Showing posts with label Sunak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sunak. Show all posts

14 August 2024

The Board of Deputies has made British Jews Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza

If Jews Are Concerned About Anti-Semitism Then They Should Stop Acting As a Moral Alibi for Extermination, Torture and Famine

 There can be no greater obscenity than using the Nazi Holocaust to justify Gaza’s Holocaust


Joint statement with the @JLC_uk: “We are concerned that the cumulative effect of these announcements, in quick succession, signal a significant shift in policy, away from Israel being a key UK ally. This would not only be a strategic error but a moral one.” pic.twitter.com/pu8tRin5Gd


One of the most embarrassing things when speaking at a Palestinian demonstration is when people applaud simply because you are Jewish. People take it for granted that most Jewish people support Israel’s war crimes.  Unfortunately this is true.

It’s not that Jewish anti-Zionists deserve praise so much as Jews who support genocide carried out in their name deserve condemnation.

That was why I objected to a contest on Twitter to find the top 10 Jews ‘who don’t hate themselves’, the Nazi-style accusation that Zionists deploy against anti-Zionist Jews. It should not be remarkable that Jews should condemn a state which has turned Gaza into a death camp.

It is a sign of the political and moral decay in the Jewish community that creatures like Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg, are able to claim that British Jews support Israel’s genocide, without any seeming comeback from Jews.

It is a symptom of the amorality of most British Jews that they don’t protest when their self-proclaimed leaders protest in their name against Britain resuming its funding of UNWRA, the UN Agency charged with preventing famine in Gaza. These wretches even complained that Britain was withdrawing its objection at the International Criminal Court to the issuing of arrest warrants for Israel’s war criminal Prime Minister, Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant.

Rosenberg warned that prosecuting war criminals would pose a threat to British national security and that feeding Palestinian children by funding UNWRA would cause irreparable harm to the Zionist cause. ‘Most worryingly of all’ Rosenberg said, ‘is the speculation that Britain may impose an arms embargo on Israel this week.’

Imagine what might happen. Israel wants to bomb one of the few remaining schools left in Gaza and all of a sudden Israel’s Chief of Staff discovers that they’ve run out of bombs. Palestinian children are likely to run amok unless you can smother them with White Phosphorous. God forbid Israel might not be able to massacre women and children at the drop of a hat. It would be an ‘astonishing decision to take against a key UK ally and security partner’ Rosenberg proclaimed.  Yet the sound of British Jews dissociating themselves from these scoundrels is deafening in its silence.

For all their memorials most Jews have learnt nothing from the Holocaust. This is Zionism. Drawing universal lessons such as anti-racism might interfere with their settler colonial project. If non-Jews in Europe had behaved in the same way as Jews do today, then not 6 but 7 or 8 million Jews would have perished in the Holocaust.

Labour Friends of Israel, funded by the Israeli Embassy, leapt into action at the prospect of Netanyahu facing the International Criminal Court for War Crimes

Support for Israel, right or wrong, is a reflex action of most Jews. By their silence British Jews are complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Unlike Germans under Hitler, British Jews do not have the excuse of living in a state based on police terror.

When Britain’s Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak claimed that marches against genocide were anti-Semitic and that Jews were fearful of entering inner London where were the protests? Most British Jews went along with this nonsense and in the process what they did was to cement the identification in the public mind between Israel’s atrocities and ordinary Jews.

Jewish Bloc on Palestinian Demonstrations

That these claims were evidence free, all the demonstrations had a Jewish bloc, didn’t deter them in the slightest.  Anti-racist Jews are invisible to the British Establishment and their Zionist monkeys.

The time has long gone when Jews could sit on the fence and proclaim their indifference to what is done in their name. To be an onlooker when a Holocaust is being perpetrated in your name is to take sides. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’

Most British Jews know little about the holocaust. They rely on Simon Schama’s coffee table books. They know even less about the Zionist record, not only collaboration with the Nazis but their blocking of escape routes for Jews who tried to get out of Europe.

As in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto was subject to a siege. Some 92,000 Jews died as a result of hunger even before the deportations. In Lodz, the second largest ghetto, about 45,000 Jews died. In all some half a million Jews died of hunger or starvation. This was deliberate Nazi policy. ‘Death by Hunger’ as Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland said. This is Israel’s template today in Gaza.

In July 1941 Zionist activists picketed the offices of Agudat Israel in the USA in protest at them sending food parcels to starving Jews in the Polish ghettos. Joseph Tenenbaum, a former Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, wrote that Jews must not interfere with Britain’s war needs, ‘even if this comes at the expense of victims in Poland or elsewhere.’ Zionists have form in this sort of thing.

I can remember debating with those on the Left who argued that it was anti-Semitic to expect someone, just because they were Jewish, to take a position on Zionism. Today when the so-called leaders of British and French Jews openly support what Israel is doing in Gaza, it is incumbent on Jews to speak out. Silence is complicity.

