There is one and only one
issue – Labour’s Silence on Genocide in Gaza and the Attack on Rafah
Whatever
else you can say about George Galloway he is not without controversy. Politically
he has a long record of forming alliances and then falling out with his
partners – whether it is the SWP
in Respect or the Stalinist Communists Party of Great Britain - Marxist
Leninist in his Workers Party.
I say ‘his’
because the Workers Party revolves around George. It is very much his baby and
it is highly unlikely that the membership would overrule him on any major issue
or indeed have the means to do so.
🚨Twitter deleted the post, so reposting to expose Israeli army crimes!
Last video of kids martyrs of Husouna family massacre They fled from Gaza to Rafah in search of safety, escaping shelling Israeli army killed them inside their tent along with all family members last night ! pic.twitter.com/hlW7qWqFJx
This is what war criminals Keir Starmer & Peter Kyle Support
George is
politically eclectic. He is a brilliant speaker, an old-fashioned orator in an
age when the leader of the Labour Party freezes like a rabbit
caught in a car’s headlights whenever anyone gets to challenge him as Audrey
White did when Starmer ventured into Liverpool.
George is not
someone that socialists find easy to support. He is anti-abortion for a start and
dismissive of issues of sexual orientation and sexual oppression -all of which heputs into a basket called ‘wokery’. There is
a distinct impression that he panders to some very basic prejudices such as
homophobia and transphobia in the belief th at if you ignore these issues then
you will get basic workers’ unity.
Likewise George’s
attitude to race which is most evidenced in his failure to oppose the Tories
scapegoating of asylum seekers. George disgracefully
attacked the SNP for having supported demonstrators in Glasgow who
freed two refugees who were seized by the Home Office’s Border Unit.
He was also
vehemently pro-Brexit and was quite prepared to support a racist like Nigel
Farage. Indeed he tried to
become a candidate in the European elections for the Brexit Party.
He even formed
an alliance in Scotland with Tories and that he even shared a platform with David
Clews, a member of the Patriotic Alternative.
Deserted!
So what are
his pluses?
George has
been a consistent anti-imperialist and was expelled from the Labour Party as an
MP for opposing the Iraq War. When summoned to Congress to address allegations
regarding oil sanctions he turned in a fine and memorable
performance.
On the
issue of Palestine George also has a good record. There was a time when he supported
the two-state solution. I know because I debated the issue with him at my old
college St Mary’s in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. But as he later admitted I
was right and he was wrong on this.
So I
understand why it is that many people refuse to support Galloway because of his
de facto alliance with racists and
reactionaries.
Letter in the Scottish National from anti-racist campaigner Mark Brown
However the
by-election in Rochdale is not about Galloway but what he stands for on the one
key issue in Britain and indeed the world.US and British imperialism’s support for the genocide in Gaza. All other
issues pale by comparison. The lives of thousands of Palestinians hang in the
balance at this moment and Galloway’s disgraceful opportunism over refugees,
Brexit and Farage are minor by comparison.
Galloway
and only Galloway is able to win this election. If Galloway wins the election
it won’t be his previous positions that are highlighted in Britain against the
racist imperialists Sunak and Starmer but his position on an immediate
ceasefire in Gaza.
This is the
key dividing line in British politics. It is the most crucial issue that we
face today. It would be utter sectarianism for anyone on the left to ignore
this. We cannot choose who our representatives are sometimes. Galloway’s
victory will be a victory for the Palestinians. What he thinks about Brexit or
refugees is frankly irrelevant at this time.
A defeat
for Starmer’s candidate, Azhar Ali is now certain now that the Labour Party has
withdrawn its
support for him, allegedly over his ‘anti-Semitic’ comments about Israel having
been forewarned of the October attacks but in reality because of the
realisation that he was going to lose.
We need Galloway’s
victory to make it crystal clear to that apology for a human being, the robotic
Keir Starmer that support for genocide is unacceptable.
GENOCIDE IN
GAZA IS THE ONLY ISSUE IN THE ROCHDALE BY-ELECTION
How Cruella
Braverman, Britain’s Racist Home Secretary, Summoned the Far Right to London, to
Counter the Palestinian March
Million Person Palestinian March
Life is full of ironies for our ham-fisted, serially
obnoxious, racist Home Secretary, Cruella Braverman. Earlier in the week she
and the Idiot-in-Chief Sunak, sought to have the million strong Palestinian march
cancelled in order to protect the Remembrance Day Commemoration.
