein

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, Oct. 30, 2020. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

 By 70% to 13%, Israeli Jews say Trump is better candidate than Biden for Israel

Israel Democracy Institute poll also finds 42% of Israeli Jews believe the US-Israel bond will weaken if Biden is elected, with only seven percent saying it will strengthen

3 November 2020, 4:30 am  

Some 70 percent of Jewish Israelis believe a victory for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in the US presidential election would be preferable for the Jewish state, an opinion poll indicated on Monday.

The Israel Democracy Institute survey, released a day before the US election day, asked whether Republican incumbent Trump or his Democratic challenger Biden is the preferred candidate, “from the standpoint of Israel’s interests.”

Among Israeli Jews, 70% said Trump is the preferred candidate, 13% said Biden, and 17% don’t know.

Support for Trump was markedly lower among Arab Israelis, with 36% saying he was the preferred candidate, 31% saying Biden, and 33% saying they didn’t know.

Among all Israelis, 63% favor Trump, 17% Biden and 20% don’t know.

Broken down by political camp, 82% of right-wing poll respondents, 62% of centrists, and 40% percent of left-wingers said Trump is the better candidate for Israel. 

Foreign Affairs Minister of Bahrain Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Donald Trump participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords on the South Lawn of the White House on September 15, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP)

 If Biden wins the race, 42% of Israeli Jews believe the US-Israel bond will weaken, with only 7% saying it will strengthen. Among Arab Israelis, those figures were 24% and 16%, respectively.

“Presumably this pronounced preference among the Jewish public for Trump to keep serving stems to a large extent from the assessment that Biden’s election would weaken US-Israeli relations, and strengthen the relationship between Washington and the Palestinians,” IDI said. 

The survey polled 611 men and women in Hebrew and 150 in Arabic, constituting a representative national sample of the population of Israel, with a margin of error of  +/- 3.7%.

Trump has been viewed by many as one of the most pro-Israel US presidents ever. 

Marc Zell - Chair Republicans for Israel Overseas

The Trump administration has used the final months of the campaign to further seek support from pro-Israel Jewish and Evangelical Republican voters. In just this past week, the State Department updated its policy to allow US citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their country of birth on passports and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signed an agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extending US scientific cooperation to apply as well in the West Bank — a move viewed by many as a first step toward American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the settlements.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid-Telem is pictured during an interview with AFP at his office in the Knesset, Jerusalem, on September 14, 2020. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)

But opposition leader Yair Lapid on Monday said that whoever wins, “the next president of the United States will be a friend of Israel.”

“Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are friends of Israel, with a deep commitment to Israel and to Zionism,” Lapid said in a statement, while adding he had seen hostile “radical voices” growing stronger within the Democratic Party.

Several rabbis, including Haim Druckman, an influential former member of the National Religious Party, have urged US citizens in Israel to vote for Trump.

And on Monday evening around 150 Trump supporters waving US and Israeli flags rallied in the city of Beit Shemesh south of Jerusalem, where many Israeli-Americans live.

An Israeli supporter of the re-election of US President Donald Trump waves American and Israeli flags from a car at a rally outside of the US Embassy, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The Trump administration has also sought to expand the list of Arab and Muslim-majority countries to normalize relations with Israel in the final months of its current term. Last Friday, Sudan agreed to become the third country to do so in recent months. Sudan followed the lead of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain after weeks of pressure from Washington, which conditioned removing Khartoum from its blacklist of state terror sponsors on Sudan making peace with the Jewish state.

These moves follow decisions by the Trump administration to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, transfer the US embassy there, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, scrap previous policy deeming settlements to be illegal, release a peace plan widely deemed to be the most favorable to Israel yet, take a far more combative approach toward the Palestinians than previous administrations and pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, which the Netanyahu government opposed aggressively.

On the other hand, Trump’s critics point out that he has turned the issue of Israel into a political football when for decades the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state had been touted as something that kept Israel more secure. Polls of Jewish voters in the US show that at least two-thirds prefer Biden over Trump, many of whom blame the president for the rise in white nationalism in the US, which has seen Jews targeted in record numbers of anti-Semitic attacks.