The Catholic Church was bitterly criticised for not having openly opposed the Nazi Holocaust despite having been aware of it from an early stage. This was crystallised in The Deputy, the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having been indifferent to the extermination of the Jews.

What then is one to make of Jews who remain silent when the Zionist puppet Ephraim Mirvis openly supports the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and protests against funding UNWRA?

The situation today is that Palestinians are not only dying from bombs and bullets but from Israel’s deliberate encouraging of the spread of disease.  The Blocking of aid convoys means that Israel is deliberately creating a famine and the conditions for disease to spread. Medical researchers in the Lancet estimated that not 50,000 but 187,000 people – a tenth of Gaza’s population – have died. Jonathan Cook has suggested that unless immediate action is taken then 600,000 will die. 600,000 is the figure that Israel’s Ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotoveli, looked forward to in an interview with Piers Morgan.

Despite the Zionist outrage when I described Israel in 2019 as ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’, my words have been proved correct. When Israel’s war against the Palestinians began last October, ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav Gallant called the Palestinians ‘human animals.’ There were no protests at this by Mirvis or the Board despite it being first coined by Heinrich Himmler, to describe Jews in in a speech to senior SS Officers in Poznań on October 4 1943.


Nor was Gallant alone in identifying with the Nazis. ‘Finish them’ is the most popular car bumper sticker in Israel today. When the war began Tel Aviv was flooded with stickers ‘exterminate now’. Former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin compared Hitler’s desire to annihilate every last Jew with Israel’s need to eliminate every last Palestinian.

Israel has based its claim to reparations from Germany on the fiction that it inherits the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. The reality is that it inherits the memory of those who killed the 6 million.

How many Jews have walked out of a synagogue sermon when the rabbi defends what Israel is doing? How many have openly criticised the Board of Deputies when they justify Israel’s policy of starvation and its repeated massacres of a civilian population?

Of course there are many thousands of Jews who have refused to remain silent such as those who participate in the Jewish bloc on the demonstrations in London. But it has to be faced that the few thousand British Jews who have participated in solidarity actions with the Palestinians are still a small percentage of Britain’s Jews.

Zionism and its interpretation of the holocaust have become, for most Jews a substitute religion. From not wanting to know about the holocaust immediately after the war, American Jews embraced holocaust theology at the same time as the United States openly backed Israel post-67. During the McCarthy era mention of the holocaust was seen as evidence of communist leanings.

How is it that worship of god has been transformed into worship of real estate, the preposterous claim that god gave the land of Palestine to the Jews? The Prophets would have called this idolatry, a Golden Calf?

How is it that Jews, who were once synonymous with the Left and subversion of the established order - trade unionist, anarchists, socialists and communists – have become the dupes and pawns of the Islamophobic far-Right?

The unspoken assumption is that Jews today have nothing in common, apart from religious rituals, with their counterparts in Eastern Europe a century ago. British Jews today are completely dissimilar to Jews in the East End of the 1930s. When anti-Semitism was a problem in Britain Jews naturally turned to the left – the Communist Party and Independent Labour Party and assorted groups. The Labour Party dissociated itself from the anti-fascist struggle.

In 1945 the only Communist MP ever to have been elected in England, Phil Piratin, was elected for Mile End in the East End.  Over half his votes were estimated to come from Jews. When Geoffrey Alderman surveyed Jewish voters in Hackney for the 1979 general election, some 1.8% of Jews said they were voting for the neo-Nazi National Front but none said they were voting for the Communist Party.  In other words not only have Jews become more prosperous but they have moved to the right politically.

Anti-Semitism – the False Anti-Racism of the Right

As traditional anti-Semitism has disappeared so, in the minds of many Jews, anti-Zionism is seen as opposition to their identity as Jews and anti-Semitism. But opposition to identity is not racism. There are many groups in which female genital mutilation [FGM] is seen as part of their culture. By this reasoning opposition to FGM is also racism.

The majority Jewish identity today is support for Israel and therefore the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism which is about Israel not Jews. No longer is anti-Semitism ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews as Jews’, the Oxford English Dictionary definition. Zionist Groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism set about increasing the fears of Jews about anti-Semitism. 

When my father took part in the Battle of Cable Street he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism. He knew what anti-Semitism meant from daily life. The mere fact that the British and US governments have pushed the definition so hard upon universities and other public bodies testifies to its fraudulent and phony nature.

From 2015 onwards the CAA produced an ‘Anti-Semitism Barometer’ which was criticised even by other Zionists for its sloppy methodology.

Writing about this survey Anshel Pfeffer accused the CAA of an ‘eagerness to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more widespread than it really is’. Pfeffer is a mainstream Zionist. About the finding that 56% of Jews agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of the 1930s.” Pfeffer remarked that:

If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.... To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.