Since the Palestinian demonstration took place an hour after the
Remembrance Day service and well away from it this was always a dishonest
attempt to have a demonstration that they don’t like cancelled.
Aerial Footage
In the weeks before the march Braverman had attacked previous
demonstrations as ‘hate mobs’ and ‘anti-Semitic’. Braverman combines Zionism,
racism and anti-Semitism in about equalmeasure. And she uses Jews a political football and pawns for her racist politics.
Braverman is a bigot for all seasons. In September she told
the American Enterprise Institute that persecution for being gay or discrimination
as a woman shouldn’t be grounds for claiming asylum. These are the Zionists' friends.
Channel Four Report on Cruella Summoning the Far Right to London
Braverman has described
refugees arriving in Britain as an ‘invasion’, accused people crossing the
Channel of having values at
odds with the UK and “heightened
levels of criminality”, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, as well
as saying that grooming gang members were predominantly British-Pakistani men who
“hold cultural values totally at odds
with British values” when the Home Office’s own statistics contradict this.
Following her release from Gaza by Hamas, 85 year old Yosheved Lifshitz is interviewed about her experience in captivity. pic.twitter.com/MOTEJ82BmB
Because the Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley
refused, for once, to adhere to her instructions, Braverman bitterly complained
in The Times that the Police were discriminating against her fascist friends on
the far-Right in favour of Palestinians! Something that didn’t go down too well
even with fellow Tory MPs.
Clare Daly MEP on Israel’s Genocidal Attack on Gaza
Since Braverman didn’t bother submitting the article forNo. 10 approval loud are the calls for her to
be sacked and Sunak is rumoured to be thinking of sacking the bigot in the next
reshuffle despite sharing most of her racist views.
Despite opposing the Palestinian marches because they are ‘anti-Semitic’
Braverman has no difficulty using the term ‘cultural Marxism’which involves aconspiracy
theory whereby the Marxist adherents of the mainly Jewish Frankfurt School
conspired to undermine Western civilisation from within by taking over the
commanding heights of culture and politics.
BREAKING: Israel commits new horrible hospital massacres! Shifa hospital bombed this morning! pic.twitter.com/VrpF38Zgi5
Andrei Brevik, who massacred over 70 young members of the Norwegian
social democrats, cited
Cultural Marxism in the manifesto he released. None of this has prevented
Cruella using them despite its clear and obvious role in anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories, not least with the Nazis who forced members of the Frankfurt school
to leave Germany.
BBC Gaza Diaries
Once again we see how anti-Semitism and Zionism go hand in
hand. None of this, incidentally, prevented the Community Security Trust, a
project of Mossad, Israel’s MI6, inviting
her to their annual dinner.
There were lots of trade union banners but very few from Unite owing to its racist General Secretary Sharon Graham refusing to do anything as Gaza burns
The march against genocide in Gaza was perhaps the largest
march I have ever attended. Certainly it rivals the April 2003 march against
the forthcoming Iraq War. It was certainly the biggest ever march on Palestine that
we have seen in Britain and possibly anywhere.
Channel Four Report on Cruella Summoning the Far Right to London
Contrary to the lying
suggestions of Sunak that the Palestinian demonstrators were ‘singing antisemitic chants and brandishing
pro-Hamas signs and clothing’ the march was concerned with genocide in
Gaza, which Sunak has given his approval to. ‘Palestine Will Be Free From the River to the Sea’ is of course not
in the least anti-Semitic but envisages a free Palestine rather than the
present Israeli police state for Palestinians.
It is true that a ‘Jewish’ racial state and freedom for Palestinians
is incompatible which is why Zionism and a ‘Jewish’ state, just like Apartheid
in South Africa and the Nazi state before it, must go. However a secular
democratic state in Israel/Palestine is not anti-Semitic but simply a genocide
prevention measure.
As people can see from the aerial footage of the march the
Police estimates of 300,000 demonstrators are wildly low. My own estimate is
that it was at least a million. I know the train from Brighton, one of a number,
was packed full with Palestine demonstrators.
