Pickles is an example of anti-Semitic Zionism – Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, anti-Gypsy and a defender of Latvia’s Waffen SS
I always
felt guilty that the eviction of Dale Farm in October 2011 and the hundreds of
Travellers living there had passed me by.
Not for the Gypsies the faux anti-racism
that is extended to British Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.
Gypsies suffered just as much as the Jews
from Hitler’s Final Solution proportionally and they are still suffering from state
racism throughout Europe. See Porajmos: The Forgotten Gypsy Holocaust The World
Ignored
The International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, to which Pickles is a delegate doesn’t
so much as mention the Gypsies and why should it? There is no Gypsy state or imperial interests
to defend.
The Pew
Research Centre’s 2016 Global Attitudes Survey showed shockingly higher anti-gypsy and anti-Muslim
attitudes yet we haven’t heard a whisper about the bigotry towards Gypsies and
Muslims in the Labour Party. Just one
person to my knowledge has been suspended for anti-Roma racism.
If you look
at the top 4 countries for racism then 82% of Italians have unfavourable
attitudes to Gypsies. The other countries are all in the 60s. Hostility to Muslims is similar. Hungary is
the top with 72% and the other three are in the high 60s. With Jews by contrast with the exception of
Greece at 55% then the next highest is Hungary with 32% and then Italy and Poland
with 24%.
You might
think that the person who has responsibility for the Holocaust as Britain’s
Special Envoy would be especially sensitive to the matter of the Gypsies. Yet Lord Eric Pickles is a prime example of
an anti-Roma bigot.
Pickles it
was who was integrally involved in what was the worst post-war example of
racism against the Roma and Gypsy minority in this country with the eviction of
Dale Farm in 2011.
Members of
this Traveller community had bought up the land on which they lived. They had settled down and their children were
going to local schools but many of the residents and the local Basildon Council
resented their presence because they were Gypsies.
The excuse
to evict them was that the land was within the green belt. They were deemed an
eyesore or a ‘blight’ and evicted using hundreds of police thugs and bailiffs. Yet
today developers are buying up this land in order that they can build on
it. What is good enough for developers was
not good enough for Gypsies.
It was
therefore with a view to assuaging my guilty conscience that I visited the Exhibition
on Dale Farm at the Tate Modern with a friend. I am glad that I did because it
filled in a lot of holes. Not least
about who was culpable for what happened.
The eviction cost Basildon Council £18m which was a
lot of money for the Council at a time of austerity. Who should step in to help
them but the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles. He provided £9m in order that
the evictions could go ahead despite the Dale Farm residents appeal to Eric Pickles to stop
eviction
Vanessa
Redgrave, a Unicef goodwill ambassador who lent her support to the residents,
said clearing the Dale Farm site in Essex breached United Nation's children's
rights and said she was “appalled that
such an eviction can be upheld by our government”. None of this however
moved Pickles, whose concern over the Holocaust is strictly confined to Jews
and Israel.
Pickles started off his political
life as Leader of Bradford Council where he achieved a reputation as a savage
cutter of services and a populist right-winger. When he became Community
Secretary under Cameron he took the axe to local government. His Localism Act
2011 was alleged to give powers back to the people but almost immediately he
approved a planning application that allowed a massive gas plant in Gloucestershire
in the teeth of opposition of the Tewkesbury Planning Committee, 12 parish
councils and 1,000 local residents.
Those at Dale Farm never forgot Pickles
and what he had done and the following year they tried to evict Pickles from
his office. However he had a large group of Metropolitan Police there to
protect him and assault the demonstrators. (Dale
Farm protesters target Pickles 19.10.12. Express) Protesters' chants rang
out: "One, two, three, four, Eric
Pickles out the door, five, six, seven, eight, let's evict the racist state."
And who was their representative but the Holocaust toting Pickles who has dined
off those who died in the Holocaust.
Pickles also demonstrated himself to
be a Christian bigot when he tried to overturn a
High Court decision that councillors could not be forced to attend
Christian prayers. His excuse was that ‘Militant
atheists should 'get over it' and accept UK is Christian. Pickles forgot
that unlike Israel, religion should not intrude into civic and political life.
It is therefore natural that a bigot
and racist like Eric Pickles should be Chairman of
the Conservative Friends of Israel.
Pickles is also a patron
of the pro-Israeli ‘charity’, the Campaign
Against Anti-Semitism. Pickles was also the person who moved to depose the radical
Black Mayor of Tower Hamlets Lotfhur
Rahman in an early display of his racist bigotry.
As the United Kingdom
Special Envoy for post-Holocaust issues you might think that Pickles would
be ultra careful not to have anything to do with fascists and apologists for
the Nazi era. After all isn’t that what the IHRA all about? It would seem not.