Since the CAA, CST and the Metropolitan Police all use the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism then any statistics they produce can be discarded as not merely unreliable but meaningless.

Concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ by racists like Suella Braverman has been used to both flatter and frighten British Jews with the express purpose of claiming that opposition to a key plan of British foreign policy, support for Israel, derives from anti-Semitism.

Why else would Sunak rush out of Downing Street when George Galloway was elected MP to profess his concern that ‘Jewish students were fearful to wear their school uniforms’?  The man who made support for the Rwandan scheme for refugees his flagship policy.

What is it about Jews that touches the depths of Braverman’s black heart when she expressed no such concerns about the attacks on mosques and Muslims following the murder of 3 girls in Southport?

Or put it another way? Would Braverman, Jenrick and the rest of the Tory slime have extended their support for Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms at the end of the 19th century?

According to Matthew Hendley [Anti-alienism and the Primrose League, 250]

the late nineteenth century critics of sweating "indulged in blatant racism, blaming foreign immigrants (mainly East European Jews who settled in the principal industrial areas) for causing sweating through their competition and low living standards.

In the debate on the Immigration of Destitute Aliens on 29 January 1902, William Evans-Gordon MP had this to say:

"The main cause of the present unpopularity of aliens in East London remains to be stated. The inflow of the foreign Jew has brought with it an immense amount of overcrowding, the direct and indirect effects of which have been alike injurious. The number of families occupying one-roomed tenements is very great, too many lodgers are received and illegally occupied basements are far too common."

Mr Forde Ridley followed up:

All they [British workers] know is that they are being turned out of their homes and the neighbourhoods in which they are obliged to live, in order to carry on their work, and that their places are being taken by Russian and Polish Jews, and you cannot persuade them that it is not a racial question. They naturally take a hatred to the Jewish people.... It is argued by some that if a foreigner can live on so much less than an Englishman, then it is high time that the British working man went to the wall.

William Evans-Gordon, the Tory MP for Stepney, formed the British Brothers League in 1901 in order to keep Jewish immigrants out. In 1903, Evans-Gordon wrote The Alien Immigrant, in which he asserted that "the settlement of large aggregations of Hebrews in a Christian land has never been successful", and that the

"Hebrew colony ... unlike any other alien colony in [Great Britain], forms a solid and permanently distinct block – a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of extraneous thought and custom", to the extent that "east of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town".

Sound familiar? This is what is said today about Muslims. The target may have changed but the argument about different ‘races’ not mixing remains the same. In his autobiography Chaim Weizmann, the future President of Israel wrote favourably of Evans-Gordon:

our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk [Trial and Error, pp. 90-91)

Stuart Samuel, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel was opposed in 1900 by a Conservative, David Hope-Kydd, who had the support of the English Zionist Federation. Geoffrey Alderman described how Kydd

cleverly coupled his desire for an aliens’ immigration bill with heart-rending support for the infant Zionist movement.’  Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants (aliens) as  ‘the very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’  [The Jewish Community in British Politics, pp. 68, 75]

The BBL was instrumental in securing the passage in 1905 of the Aliens Act which aimed to stop the entry of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.. Richard Thurlow wrote that

The League also left behind a legacy of support for far-right groups in east London and this was exploited by the British Union of Fascists, the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, the Union Movement and the National Front who gained followings in the same environs.

If Braverman and Sunak had been living at the beginning of the 20th  century then the hostility they display to refugees today would have been directed with equal venom against Jewish refugees.

Today British Jews are the most prosperous segment of the White population and also the most reactionary and racist. If a survey was conducted of attitudes of Jews to Moslems it would show that Islamaphobia and anti-Arab racism was off the scale.

Even without a scientific survey there are intimations of this. In January 2022 the Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced to resign. Mond had written on Facebook and tweeted that ‘all civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’ Mond is also a trustee of the Jewish National Fund-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

In July 2018 the BOD suspended Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the vilest of animals.” Three years previously Pine had said that it was a pity that the pro-Palestinian Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”

Jewish News reported that ‘the Board’s executive ruled that she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’.

What was the reaction of Finchley United Synagogue? Did it change its representative? It was reported that

Finchley Synagogue will look into the plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”.

Note that word ‘plight’.

There are many reasons for the changing political allegiances of British and European Jews. One of the most important is socio-economic. Jews have almost entirely emigrated from the East End of London to the north London suburbs such as Golders Green.

According to Alderman by 1961, over 40% of Anglo-Jewry was to be found in the upper two social classes compared to less than 20% of the general population.’ William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote that:

The rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size. [The Left, the Right and the Jews. p.51]

In December 1990 I wrote, in REDEFINING ANTI-SEMITISM The False Anti-Racism of the Right

It has long been the practice to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism, including Jewish anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'.... Today the New Right claim to be opponents of anti-Semitism. ...  Reagan's Republican Party... voted at its 1984 Party Convention to condemn anti-Semitism unanimously. Even neo-fascist groups, eg. the French cultural and academic racist group, GRECE, opposes 'anti-Semitism'.’