Moreover, these more dovish voters are less supportive of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank and tend to oppose moves the Trump administration has taken to solidify the Israeli presence there at the expense of efforts to reach a two-state solution.

Look at Trump and You'll See the Israelis

Gideon Levy

Published on 08.11.2020

Standing in line Friday in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Aviv Gimel to pick up the weekend edition of Israel Hayom, affluent residents discussed the likely defeat. “We’re screwed,” one man said sadly; his companions nodded in agreement. It’s a dark day for Israel: Donald Trump has lost the election.

No other country in the world, with the possible exception of the Philippines or Nebraska, was as saddened by his fall. A poll by Israel’s Mitvim think tank found that 70 percent of Israelis support Trump. A survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center had similar findings. Whereas 75 percent of West Europeans are fed up with the U.S. president, in Israel a large majority – including centrists and some leftists – admires him.

It can be argued, of course, that this support is a way of saying thanks for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights and withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal. But these events caused little excitement in Israel. No one jumped into a fountain in a city square to celebrate the recognition of Majdal Shams as an Israeli town, and only a few people were moved by Ambassador David Friedman’s change of address.

The explanation for Trump’s rising popularity in Israel goes much deeper; its roots are much more disturbing. Israel admires Trump not despite his many repellent shortcomings but because of them. Trump is the embodiment of everything that’s bad and ugly about Israel while normalizing and whitewashing them for us. Look at him and you’ll see ourselves. This is who we are, or who we’d like to be. Most of us, anyway.

Trump is the embodiment of Israel the unbeautiful; he could easily be elected prime minister. The vulgarity, coarseness, belligerence, ignorance, scheming and lies; the contempt for the weak, for the law, for justice, the media, science and the environment – all this fits us like a glove.

Who wouldn’t want a prime minister condescending to everyone, someone who always knows best, who will make Israel great again? Who wouldn’t want a prime minister who’s nobody’s fool, who made his fortune through guile and cunning, just the way we like it?

Who wouldn’t want a prime minister who scoffs at political correctness and will bring back the good old days of male chauvinism unhindered by feminism; who won’t bother us with all those threats to the planet and nature, who’ll also bring back racism?

Who wouldn’t want a real man like him? Who wouldn’t like someone who will scorn international institutions, human rights groups and international law, who will violate signed agreements and deride arrogant Europe and its universal liberal values, just as in the secret dreams of many Israelis? Even Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s as similar to Trump as he can be, can’t attain that level of making dreams come true.

Take the typical Israeli driver. He isn’t Trump? The Israeli road isn’t Trumplike? Cut somebody off, honk, curse, break the law, park anywhere, don’t think about anyone but yourself, yours is the biggest, strongest and fastest; look at me.

Take Israeli politics, especially politicians on the right. That isn’t Trump? They wouldn’t want to be like him?

Combine Avigdor Lieberman, Miri Regev, Osnat Mark, Miki Zohar and David Amsalem and you get Trump in Hebrew. Combine their bullying, ignorance, populism, superficiality, populism and vulgarity and you get Israeli Trumpism.

As an encore, add the way Trump humiliated the Palestinians, ignored their very existence. Their rights meant nothing to him, just as they mean nothing to most Israelis, simply because they’re weak. It’s a dream.

It’s an Israeli dream to stop aid to the weak and give it to the strong, as Trump did – from the UNRWA refugee agency to the Israeli army, from the refugees to the force that expelled them. And it’s an Israeli dream to deport asylum seekers, as Trump has, to keep hundreds of children separated from their parents and leave tens of thousands of frightened adults.

That’s Trumpian justice, and it’s Israeli justice. That’s why we’ve loved him so much. That’s why it’s such a pity that he’ll be leaving.

In shadow of patriarchs, settler leaders gather in Hebron to pray for Trump win

West Bank mayors recite psalms, hoping for four more years; cite incumbent’s recognition of Golan Heights and Jerusalem, support for Israel against threats like Iran and BDS

November 2020, 4:53 pm

Hebron spokesman Yishai Fleisher, right, and Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel, blow shofars to show their support for Trump November, 2, 2020. (Courtesy Har Hevron regional council spokesperson)

Settler leaders held a special prayer session Monday outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, at which they thanked US President Donald Trump for his support of the settlement movement and wished him success in Tuesday’s elections. 