In 2009 a controversy blew up over
the decision of Tory MEPs to leave the mainstream Christian Democrat European
Peoples Party to join the far-right European
Conservative Reform Group. The EcrG was chaired by a former fascist, Michal
Kaminski of the far-Right anti-Semitic Polish Law & Justice Party, ‘whose
anti-Semitic outbursts in the past have been well documented’ . Even
Jonathan Freedland, a strong Zionist, wrote that Once
no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski.
Self-respect is the least of Pickle’s worries.
The ECRG contained people like Roberts Zile of Latvia’s
For
Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK party. Every March Ziles goes on a demonstration/ march
commemorating the veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS. It is true that only a
minority, between 20% and one-third were volunteers but the fact is that they
fought on the side of the Nazis. These annual marches contain primarily fascist
and nationalist elements that are virulently anti-Semitic.
 |
| Roberts Zile MEP |
In David Miliband’s speech at the
2009 Labour Party Conference he accused
Pickles, who was Conservative chairman at the time, of being
“a defender of
the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom party (with which the Tories are now allied
in the EU) – despite the fact that its members attend commemorations for the
Waffen-SS.’
In response Eric Pickles according to
the Guardian
suggested that ‘the Latvian Waffen-SS
were only conscripts fighting for their country, and to say otherwise was a
Soviet smear.’
Pickles deliberately ignored the fact
that not only was a substantial minority of Latvia’s Waffen-SS eager
volunteers, but they included veterans of pro-Nazi death squads who had already
taken part in the first phase of the Holocaust. The mere fact that this march
commemorated those who had fought with Hitler should have been enough for
Pickles.
Monica Lowenberg, whose paternal
family, had been murdered in the Libau and Riga Ghettos by those who later
joined Latvia’s Waffen SS, attended the March 2012 demonstration in Riga. She told
in an open letter how
‘At the Monument of
Freedom in the center of Riga where the SS lovers congregated last year... I
was jostled, harassed and made to feel unwelcome. I was told by a number of
young Waffen SS supporters that even though my grandfather was born in Libau
(Libava), Latvia and all of my Latvian Jewish family had lived for generations
in Libau, until they were brutally murdered in the Libau massacres of 1941 and
Riga Ghetto of the same year, I had no rights to be in Latvia as I was Jewish.’
Even worse
‘another party comrade of Mr Zile told
the Latvian parliament that LNNK has always been against the trial of Konrads
Kalejs and other Latvians accused of Nazi crimes. Kalejs was a close assistant
of Viktors Arajs, chief of the bloody Arajs Commando, responsible for guarding
and finishing off those Jews who were still alive in the ditches into they fell
after mass shootings. Some survived and tried to escape but the Latvians were
on hand to kill them.’
The Arajs Commando worked
alongside Einsatzgruppen A, the most murderous of the four death squads that
operated in the wake of the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They took part in mass executions in Riga
Ghetto. The first transportation of 1,000 Berlin Jews to Riga along with 24,000
members of the Riga Ghetto were shot on 30th November 1941 by the Nazis
and the Arajs Commando, which joined the Latvian Legion which consisted of 2
Waffen SS divisions in January 1943.
Pickles justification
for the actions of the Latvian Waffen SS were that ‘they were only following
orders.’ Pickles role as an apologist for Latvia’s Waffen SS has not prevented
him being a McCarthyist witch-hunter sniffing out any trace of ‘anti-Semitism’
whenever Zionism is on the agenda.
This is Part 1 of an extended essay
on this Tory bigot. Tomorrow is Part 2
and how Pickles tried to get a lecturer at Bristol University sacked for
writing an article discussing how the Holocaust is used to deter people raising
the question of Palestinian oppression.
On 19th October 2011, eighty Traveller families lost their 10 year legal
battle for their homes. Dale Farm: The Eviction, explores this important event
from the perspective of artists from different communities.
Artists from the Travelling community and elsewhere will present creative
responses to the eviction, aiming to broaden the discussion about Dale Farm and
acknowledge that not everyone backed or agreed with the eviction by the local
authorities, which the UK government supported and in part financed. Against a
backdrop of negative media coverage and social media attacks on Traveller
communities, this event also aims to be therapeutic for the Traveller artists’
and the community members impacted by the loss of their homes.
As well as visual art, performance, music and video, audiences will have
the opportunity to view unique Traveller archival material from Grattan Puxon’s
archive together with artefacts from Dale Farm, removed at the time of the
eviction.
This event is curated by Phien O’Reachtigan of Traveller-Art-Performance
and Beverley Carpenter of Oblique Arts
in association with Tate Exchange Associates 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.