Anti-Semitism was the new and false anti-Semitism of the Right and one reason for this is because it barely exists.  Anti-Semitism is an extremely useful weapon with which to attack the Left and the Palestine Solidarity Movement and that is what we are experiencing today. 

Many on the left, were slow to understand this. It became clearer when ‘anti-Semitism’ became the main weapon used against Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.

How was this possible? Quite simply as Jews changed so did anti-Semitism. Racism changes its contours. It doesn’t stand still. Yesterday’s victims of racism may be today’s racists.

We can see that clearly with people like Priti Patel and Braverman, both of whose parents were immigrants. When the Jews of the East End faced the violent anti-Semitism of Moseley and the British Union of Fascists, their allies were the left and ordinary workers.  In October 1936 at the Battle of Cable Street an estimated 200,000 demonstrators successfully defied the attempts of the Metropolitan Police to force a path through the East End for the fascists. The march had been approved by the Tory Home Secretary Sir John Simon.

Today the Met purport to oppose anti-Semitism but at that time their ranks were full to the brim with BUF sympathisers. Racism towards Jews has been replaced by hostility to Muslims in police ranks.

The same is true of the Tory Party. Until recently the Tory Party was infested by anti-Semitism.  Zionism’s hero, Arthur James Balfour was a dedicated racist and anti-Semite. As Prime Minister he introduced the Aliens Act 1905.

During a conversation with Weizmann, Balfour recalled an exchange with Cosima Wagner, the widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann

‘pointed out that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p. 154].

During the 1930s the Tory Party was riddled with anti-Semitism. The pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship claimed among its members, fifty members of both Houses of Parliament and ‘many generals, admirals, bishops and bankers.’

Members included Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Prince von Bismarck, Governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman and Geoffrey Dawson editor of The Times. Corporate members included Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop Rubber, Thomas Cook & Son, the Midland Bank (now HSBC) and Lazard Brothers amongst others.

This was why The Times (along with most of the British press including the pro-Hitler Daily Mail) and the BBC refused to allow criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to interfere with their coverage of German affairs. When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of state racism, the mainstream press weren’t interested. Today when ‘anti-Semitism’ means criticism of Israel then the media are all over it.

One of the most ardent pro-Zionist politicians was Winston Churchill.  Apart from warm words of sympathy he did nothing to help alleviate the plight of Jews under Nazi occupation, still less to admit to British territories Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis.

In a speech in Sunderland in January 1920 Churchill spoke of ‘the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jew’. Churchill was espousing a version of the international Jewish conspiracy theory.

Churchill followed this up in 1920 with Bolshevism v Zionism in the Illustrated Sunday Herald where he stressed how important it was

that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.

Churchill’s answer to the support among Jewish people for socialism was Zionism. The Nazis too saw Zionism, in Hitler’s words, as ‘a great movement’. (Mein Kampf, p.41).  Zionism has always been a racist and counter-revolutionary movement.

Long before Zionism took hold amongst British Jews it had become the adopted policy of the British Establishment. The only member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was Sir Edwin Montagu, its only Jewish member.

The organisation that is charged with monitoring and collating statistics of anti-Semitism is the Mossad Project, the Community Security Trust. As Tony Lerman documented in his essay Antisemitism Redefined in the 1990’s the Israeli state moved to take over the monitoring of statistics on anti-Semitism. Lerman wrote

I had close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA)... in the 1990s, I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the first objective, independent , country-by-country survey of anti semitism worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. [On Anti-Semitism, p.12].

Every year the CST produces Anti-Semitism Incident Reports and every year it documents a continuing increase in anti-Semitism. This fits in well with Zionist ideology that holds that Jews will never be safe living outside Israel which is their ‘real home’.

Sure enough their report for 2023 found that ‘anti-Jewish hate recorded across the UK in 2023... is the highest annual total ever reported to CST.’ What even the CST could not avoid is the conclusion that it is Israel’s attacks on Palestinians which is responsible for this increase. In other words the ‘Jewish’ State is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. They wrote that:

These spikes (in anti-Semitism) also reflected the surge in anti-Jewish reactions to the escalation of conflicts involving Israel. In 2023, the increase in antisemitism following 7 October occurred on a larger scale. Between 1 January and 6 October, CST had recorded an average of five antisemitic incidents per day; from 7 October to 31 December, this rose to an average of 31 antisemitic incidents per day.

Note how the reaction of people to Israel’s genocide is termed ‘anti-Jewish’. I shall leave a detailed analysis of their figures to Alan Maddison’s article for JVL ‘Will the latest CST report do more to protect British Jews or Israel?’ I have just one observation.