Psalms and other prayers meant to aid the incumbent president to victory were recited at the Monday event, during which Har Hevron Regional Council chairman Yochai Damri and Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel, blew shofars to show their support for Trump.

At the event, Damri explained why the US president meant so much to the settler movement.

 “We came here today to say to President Trump thank you,” he said. 

“Thank you for your special relationship to the land of Israel, for the recognition of the Golan Heights and of the settlement enterprise. Thank you for your war against Iran and the BDS movement. Thank you for strengthening the settlement of the land of the Bible. We pray and hope that you will continue to another four years of strengthening the settlement enterprise.” 

Israeli Trump Supporter heads to Jerusalem

Marc Zell, the head of Republicans Overseas Israel at the Cave of the patriarchs, November 2, 2020. (Courtesy: Har hebron regional council spokesperson)

Kiryat Arba Local Council chairman Eliyahu Libman said, “Trump proved his friendship toward the people of Israel by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing our sovereignty in the Golan Heights and the right of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.”

Those moves on behalf of the settler enterprise were lauded as “tremendous and daring” by Binyamin Regional Council chairman Yisrael Gantz.

Also adding their voices to the reelect Trump prayer meeting were Gush Etzion Regional Council chairman Shlomo Ne’eman and the mayor of Hebron, Rabbi Hillel Horowitz.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs, where the prayer session took place, is sanctified by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

Hebron is home to approximately 1,000 settlers, who live in a series of enclaves surrounded by some 215,000 Palestinians. Large numbers of Israeli security forces protect Jewish residents in the city, which is frequently the scene of violence.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1323218530427408385

 

While Jews in the United States — except for the Orthodox — are expected to vote overwhelmingly for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump is a popular figure in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described him as the “greatest friend” Israel has ever had in the White House.

Many in Israel view Trump as a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, especially in the wake of the Washington-brokered Abraham Accords, which led to normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan.

A poll published by Channel 12 news Friday showed 54% percent of Israelis favor Trump, compared to 21% who favor Biden and 25% who were undecided or did not know. No methodology or margin of error was provided by Channel 12 for the survey.

Settlers in particular have been outspoken supporters of Trump for his policies that appear to support Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank. In addition, he has earned accolades for his administration’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

US ambassador to Israel David Friedman (L) with Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi in Efrat on February 20, 2020. (Gershon Elinson/Flash90)

Still, many settler leaders, Damri included, rejected Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan over the fact that it included the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on parts of the West Bank not annexed by Israel. The reaction was reportedly met by anger in the White House.

Oded Revivi, the influential head of the Efrat settlement who was one of the settler leaders who embraced the Trump plan, said Sunday that he would not participate in the rally out of respect for the US political process.

“President Trump has proven over four years that he is a big friend of Israel and during his term ties between Israel and the US have grown stronger. However, just as we warn off foreign influences from internal debates and elections… so it is not correct for the leadership to express a stance on the US elections,”

he tweeted.

Richard Seymour’s Journey to the Right Continues As He Abandons Class whilst Glorifying the Attractions of Fascism

 Firstly it was ‘unconscious anti-Semitism’ that was Labour’s problem now we have a rewriting of the fight against German fascism

One of the iron rules of left politics is that refugees from the SWP’s internal regime almost invariably move to the right. So it is with Richard Seymour. The politico-psychological reasons for this I will leave to others. The sense of political freedom that comes from not having to pay lip service to a particular political line perhaps? Or maybe the stress of having to pretend that some organisation or other is really a genuine manifestation of the popular will rather than an SWP front group no doubt takes its toll.

Richard Seymour - is he the Guardian's replacement for the ever insipid Owen Jones? 