Although genocide doesn’t disturb the robotic leader of the Labour
Party, Keir Starmer, Sunak or Biden, most ordinary decent people take exception
to seeing hospitals bombed, patients killed, babies on incubators murdered and
a civilian population deprived of fuel, water and food.It says something about our leaders that war
crimes committed in the name of Zionism simply get them to repeat like a stuck
tape-recorder the allegation of anti-Semitism.
The suggestion that it is anti-Semitic to oppose genocide in
Gaza is itself anti-Semitic. It assumes that all Jewish people are blood
thirsty savages. Of course our war criminal leaders, regardless of religion,
have no principled objection to killing people in the global South. After all
that’s where the biggest profits are to be made.
What was encouraging was how young the demonstration was and
also how many White people took part, exploding the myth that this is only of
concern to Muslims. Keir Starmer may though have done permanent damage to
Labour’s vote amongst Black and Muslim people by his racist politics and
support for genocide.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
has brought the racism behind Europe’s refugee crisis to the surface – Ukrainians,
apart from the Black variety, are the Right, White kind of refugees
UPDATE
'Russia's
#NATO Enlargement Redlines' - #Ukraine Cable from 2008 written by #CIA director William J. Burns, then US ambassador
to Moscow Link:
'Russia's #NATO Enlargement Redlines' - #Ukraine Cable from 2008 written by #CIA director William J. Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow Link:
Contrast the welcome for Ukrainian
refugees with the reception for Afghan and Middle Eastern refugees
Why, you might ask, has RT been banned throughout Europe?
Britain was supposed to have left the European Union with Brexit yet it has
willingly succumbed to the temptation to clamp down on
any alternative sources of information or narrative. What have they got to hide?
Let's remember how the prostitute press treated the invasion of Iraq, which broke international law and the ICC and UN didn't lift a finger
I listened to RT most of yesterday, before it was taken off
air. It was remarkably balanced in its coverage, giving equal time to critics
of Russia’s invasion. But that was the problem. The Government does not want any alternative coverage. It wants us
to rely on the BBC, which is acting as a cheerleader for NATO. Al Jazeera isn’t
much better either.
RT was broadcasting from the two breakaway republics of
Donetsk and Luhansk, unlike the BBC. As far as the Government was concerned
that was the problem.
‘capable
of delivering electric shocks to unwanted migrants and armed with heat sensors,
cameras, and loudspeakers that blare in several languages.
Poland is
another country which is noted for its hostile attitude to refugees, erecting
barbed wire fences with Belarus. It, together with Latvia and Lithuania, described
refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘not refugees but part of a “hybrid warfare” campaign being orchestrated
by Belarus’.
Poland sent 500 troops to fight the ‘invasion’ and there
are reports that at least five people died. A Polish soldier who deserted in
disgust at the behaviour of the Polish army reported that several refugees had
been killed by the army.
Contrast this with the welcome
given to Ukrainian refugees.
However there is one exception. Black, Asian
and Arab people in Ukraine are being prevented
from getting out of the country and then, when they manage to get to the
border, are being prevented by Poland from entering.
Since the
war started, more than 870,000 refugees have fled from Ukraine to neighbouring
countries, the United Nations said. Half of those are currently in Poland.
Queues along the border are now tens of kilometres long with some African
students describing to Al Jazeera how they have been waiting for days to cross
amid freezing temperatures and with no food, blankets or shelters.
Contrast the coverage of Ukraine with Palestine
On Monday I went to my local
store to be greeted with an almost unprecedented unity amongst the press. Every
front page had a picture of a Ukrainian child and a variety of emotive
headlines. Contrast this with Israel’s murder of Palestinian children.
18-year-old Shadi Najim (left) and 22-year-old Abdullah al-Husari (right) were killed by Israeli forces during a night raid on the Jenin refugee camp on Tuesday March 2, 2022. (Photo: Social Media)
In just one day this week three
young Palestinians were
killed with shots to the head. In May last year 62 children were killed in Israel’s
attack on Gaza. You could have been forgiven if you missed the front page coverage
because there wasn’t any.
White children harmed or hurt make headlines,
especially if opposition to the war is in line with American war aims. When
it came to the war in Iraq when hundreds of thousands of children were killed,
there were no headlines or coverage of victims of American military murder.
When Julian Assange revealed the truth behind one particularly
murderous assault from the air, which included shooting down two Reuters journalists, because it was filmed, it was Assange who was
penalised. This is the hypocrisy which lies behind the wall to wall
anti-Russian propaganda.