The CST report recorded 266 incidents of Assault in 2023, a rise of 96% from the 136 incidents reported in 2022. They tell us that this was ‘the most ever recorded in a year.’  So if the CST are right then two Jewish people will be attacked every three days. This figure is, in itself, quite strange because the CST tells us that there were 4,103 incidents of anti-Semitic hate in 2023.

Normally, for other examples of racism, assault forms about a third of total incidents which suggests that the CST are vastly over inflating the number of anti-Semitic incidents and padding them out with social media posts which are unquantifiable.  What is even stranger is that not one ‘of these incidents was severe enough to be classed as Extreme Violence, compared to one incident in 2022.’ Extreme violence is where there is a case of actual or grievous bodily harm. In other words not one Jewish person was actually hurt in 2023 and just one was hurt in 2022.  Compare these figures to attacks on Muslims.

The CST's Opposition to 'anti-Semitism' didn't stop it inviting Britain's racist Home Secretary as its Guest of Honour

The CST’s decision to invite Braverman as the guest speaker at its 2023 Annual Dinner, gives the lie to CST’s claim to oppose racism.

In a parliamentary debate on Tackling Islamaphobia we learn that almost half of religiously motivated attacks last year were against Muslims, a trend that has stayed consistent for the last six years. 42% of mosques have experienced some form of attack over the last three years (Andy Slaughter MP). I doubt if even 1% of synagogues have been attacked. The scenes outside Southport, Hartlepool and other mosques have never occurred outside synagogues yet the Home Office channels £15m into the coffers of the CST, consistently greater than that to tackle Islamaphobia. Why? Because the British State has an interest in promoting the idea that ‘anti-Semitism’ is on the increase as a way of buttressing support for Israel. Jews are the moral alibi for a central plank of British foreign policy.

Although the BOD is very concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ today it wasn’t always like that. In 1942 when news about the deportation of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz emerged, the Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews published a protest against what was happening. It asked the BOD to join with them. The Board refused.

It would seem that Brodetsky and his colleagues wished to maintain a distance between themselves and the organisations of recent arrivals, whose demands went against the grain of the BD policy which was to work ‘decently’ and refrain from making noise.

In June 1942 the Federation held a public rally. ‘Invitations were sent to Brodestsky and Brotman but they declined to attend.’ Selig Brodetsky was elected as the first Zionist President of the Board in December 1939 and Brotman was its Secretary. Meier Sompolinsky wrote about how

‘the shrewd action of the World Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews made a strong impression and led to a conflict between the advocates of the quiet and the public approaches....

At the demonstration Rabbi Hertz, as chairman, expressed disappointment at Brodetsky’s absence. Even (Anthony) Eden (Britain’s Foreign Secretary) and Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic primate had sent statements to be read in public, but all the president of British Jewry did was to send an indirect letter.

Sompolinsky comments that

The way the Slovakian issue was handled was characteristic of the hesistant approach of the JFC [Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies] in the period before the Final Solution became public knowledge. [Meier Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust - The failure of Anglo-Jewish Leadership, pp. 68-9, 1999]

When it came to opposing genuine anti-Semites the Board of Deputies has always run away from opposing them

This has been the reaction of the BOD throughout its history. In 1936 it opposed Jews taking part in the Battle of Cable Street. The BOD opposed the 43 Group of Jewish ex-servicemen who physically put Moseley and his Union Movement to flight after the war. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the NF was active, the BOD told Jews to keep silent. The only form of ‘anti-Semitism’ that the BOD has ever been prepared to be vocal about is opposition to Zionism and Israel.

The first time the Board held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ was in 2018 when Corbyn was leader! Last year they also held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ – this time in support of genocide in Gaza. This is the reality of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scare. It is about keeping British Jews as their docile political pets.

It means British Jews like Heidi Bachram, a Jewish Chronicle correspondent in Brighton and Hove, acting as a spy for the British police against Palestinian solidarity activists. This is a continuation of a long and inglorious Jewish tradition which began when Haganah agent Feivel Polkes acted as a Gestapo agent informing on the left. Thousands of Jews living under cover were betrayed to the Nazis by Jewish informers, such as Icek Glogowski (Fat Jacques). Jewish informers were far more effective than their non-Jewish counterparts because many Jews in hiding trusted them. Zionism informers today carry on the tradition.

French Jews support for Le Pen

One example of how Jews in Western Europe have moved to the right is the recent elections in France. Contrary to all expectations the Left came out on top and Marie Le Pen’s National Renewal came third. You might expect that French Jews were overjoyed that a party founded by a holocaust denier and containing many anti-Semites had been defeated. Not a bit of it. Many French Jews voted for them and according to the Israeli press they were most disappointed that the ‘anti-Semitic’ left came out on top.

Zionism has managed to transform the far-right enemies of Jews into their friends and the left, who hid Jews from the Nazis in France, into their enemies. Not only are Western Jews the most racist, right-wing section of the White population, they are also the most stupid.