Richard Seymour who has had his Lenin’s Tomb blog since 2003 became a licensed critic within the SWP. Just as Kremlinologists became adept at reading between the lines of official Soviet pronouncements in order to gauge which way the wind was blowing, so some of us became adept at reading between the lines of Seymour’s blog.

The ideal German family in 1937

It all exploded in 2013 with the SWP’s rape scandal when women who accused the National Secretary, Martin Smith (Comrade Delta!) of rape and sexual assault found themselves under attack. At a kangaroo court, (Disputes Committee) they found themselves being questioned about their sexual history and they found themselves becoming the accused. The nearly all women Committee (the only the male member, Pat Stack dissented) cleared Smith and convicted the women of defaming an upstanding Central Committee member. They were even barred from the emergency conferences which discussed what had happened to them and other women (including a friend of mine) who were victimised and dismissed from their jobs with the party. All under the benevolent gaze of Kings College's Professor Alex Callinicos. This was the catalyst for Richard Seymour and hundreds of others to resign from the SWP. 

Jews in Stuttgart being marched to the deportation trains in 1941

Seymour, like many others was enthused by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as he wrote The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.

In April 2016, a month after I was suspended and as the witchhunt was just getting going Richard wrote a remarkably perceptive article Pitch forks at the ready in which he wrote of the ‘dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice’ of the attacks ‘which is more redolent of a McCarthyite inquisition than a real debate.’

Which of course was absolutely correct. Ken Livingstone had just been suspended for supporting Naz Shah’s meme about how it would be so much cheaper if Israel was transferred to the United States. Seymour wrote that

‘it is a grave mistake for anyone to either quietly condone the suspension [of Livingstone] out of a misguided sense of realpolitik... or vocally support the suspension in the vain hope that throwing one more carcass into the ravening maw of the right-wing mob will placate it... If you rebuke someone, they’ll demand suspension; if you suspend them, they’ll demand expulsion; if you expel them, they’ll wonder why it took you so long to get round to expelling antisemites...’

You cannot win by obeying this logic. And the logic which has been used to condemn Livingstone... will soon enough be turned on others. Corbyn, for example. If Greenstein can be suspended for criticising Zionists, if Bouattia can be vilified for the same, and if Livingstone can be monstered as a “Nazi apologist” for referencing actual historical facts, then how long before another round of demonisation of Corbyn on the basis of his supposed ‘connections’ to extremists... Pusillanimity in the face of this kind of inquisition is its own kind of liability. The more you concede, the more you are obliged to concede.... Alan Johnson, doyen of the 'antitotalitarian left' ... has stated the case very clearly: “Save your pitch fork for Corbyn”

Hotel Silber - former Gestapo HQ in Stuttgart

If Richard had confined himself to this analysis then he would not have gone wrong. But unfortunately, before long he was revising his opinions and trying to find something new to say. This is the problem with left-wing writers who want to keep the eye of editors in the bourgeois media. They end up trimming and cutting.

Two years later I came across Labour’s Antisemitism Affair on America’s Jacobin site. Jacobin is the premier left-wing publication in America for which I had previously contributed Rewriting the Holocaust  about Netanyahu’s attempt to blame the Palestinians for the Final Solution (& thus exonerate Hitler). Now Seymour was hedging his bets. Yes ‘anti-Semitism’ had been weaponised but that was not to say that it did not have some basis.

Crowds Outside Hotel Silber in the 1930s

I wrote that Seymour was

‘mired in the swamp of identity politics… a Jewish identity based around Israel and Zionism, suitably dressed up as a concern with anti-Semitism, is equally as valid as a Palestinian identity based on ethnic cleansing. If Jews can claim that they are oppressed because of hostility to Israel who is going to countermand this? When class and race are removed from the equation who is to decide who is oppressed and who is the oppressor? Everything is subjective and personal. All identities are equally valid, albeit some are more equal than others.’

I observed that

‘People who prize themselves on their detachment from the struggle and who adopt an aloof and condescending attitude to those who are involved in political battles are destined not to hang around for too long.