The Racism that runs through the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis – they are
White like us
There has been a systematic and persistent racism in the coverage of the Ukrainian
refugee problem.
On Radio 4′s Today programme Thought for the Day’ Tim Stanley,
historian and Daily Telegraph writer said:
“Ukraine has touched the West in a way
that Syria or Yemen did not.’ And why was this? Stanley explained that ‘one of the reasons is that being a European
country, it looks so familiar.’ In other words they are white.
As Nadine White wrote
‘From France to the UK and the
US, much of the media coverage of the war in Ukraine has been saturated with racial bias.’
A CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata claimed
that the attack on Ukraine cannot be compared to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan because the Eastern European country is more “civilised”.
“This isn’t
a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict
raging for decades,” he said. “This is a relatively civilised, relatively
European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you
wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
One shudders to think what D’Agata would have said if he wasn’t
being careful.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, David
Sakvarelidze was interviewed on Radio 4
“It’s very
emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes
being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his
rockets,” Sakvarelidze said.
The BBC presenter responded: “I understand and of course respect the emotion.”
Molotov Cocktails and Resistance
“Amazing
mainstream Western media gives glowing coverage of people resisting invasion by
making molotov cocktails,” one social media user remarked. “If they
were brown people in Yemen or Palestine doing the same they would be labeled
terrorists deserving US-Israeli or US-Saudi drone bombing.”
Al Jazeera’s Peter Dobbie was forced to apologise after he said
“What’s
compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed. These are prosperous,
middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from
the Middle East [...] or North Africa. They look like any European family that
you’d live next door to.”
Nadine
White observed how ‘
Visibly fighting back
tears during a broadcast from Poland, Lucy Watson of ITV News said: “Now the unthinkable has happened to them,
and this is not a developing, third world nation, this is Europe”.
Yes it must be a shock that Europe is tasting a fraction of
what it has visited on other countries.
We also saw the hypocrisy of the United Nations on full
display today. The General Assembly voted to ‘deplore’ Russia’s invasion. So do I. But compare this with America
and Britain’s invasion of Iraq which caused approximately one million deaths as
well as destabilisation and slaughter across the Middle East. It was the Iraqi
invasion which led to the creation of ISIS.Yet what was the UN response? Absolutely nothing. There was no criticism
of the USA.
I won’t bother detailing every instance of media racism
because, as they say, every picture tells a story. It is a story of ingrained media
racism.
Ukrainian Opposition to Becoming the United States’ Pawn and
Plaything
And there’s something else that the mainstream media has not
shown. That not all Ukrainians are happy that the United States, which has been
enforcing austerity on Ukraine via the IMF and World Bank, is now using them as
a pawn in its battle with Russia as it seeks to achieve hegemony in Europe and
the world.
What coverage have there been of these demonstrations in Kyiv
against US imperialism? Again it doesn’t
fit with the BBC narrative and now that RT is off the air, we can be sure that
they won’t be shown either.
Tony Greenstein
"It's so odd (that) war is no longer
being waged exclusively against Black, brown and poor people. Shock.
Horror"
American Ignorance – ‘the lady on CNN just now said that the
damage in Kyiv is something a capitol city in Europe hasn’t seen in almost a
century… the siege on Sarajevo began on April 5, 1992 and didn’t end until
February 29, 1996’
Molotovs – ‘If this was done by
Palestinians, Afghanistan or other nations resisting occupation, it would be
terrorism.’
BBC Racism – ‘But people with 'blue eyes and blonde hair'
dropping bombs over the Middle East and Africa is OK. And 'Blue eyes and blonde
hair' is Hitler's words from the Mein Kampf about the superior Aryan race.’
And then there is the Jewish Chronicle’s fascist
sympathising editor, Stephen Pollard. According to Pollard Boycott Divestment
and Sanctions against Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’.
But when applied to Russia it is perfectly kosher.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backed the
boycott of Russia from sports, but criticised the boycott of last month’s Sydney Cultural
Festival over receiving sponsorship from the Israeli embassy.
Claudia Webbe, a British member of parliament, tweeted that
the people who genuinely care about Ukrainians are the ones who will welcome
all refugees with open arms.
“The rest?” she posted, “Well, they’re pretending.”