Tony Greenstein

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6 August 2024

To Counter the Riots & Attacks on Refugees We Need a New Anti-fascist/Anti-Racist Movement – We Can't rely on the Police or State

Stand Up to  Racism is NOT that movement – it is a recruiting vehicle for the SWP & a cosy alliance with the Trade Union Bureaucracy


Tony Greenstein's speech at Palestine solidarity rally in Liverpool 4 August 2024


Tomorrow there will be a mobilisation in Brighton against the Fascists

Last Sunday I spoke at a Palestine solidarity rally in Liverpool. There was going to be a demonstration first and then a rally but fears of fascist attacks led to the demonstration being cancelled (although there was an impromptu one after the rally).

On the previous evening the fascists had rallied outside a mosque and burnt down the Spellow Library and Community Hub library, a 'one stop shop for one of the most deprived'. This story has been repeated throughout the country.

A remarkable achievement for fascist goons in Liverpool - they burnt down a local library and advice hub

Al Jazeera Rioting in Liverpool

Unfortunately Skwawkbox’s report did not tell the whole story about what happened in Liverpool. The previous day a thousand fascists had mobilised at the Pier Head, the traditional rallying place of the Labour Movement and just six anti-fascists were present. Although they were unable to attack the mosque in Walton the fascists did considerable damage.


If anyone bears responsibility for the riots today it is the disgusting coconut Suella Braverman. The irony is that she is the child of immigrants.

Although the catalyst was the murder of 3 young girls in Southport a week ago, the months and years of demonisation of refugees and Muslims have taken their toll. Sunak and Braverman, who were so voluble about ‘hate marches’ against genocide in Palestine and who were so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ have had nothing to say about the violent attacks on Black and Asian people and Mosques. Their indignation about racism is reserved exclusively for Jewish supporters of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.

If anyone bears responsibility for playing the same theme tune as Farage its Yvette Cooper - instead of changing the racist discourse she continued where Braverman left off - this is where bourgeois feminism has ended up


Those who talked about ‘swarms’ of migrants (David Cameron) and an ‘invasion’ of refugeees (Braverman) bear the responsibility for what has happened today. So does Yvette Cooper who only a week ago was proudly boasting about how she would wage war on refugees earning a crust washing cars. What a terrible crime it is to want to work!

Instead of attacking the obvious anti-Black and Islamaphobic racism of the rioters Starmer and Cooper frame what is happening in terms of thuggery and violence. 

We should not accept this . The violence and thuggery is a consequence of the politics of racism and scapegoatism and both Starmer and Cooper are equally guilty of creating the conditions in which it took place. The answer is NOT more legislation restricting the right to protest. The irony of restricting the right to protest against genocide in Gaza has been lost on these hypocrites.

As it is dozens of peace activists and protesters are in gaol, some with lengthy sentences, because direct action to prevent climate catastrophe is considered more dangerous than whipping up race hatred.

Starmer and his Zionist supporters went on about ‘anti-Semitism’ repeatedly although no Jewish synagogues were attacked nor were Jewish people. But when Mosques are attacked NOTHING IS SAID.

Cooper talked of the  ‘billions’ the asylum backlog is costing us which is a straightforward lie. Asylum seekers want to work and house themselves. It is the immigration rules that prevent this that is costing money.

Greater Manchester Police Attack Victim of  Race Attack

Scapegoating refugees is so much easier than tackling the real criminals such as Boris Johnson and Sunak who handed out billions of pounds of COVID contracts to their corrupt cronies - something the Met is refusing to investigate

What has cost us an estimated £15 billion is the COVID Contract frauds perpetrated by the last government when they established a VIP track to allow their friends and cronies, such as Baroness Mone, to secure lucrative contracts to provide Personal Protective Equipment, much of which was defective and never used.   Mone and her company Medpro was given over £200 million pounds for PPE that was unfit to use. The whole scheme was later judged illegal but the CPS and Metropolitan Police have not prosecuted anyone. Over £40 million was handed to Matt Hancock’s pub landlord, Matt Bourne, who had never before manufactured PPE.

Just imagine this corrupt pair, including Tory Peer Lady Mone, trousered over £200m & a profit of over £100m for PPE that was useless. The Met has done fuck all - however this is not newsworthy for the BBC

But the thugs and idiots who have run rampage in the last week know nothing of this because we have a ‘Labour’ government which is as much in hock to the rich and privileged as the last Tory government. Far better to attack refugees and Muslims than those who are really to blame. Starmer’s Labour has pledge to continue with austerity with Rachel Reeves removing the winter heating allowance from most pensioners.