Unfortunately Richard did not heed my advice that

One of the hallmarks of socialist or left-wing writers is their commitment to the overthrow of the system we live under.  They employ their talents on our behalf not just their own…. People such as John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali have demonstrated their commitment under fire.  However the Left is also plagued by opportunists and turncoats, fair weather friends and erstwhile socialists like Owen Jones, … Others, like Nick Cohen, simply jack-knifed to the right.  American neo-conservatism is littered with the bodies of ex-leftists…’

There was no attempt by Richard to explain the origins of Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ campaign.  It was if it had appeared by magic.  An example of political spontaneous combustion. The idea of a deliberately co-ordinated and engineered campaign to destabilise Labour didn’t occur to Seymour.  The possibility of state interference completely eluded him. Seymour referred to the famous mural by Mear One, that was used by Luciana Berger to undermine Labour at the 2018 local elections, as being automatically antisemitic. Not once did he ask how a mural, which had been erased for 6 years, had come into prominence just before the 2018 local elections.  That, and only that, was the issue.

Hotel Silber in the 1930s

When talking about Livingstone’s remark that Hitler supported Zionism, Seymour changed his tune. No longer was it the case that ‘at worst he made a clumsy attempt to say something that is true.’ Now Seymour was of the opinion that Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazi state, was not so much a case of  Hitler ‘ “supporting” Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews from Germany.’

But this was not true. Ha'avara was agreed to by the Nazis as a means of undermining the Jewish led Boycott of Nazi Germany. For a time the Nazi government, at the behest of the Zionists, forbade Jews going anywhere but Palestine. The Gestapo acceded to the Zionist demands that those taking advantage of Ha’avara should only go to Palestine.  Seymour git all of this horribly wrong. German Jews could always take their money out of the country. True there were massive confiscatory taxes which only got worse but Ha’avara made it worse, not better for Jews seeking to emigrate.

The Communist Party of Germany

According to the American Jewish Yearbook less than one in 7 of the nearly 450,000 German and Austrian Jews who got out went to Palestine (60,000) and that is larger than most estimates. Ha’avara was about the richest Jews, who could have gone elsewhere, not poor and working class Jews.

Nor is it true that the Nazis didn’t support the Zionist movement.  They did, vociferously, against the 98% of German Jews who were not Zionists. When the Nazis arrested thousands of Jews after Kristallnacht, orders came the next day from Heydrich that Zionist Jews were to be released immediately.  Zionist historian David Cesarani wrote describing how ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” (my emphasis) [The Final Solution (p.96)] Lucy Dawidowicz described how, on 28th January 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich issued a directive stating that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations … prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118]

Dr Joseph Mengele - the 'angel of death' fled to Paraguay and died in Brazil - Israel refused to call for his extradition as that would have upset relations with both these countries

Seymour accused Jackie Walker, by attending the ‘training session’ of the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, of waging a ‘factional war’.  Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not “open to all people who experienced a holocaust.” as wrong. In fact Seymour was wrong. The holocaust in the Belgian Congo and Namibia are excluded as are all genocides before 1939. 

One unfortunate characteristic of Seymour is that he tends to pontificate about subjects he knows nothing about. For example Seymour quoted uncritically from a survey by the far-Right Campaign Against Antisemitism without asking whether it was designed to produce certain outcomes.

In Analysis: British Jewry and a feeling of insecurity Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research described the CAA’s findings as being ‘based on a survey with little, if any, methodological credibility.’  Boyd described the finding that 45% of British people were anti-Semitic as a ‘deeply flawed read of the data’. The IJPR found the CAA's survey to be 'littered with flaws' and 'irresponsible'. Due to 'quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses', its poll of British Jews had 'very limited capacity' to assess the representativeness of its sample.

Seymour quoted uncritically the CAA's findings without probing deeper.  Even the Zionist Community Security Trust’s Dave Rich wasn’t so superficial.  He observed that:

Nazi pageantry to hypnotise the masses

‘This latest poll showed something else that is interesting… that people who believe antisemitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as antisemitic…. It is as if antisemitic ideas circulate in society and influence the stereotypes people believe about Jews, but this does not affect how people imagine they relate to actual, living Jews who they know or might meet…. Even people who believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy or deny the Holocaust are affronted by the notion they might be antisemitic. What antisemites really think

The CAA claimed that more than half of British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer in Ha'aretz observed that if the CAA believed that “then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.” Pfeffer noted, regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy:  “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.”  In other words a number of the anti-Semitic stereotypes were not anti-Semitic!

