Even the Tory Press are turning against the Downing Street Clown and his Criminally Negligent Government

Let’s hope that the Idiots of the North who voted for Boris Johnson are happy that they have now gained control of their lives whilst all around lose theirs

It is difficult to understand how anyone, let alone working class people, could seriously believe that the NHS would be safe in the hands of an Old Etonian and Bullingdon boy. The collapse of the Red Wall in the last election is a testimony to the depoliticisation of much of the working class.

As 569 more people lose their lives in Britain to Coronavirus, the Idiots of the North should be pleased that we have now become sufficiently independent to reject taking part in a collective European bid for ventilators. The official excuse  was that the government ‘lost’ an email but anyone buying that really should write a letter to Santa Claus.

Today we are paying the price for 10 years of austerity. Just 2,000 NHS staff, out of half a million, have been tested for COVID-19.  The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, promises that 100,000 will be tested per day by the end of the month. By then there may be another 15,000-20,000 dead.  Even if this is achieved, which is by no means certain given the history of broken promises, it will mean that it would take one and a half years to test everybody.

The key statistic is the number of intensive or critical care beds.  Britain has just 6.6 per 100,000 people compared to 29.2 for Germany and 34.7 for the United States.

The situation for hospital beds is even worse. The number of beds per 1000 people today is 2.54 in the UK, 35^th out of 41 countries.  Since 2013 the number has steadily declined from 2.76 to 2.54.  Compare this to Germany with 8 beds per 1000.

Or to put it in perspective the number of hospital beds in the UK has declined since 2000. In 2000, there were over 241,000 beds in the UK, by 2017 this figure was approximately 167,600. This means over this sixteen-year period there were over 70 thousand fewer hospital beds in the UK. The decline did not start in 2010 but in 2000 under New Labour. Indeed the steepest decline was under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for those who believe austerity began with the Tory/Liberal coalition. 

But even the worm turns eventually. Yesterday’s Times ‘Cornavirus testing plans in chaos’ and even more surprisingly The Telegraph, which is virtually the Tory party’s in-house magazine, ran a front page ‘Health officials ignored offers of coronavirus testing help as anger mounts at Government's failure to ramp up capacity’ which disclosed that 

Some of the Idiots of the North at Grimsby Fish Market Who Believed that Johnson was 'one of us'

‘officials have repeatedly ignored offers of help from many of the country’s leading scientific institutions. Meanwhile, senior health sources warned that the moment for this country to launch a successful mass community testing programme may already have been lost.’

Britain’s 3,000 deaths is testimony to how the NHS has been run down for the past 20 years, under New Labour and the Tories/Lib Dems. All those people, and the thousands of deaths to come will have been in vain if, at the end of the crisis, we go back to more austerity and more cuts.

And yet we are committed to spending 2% of Gross Domestic Product on the armed forces, defending us against a non-existent threat.

All the signs are that there is a determined effort to keep politics out of the Coronavirus crisis, as if COVID-19 was an act of god and as if the utter shambles of the government’s response is also just a natural disaster.

Johnson’s bonhomie and clownish behaviour are no longer funny when people cannot even see off their loved ones, when funerals can only be attended by a maximum of 10 people with no wake afterwards. The Tories lied when they told us that all they were making was 'efficiency' savings. What they were doing was cutting into the bone whilst at the same time spending hundreds of millions of pounds on 'competition managers' and other useless bureaucrats whose sole task was creating a false 'internal market' in the NHS so that Johnson's pals could make a killing out of lower wages and poor standards.

The state of the NHS is a tribute to a political ideology that prefers tax cuts for the rich to more hospital beds and ventilators. 

Who would have believed that doctors now have to choose who will live and who will die?  Who will benefit most from a ventilator and who is least likely to benefit?

Any working class person who voted for the Tories last December, because the Mail and the Express told them that Corbyn was their enemy and the Old Etonian was their friend can have no complaints if they succumb as a result of the crisis in the NHS.  

But Labour too bears a great deal of the blame for not dealing decisively with those who portrayed it as ‘anti-Semitic’ and hostile to Jews.  The failure of Corbyn, McDonnell and their acolytes to rebut these smears is seen in the pathetically weak candidature of Rebecca Long Bailey.

Boris Johnson’s trademark has been that of a buffoonish character, which has helped to disguise his far-Right and racist views. Anyone who is poor who believes that Johnson is ‘on our side’ really does need a lobotomy.

Johnson is a believer in eugenics, the ‘science’ that social attributes like intelligence, wealth, personal success are inherited and part of one’s genetic make-up. It was no accident that he hired Andrew Sabisky, an open believer in eugenics and the racial sciences, as an adviser. This and the previous Tory government has had a habit of appointing racists

Toby Young and his admirer

There was Toby Young who wrote an article for the Spectator which talked of ‘progressive eugenics’, in addition to plain homophobia and misogyny.  He said of Michael Gove’s desire to bring back O levels that if he is serious about this then

‘the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.”

This didn’t prevent Johnson criticising the “ridiculous outcry” at calls for his dismissal, saying Young would “bring independence, rigour and caustic wit” to the OfS. We also had the late and unlamented fascist Roger Scruton, former editor of the Monday Club's Salisbury Review, who the government was forced to sack, after a series of racist outbursts.