Sussex Police actively tried their best to prevent the launch of my book on fighting fascism in Brighton - the Quakers of Friends Meeting House literally quaked, giving in to Police threats that they would provide no protection - the eventual EDL picket was barely enough to fill a phone box

Twice the Independent Police Complaints Commission upheld my complaint about Sussex Police trying to prevent an anti-fascist book launch - we should never think that the Police are neutral when it comes to racism or fascism

Sussex Police did their best to obstruct attendance at my book launch - their sympathy for the fascists was all too clear

The EDL picket of my book launch then moved to Churchill Square where they tried to attack the Palestine stall and got the shock of their lives as hundreds of shoppers turned on them - they had to seek police protection in the end - Tony Greenstein is speaking  with the megaphone

The Book that Brighton/Sussex Police tried to ban - demonstrating once again that the Police will never be our friends

The BBC have actively promoted the charlatan Farage and his racist agenda - and there are still those who call themselves anti-racists who pay the BBC licence fee

The attacks we have witnessed have political roots which have been exploited by charlatans like City money man, Nigel Farage, who the BBC have shamelessly promoted for years. We have to set our own agenda and the labour movement has been pitifully weak at doing this or combating the growth of the far-right.

The answer @FigureSpeech is not to pay the BBC Licence Fee

National Front march 1976 Bradford

I was active in the 1970’s in fighting fascism when the National Front was talked about as the third major party after having come third in the 1973 parliamentary by-election in West Bromwich with 16%, securing 18% of the vote in Leicester council elections and over 100,000 votes in the Greater London Council elections. But despite this I can't remember a fascist rally when the Left was outnumbered by the fascists. This is what is different this time around.

Oswald Moseley speaking at the Brighton Dome in 1936 - canny electricians wired up the speaker system that gave the assembled fascists a chance to listen to the Internationale!

At the EDL demonstration in London on 27 July there were approximately 15,000 fascists and just 5,000 anti-fascists.  This is something we have to reverse. Of course times have changed. 40 years ago the labour movement was strong with a closed shop in the docks, cars and mines. There were major industrial battles between the working class and the government. Today the working class is atomised and depoliticised. Production has been transferred to the Global South and what used to be referred to as the proletariat has been dispersed. Today it is doctors not dockers who go on strike.

South Yorkshire which was at the heart of the mining industry and an incredibly political working class now sees the effect of deindustrialisation as lumpen youth turn their attention to easy scapegoats such as refugees and Black people.

In sleepy Lewes the NF tried to hold an election meeting in the 1979 General Election but it was surrounded by hundreds of anti-fascist protesters

We need to make our arguments based on class not the liberal diversity agenda which ends up with the Sunaks, Bravermans and Priti Patels of this world. Yorkshire was made an industrial desert by Thatcher and neo-liberal economics. It wasn’t migrants who closed the mines and the docks but those  who own the billionaire press and their friends.

A good letter from the 5 independent MPs but where were the useless Campaign Group of MPs like Abbot and McDonnell

When the rioters say they ‘want their country back’ the obvious question is when did you ever own it? Those who own the wealth of this country don’t have a moment’s hesitation in transferring their money abroad or moving their factories to India or South Korea. Unfortunately the most basic arguments for socialism have been abandoned by a Labour Party which wraps itself in the Union Jack to hide its political bankruptcy.

What we need is to create a mass anti-fascist and anti-racist movement in Britain which can challenge the racist ideas in the heads of young white kids who, lacking any future, target vulnerable minorities. Most of those taking part in the riots are not fascists or neo-Nazis but they are easily recruitable fodder for those who are.

Thousands of anti-fascists came out to prevent an NF march in Wood Green in London

The 1970’s saw major pitched battles between fascists and anti-fascists such as that at Wood Green in April 1977 (where Corbyn earned his spurs) and at Lewisham in August 1977 where the riot police made their first appearance on the mainland. The SWP led the physical force mobilisation on the afternoon of the National Front march. In the morning Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark led a march of liberals and other worthies anxious to avoid any confrontation.

The Metropolitan Police did their best to baton their way through for the National Front as a rain of bricks and missiles landed on them from the local Black youth. After completing just one-third of the route the police gave up. That is the spirit we have to rekindle. Physical force opposition to fascist groups is based on the idea that if you allow fascists and their supporters to control the streets you will lose the battle.

Brighton Anti-Fascist Mobilisation 1981 Against NF March - The Level

In 1976 Brighton & Hove  Anti-Fascist Committee was created, based on the labour movement and a year later the Anti-Nazi League was created. It became, along with Rock Against Racism (which came into being after Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell) a mass movement. The only mass movement that the SWP has ever initiated.  

When Brighton ANL was created we had mass meetings every month in the old Resource Centre in North Road (where Brighthelm is now) of 400-500. In April 1978 the ANL and RAR organised a massive carnival in London of over 100,000 people which gathered in Trafalgar Square to march the 6 miles to Victoria Park in Brixton. Bands like the Clash and Tom Robinson played. There were a number of other carnivals. The political cultural aspect of the struggle rather than paper selling knocked the stuffing out of the white and old, stale and male National Front. NF stood for No Fun.