There were other indications that Seymour was writing in complete ignorance of what he was writing about. He described Gary Spedding, a Walter Mitty character, as a ‘Jewish left-winger’ citing his article We in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Have a Problem With anti-Semitism.

If Seymour had been following my blog then he would have read my articles Gary Spedding - The Zionist Cuckoo in the Palestine Solidarity Nest, Gary Spedding Calls in the Police - I have been harassing him!, Gary Spedding – the Self-Proclaimed Expert on ‘anti‑Semitism’ and Jewish Voices for Labour Expels Gary Spedding & its Zionist wing (or some of them) - after much Blood, Sweat & Bile. However Seymour knew nothing about Spedding other than he was always happy to provide a rent-a-quote.

Spedding is not Jewish (nor is he left-wing, he is a former member of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland) although that doesn’t prevent him telling Jews just what is and is not antisemitic. Spedding is not a Palestine solidarity activist and his claims to that effect are widely derided. He has no involvement with any Palestine solidarity organisation. He has been an avid supporter of the witchhunt and confessed to breaking down with tears of joy when I was expelled. Like most SWP exiles Seymour is trying to find a progressive space between the politics he once espoused and the SWP's right-wing critics. 

The KPD's Red Front Fighters Paramilitary Group - Banned by the SPD Government in 1929

Seymour has surpassed himself with his latest article The masses against the masses on German fascism. It can be read on the blog of Jewish Voices for Labour who, for some strange reason, decided to republish it.  When I went to the Patreon site, where it originated, I was asked for my credit card! Not only Rupert Murdoch operates behind a pay wall.

He begins as he continues telling us that 

‘It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.”

The fascist inside you is an interesting concept. It is as if fascism is some kind of pathology that we are all infected with.  It mirrors the Zionist claim that anti-Semitism is a ‘virus’.  If what Seymour meant to say was that all of us have contradictory sides to us, that socialists can be oppressors on the personal level, then that is true but it is a product of living in a class society. 

Irony is sometimes lost on the Socialist Workers Party

Seymour writes that 

there was not a huge gap between the “Wild-frei” gangs, with their Dionysian sexual rituals – many of whom would join the Nazis – and the insolent SS boys who loved to strut about in their leather, and the girls who went into paroxysms of excitement when the stormtroopers showed up. 

I don’t know about the orgasmic excitement of the Fräulein but I can’t think of a more absurd comparison than between repressed Nazi sexuality and Dionysus, the Greek god of sensuality and hedonism as opposed to the austere Apollo and the Nazi ideal of youth: '"swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel."

If Seymour knew anything about the Nazis and sexuality he would know about the disturbed, repressed, mysoginist and sadistic sexuality of the SS with their leather fetish. He might also care to acquaint himself with Richard Evans The Coming to Power of the Third Reich [p. 375] and the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science on 5 May 1933. The National Socialist Student League and then the SS destroyed and burnt thousands of books, documents and photographs in this world famous centre.  Fortunately Hirschfeld himself was abroad. The Institute was a champion of homosexuality, women's sexual freedom including abortion.  It stood for everything that the Nazis hated.

In his follow-up book, The Third Reich in Power [pp. 205-6] Evans describes the subversive power of jazz and swing and their attractions to the youth and how:

‘the free-and-easy social mixing of Jews, half-Jews and non-Jews in the social scene of the swingers was crassly at odds with the dictates of the regime’s racial policy. What had begun as an act of adolescent cultural wilfulness was rapidly becoming a manifestation of political protest.’

Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn describe how, in 1936, 1,500 German youth had organised to attack Hitler Youth leaders at night. Likewise in Munich a group calling itself Red Anchor formed to attack anyone in the Hitler Youth. These groups had spread to Berlin and Cologne and in Leipzig two 17 year olds were sentenced to 3 years hard labour when the Gestapo caught them. [Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, p.39]

Of all this Seymour is blissfully unaware yet the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism capitalised on this image of Nazis as austere and disciplined when they coined the slogan NF=No Fun. We painted the National Front as austere and censorious.

Seymour went on to quote Daniel Guérin, who concluded after a visit to Germany that fascism

“surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away;’

Seymour commented that ‘Somehow the masses had come to desire fascism.’ A quite amazing observation that is at variance with the facts. Seymour says that this led many of Guerin’s readers ‘to suspect he had lost his marbles.’ The same observation could be made about Seymour.

However I prefer to believe that Guerin simply changed his mind as his Fascism and Big Business is well worth reading,

It is true that Hitler’s main base of support was among the petit-bourgeoisie, the middle-class and the peasants but the working class remained impervious to his attractions.

What is really unforgivable is that in order to prove his point Seymour simply resorts to distortion. He writes that ‘between 1928 and 1933, the Nazis had added 16.5 million votes to their support.’

Either Seymour is ignorant or he is deceiving his readers. The March 1933 election was not free. Coming after the Reichstag fire it was held under a state of terror. Despite this the Nazis only got 44% of the vote and the KPD and SPD retained over 12 million votes.

Seymour omits to mention the two 1932 elections. He resembles another falsifier of history, Daniel Goldhagen and his Hitler’s Willing Executioners which held that Germans, all Germans, were eliminationist murderers. [see David North’s A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

In July 1932 37.3% (13.75m) supported the Nazis compared to the 13.24m (35.9%) vote for the workers’ parties. However in November 1932 the Nazi vote fell to 11.74m (33.09%). The combined vote for the workers’ parties 13.2 million (37.3%) was one and a half million more than the Nazis’. By November 1932 the Nazis had passed the peak of their popular support.

Seymour misses these complexities because it would ruin his bankrupt thesis about the mass attraction of fascism. It was precisely because the Nazis were losing support and the fierce opposition to them by Germany's workers that the military and industrialists put Hitler in power.

But for Stalin's Third Period dating from the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, in which reformist parties were termed ‘social fascist’, and the refusal to form united fronts with workers who supported social democracy, Hitler could have been defeated. The KPD was under Stalin’s thumb and Stalin was happy to see Hitler coming to power as a way of dividing the western powers. The KPD stupidly followed the foreign policy demands of Stalin rather than the needs of the German working class. But Seymour has other, somewhat more right-wing fish to fry.

Seymour writes that

‘Millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas, long before Hitler was even a clamorous, minatory nuisance in the fringes of the German Right.’

In fact volkish organisations had declined in number in the Weimar period.  Hitler and the Nazis played down anti-Semitism to the point of invisibility in the run-up to the 1933 elections. As Raul Hilberg wrote anti-Semitism in Germany ‘never became altogether respectable or truly prevalent.’ [The Goldhagen Phenomenon, p.723]

Ian Kershaw wrote that the millions of extra votes in the 1930 elections ‘‘were in no sense anti-Semites’. [Popular Opinion and Dissent, p.230] Zionist historian David Cesarani stated that Hitler’s attacks on Jews ‘diminished to vanishing point.’ in the run up to the 1933 elections yet Seymour, whether out of design or ignorance, chooses to portray the German population as thoroughly anti-Semitic.

Seymour speaks of ‘a broad popular consensus favouring core elements of the fascist agenda.’ This is BBC history. Seymour writes that in the 1933 elections

‘the Nazis had a clear plurality in all but two constituencies. Moreover, it’s clear that on top of the Nazis’ 44 per cent of the vote, millions of centrist and conservative voters were willing to accept a dictatorship against the Left.’

Actually this is not true. The Catholic Centre Party and Bavarian Peoples Parties were dissolved by Hitler in July, just before the Pope agreed a Concordat with the Nazis in which he agreed that the Church would abstain from politics.