Brighton Anti-Fascist Mobilisation Against the NF early 80s

 After the General Election of 1979 when Thatcher came to power and the NF got a derisory 0.6% of the vote the NF took to thuggery and street violence. As Secretary of Brighton ANL at the time I helped organise the anti-fascist response which drove them from the streets of Brighton although not before there had been 3 fascist demonstrations. I record these events in my book in 2012 The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

Today’s Stand Up To Racism is a pale shadow of the ANL at its height. It is not only an SWP recruiting vehicle it has effectively become the subcontractor for the trade union bureaucracy allowing them to hive off anti-racism to SUTR whilst actually doing nothing to combat racism amongst their own members.

National Front and British Movement members give the Hitler salute at the 1981 demonstration in Brighton at which I was arrested (& acquitted)!

We urgently need to recreate a mass anti-fascist and anti-racist movement that involves both the labour movement and Black and Asian communities. At the moment Asian communities themselves are heavily split on communal lines, not only between Hindutva supporters and Muslims but between Sunni and Shi'ite.  It is worth reading an article on The Muslim Vote by Craig Murray about the Muslim vote in Blackburn where he was a Workers Party candidate.

George Galloway on the Boat People and the Royal Navy

It also means that there is a responsibility on those like George Galloway not to echo and amplify the message of the racists. If refugees stay in hotels it is because they are not allowed to work not because they wish to do so.

The far-right have established themselves all over Europe in countries where social democracy once reigned, such as Sweden and the Netherlands. We have a duty to ensure that this does not happen here and that means there is no room for left sectarianism and using anti-racism as a party building exercise. Nor is there room for the kind of communalism that Craig Murray experienced. Black is a political not a physical colour. The fact that the murderer of the girls in Southport was a Christian fundamentalist did not affect in the slightest the belief that ‘the Muslims’ were responsible.

After the fascists had attacked a lone Black man in Manchester Greater Manchester Police set upon him, leaving the fascist thugs alone

What we are also witnessing is a coming together of the Zionists and the far-right. For the fascists the best opponents of Muslims are Zionists and the Israeli state. Tommy Robinson is an open admirer of the Israeli state and its wars. Fascist symbols and the Israeli flag go together very well. Zionism has no problem with holocaust deniers. It's Palestinian supporters who are their enemies. As Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherland’s Freedom Party, which became the largest party at the 2023 elections said ‘If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.’

SUTR has consistently refused to take up the issue of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. That was why Brighton & Hove PSC disaffiliated from them locally. In Scotland they have marched for 5 years with Glasgow Friends of Israel. SUTR seems unable to understand that Israeli Apartheid is racist and worse even than its South Africa counterpart was 30 years ago.

The SWP is still cowed by ‘anti-Semitism’. Like dinosaurs, they are incapable of understanding that the patterns of racism change. Jews were once the victims of racism. Today they are mostly the supporters of racism in the form of the Israeli state.

Of course not all Jews are Zionists. Those who are anti-Zionists are not deterred by the mention of Palestine. So it is Zionist Jews that SUTR are directly appeasing. They don't understand that Zionists have no interest in fighting fascism. When the Board of Deputies organised a march against ‘anti-Semitism’ recently Tommy Robinson went along to join it.

Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israeli Apartheid must be central to any anti-racist and anti-fascist movement today. There is no room for the participation of Zionists and supporters of Jewish Supremacy.

Joe Solo responds to HOPE not hate controversy – Not The Andrew Marr Show

That is why anti-fascists should have absolutely nothing to do with the Zionist HatenotHope group run by Nick Lowles. It is an anti-left Zionist organisation and its former Deputy Director and Company Secretary, ex-Labour MP Ruth Smeeth (now Baroness Anderson) led the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign.

In particular she targeted for expulsion Marc Wadsworth, the veteran Black anti-racist activist after making false allegations of anti-Semitism. She was also a member of the Jewish Labour Movement .


HnH led the attacks on Chris Williamson and even withdrew a ‘Hero Award’ from Jo Solo, a socialist musician, when they learnt that he was also a supporter of Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP.

Such was the backlash to what they had done, that they later rescinded their decision and decided after all to give him the £5,000 which he had all along intended to give to other organisations anyway. A crowdfunder for Jo had raised double that so Jo was in a good position to say ‘no thank you’.  Egg on HnH’s faces all round.

Lady Smeeth was named in a Wikileaks US Embassy Cable as a ‘strictly protect asset’.  In other words she was an intelligence asset. Lowles came from Gerry Gable’s Searchlight Magazine which was well known for trading information on fascists in exchange for handing over information on left activists and anarchists.

HnH is clearly an MI5/Mossad Intelligence Cutout and should be avoided like the plague.

Tony Greenstein

See The BBC condemns the riots and sanitises the far right in the same breath

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