Seymour writes that his ‘version of events hasn’t been tenable for a long time.’ Well not amongst socialist historians but amongst the Neil Fergusons and Andrew Roberts I imagine that Seymour will receive a warm welcome! Seymour quotes Zionist historian Otto Dov Kulka

in the run up to the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), the Nazi leadership was being pressured to act by violent demonstrations and pogroms.

and that ‘most disturbing is the role that a large, radicalised minority played in catalysing the regime’s offensive against Jews.’ as well as a ‘mass hysteria about Jewish “race defilers” This is simply not true.  He himself recounts this was called a ‘mass psychosis’ by a member of the Gestapo. Nearly all these riots and pogroms were by members of the SA and SS. Seymour informs his readers that

‘the same pattern of agitation occurs before and during Kristallnacht. The regime radicalised its base with intense propaganda, who in turn catalysed and consolidated the regime’s agenda.’

This is rubbish. The majority of Germans, including even members of the Nazi Party, were revolted by the SA pogroms of November 9-10 1938. The same Otto Dov Kulka wrote about how a Gestapo situation report after Kristallnacht reported how ‘the Communists declared their solidarity with the Jews’ and how this had found ‘eager support in middle-class and especially clerical circles.’ [‘Public Opinion’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘Jewish Question’, p. 140].

Kershaw wrote of his

‘admiration for the courageous minority – overwhelmingly communist workers – who fought uncompromisingly against the Nazis…the vast proportion of them workers’ were put in ‘protective custody’ [Popular Opinion, p.71]

 Of Germany’s workers Seymour says nothing because it doesn’t accord with his narrative and in any case he clearly hasn’t read around the subject.

Kershaw wrote of Germans’ hostile attitude to Kristallnacht despite ‘the conditions of extreme terror and intimidation in which people live.’ (p.271) According to Seymour civil society was terrorised but that it was also an instrument in terror. ‘The masses were deployed against the masses.’

Kulka wrote of how ‘in some places the police stepped in to halt acts of terror only after the maltreatment of Jews aroused spontaneous popular opposition.’  What is Seymour’s take on this?

‘the tumult, in which cops were frequently called “Jewish lackeys” if they intervened, risked causing a rift with police who had thus far been smoothly integrated into the Third Reich.’

Seymour writes of how

‘the consensus behind the Nazi regime did not fall apart, according to Ian Kershaw, until the middle of the war when it became clear that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster.’

In conditions of extreme terror, 75,000 communists were placed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1935, of whom thousands were murdered. The idea of consensus seems a particularly strange way to describe what was happening.

The Nazi regime made every effort to inject anti-Semitic poison into the body politic but there is every indication, from the empty cinema halls for its anti-Semitic films that they were unsuccessful. Even Himmler was forced to admit that every German had his favourite Jew in his October 1943 Posen speeches.

When in 1937 Hitler opened a House of German Art in Munich a contrasting exhibition was held of ‘Degenerate Art’. It was soon closed down as the crowds flocked to it rather than the Aryan Art.

Seymour argues that the popularity of the Nazis was due to the fact that living standards rose. They did for big business and to a lesser extent the middle-class but not the working class with the exception of those working in the armament industries. From 1933 to 1939 wages fell, the number of hours worked rose by 15 per cent, serious accidents in factories increased and workers could be blacklisted by employers if they attempted to question their working conditions. Seymour should consult the GCSE History syllabus!

Seymour is taken  up with ‘the erotic glamour of (fascism’s) organised violence.’ Since Seymour begins his essay with Daniel Guerin’s visit to Germany before the Nazi accession to power, he should also consider what Guerin said in Fascism and Big Business: ‘All ‘anti-fascism’ that rejects it [socialism] is but vain and deceitful babbling.’ (p.13) It is a message that Seymour’s former comrades in the SWP could also take to heart!

It’s not often that I agree with Graeme Atkinson of Searchlight magazine but his comments on the JVL blog were spot on.

‘Richard Seymour’s article is shallow and, sad to say, rather politically uninformed about the class nature of Hitler fascism and German working class’s resistance to it.’

The only mystery is why JVL thought it worth republishing this worthless, reactionary article. JVL seems to be attracted to trendy ex-leftists embarked on the road to the Right.

Tony Greenstein