Johnson’s book 72 Virgins was a tribute to the racism that percolates in Tory and Brexit circles. It made reference to 'Islamic headcases' and 'Islamic nutcases'. Arabs were noted to have 'hook noses' (an old anti-Semitic caricature) and 'slanty eyes'; a mixed-race Briton is called 'coffee-coloured'; and use of the term 'pikeys' and 'half-caste'."^[6] 

Johnson described Barlow, believed to be himself, having a jaunty vaudeville act beneath which there are no real core ideals, values or beliefs." Which is probably a fair description of himself.

The book also depicted Jews as "controlling the media" and being able to "fiddle" elections. Strangely enough the Board of Deputies wasn’t interested in its anti-Semitism but that might be because the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was never about anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism.

Eugenics used to be all the fashion and the Nazis took it one step further by exterminating the disabled in the belief that the ‘race’ would grow more healthy.

This Saturday will, unless there is an upset, demonstrate that the Labour Party has moved to the Right and Keir Starmer, who has all the charisma of a dead pony, will assume the leadership.  No one should assume that as he purges the left, that Labour will assume power at the next election. The decline of social democracy throughout Europe is a phenomenon that isn’t confined to Britain.

Meanwhile for the Idiots of the North who still believe in Brexit, despite the cost of not co-operating with Europe over the current crisis, they have the prospect of coming under Trump’s thumb. After all, having gained control now of our affairs we could even emulate the US health care system where not only do 20 million people  have no insurance but the majority of American people are underinsured, which means that even if the insurer pays some health bills, you are expected to pay the rest.  

It is this, more than anything, which is responsible for the fact that more people go bankrupt because of an inability to pay medical bills than anything else.

The Guardian reported that one out of every six Americans has an unpaid medical bill on their credit report, amounting to $81bn in debt nationwide, while about one in 12 Americans went without any medical insurance throughout 2018. Even as many Americans struggle to afford health insurance coverage in the first place, those that have it are not insulated from facing massive debt due to medical bills

And we should be under no doubt that if you are a free marketeer then the NHS is anathema, based as it is on the good old socialist principle of ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.’

Let no one be in any doubt that if Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers, such as Rees Mogg, could get their way then they would move to an insurance model.  Instead they have decided to privatise the NHS by stealth.  New Labour and Starmer, because the two are interchangeable, support private involvement in the NHS.

Meanwhile, under this shambolic government thousands are going to die for lack of NHS staff, lack of equipment and lack of testing.

You have been warned and it is up to us to ensure that after this crisis we say NEVER AGAIN to those who say there isn't enough money for a decent NHS.

Tony Greenstein

Mad Cows and Englishmen –The Telegraph goes Barking Mad over Beef and Communism

As Douglas Murray chokes on his racist bile, is the Torygraph's headline the most stupid ever? 

I rubbed my eyes when I saw the headline ‘University which banned beef now hosts 'Communist' summer school’. What could possibly be the connection between the decision to take beef off the menu at Goldsmiths University, as part of their contribution to fighting global warming and a debate between Professor Moshe Machover, the founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation and myself?

What for that matter is the connection between British Beef and hosting the annual Communist University? I guess in the mind of the Daily Telegraph it’s only the loony left and rabid feminists who would ban the staple food of every red blooded Englishman. Hosting a Communist University must be proof that our way of life is under attack even though it is a commercial booking and nothing to do with the university itself. Small details such as these are irrelevant to the rabid right.

Phoebe Southworth was a hackette in search of a story and she wasn’t going to let facts stand in the way. Yes it’s true I’ve described abusive Zionists who call you a ‘self hater’ as Zionist scum. That is precisely what they are. It is also an incontrovertible historical fact that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis. Get over it. In the 1950’s Israel staged a four-year long trial of the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner over allegations by survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust that he had collaborated with Eichmann and helped send them and their families to their deaths. When Kasztner was found to have collaborated with the Nazi, literally ‘sold his soul to Satan’ by Judge Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court the government of Israel fell. 

However I wasn’t expelled for these ‘crimes’ but for being an anti-Zionist and ‘abusing’ people like Louise Ellman, a noxious supporter of the Israeli Military’s abuse of Palestinian children.

Letter to the Telegraph in response to their idiotic article

However The Telegraph’s idiotic reporter isn’t one to let up on a good story. Apparently ‘The latest move has prompted accusations that Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students and that it is "officially becoming a Communist university".

So let us digest this.  Two Jewish people debating the finer points of whether Israeli Jews constitute a nation means that ‘Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students’.  Is she really saying that hearing two Jewish anti-Zionists debate Zionism will threaten the well being of the spoilt Jewish darlings and JAPs (Jewish American Princesses) who are students at Goldsmith? 

Needless to say, when a hack needs a quote then who better to turn to than the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.  They believe that the presence of Professor Moshe Machover and myself on campus is "deeply troubling". The University is “welcoming onto campus a number of individuals who have a history of baiting Jews or outright antisemitism”.

The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so shop soiled of late that it has lost its effect.  Now we are ‘Jew baiting’ if we disagree with Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism. Indeed we have a ‘history’ of doing this.  I guess I also have a history of opposing fascists such as Tommy Robinson and the EDL, who Zionists like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism work with. 

The head of the college even looks like one of those hated feminist leftist do gooders

And if this was not bad enough, then Douglas Murray, the frothing at the mouth Islamaphobe  who is Associate Director of the cold-war Henry Jackson Society penned in the following day’s Telegraph, Our anti-capitalist, anti-Western universities no longer care about excellence

This mild mannered, man is the same person who, in 2009, described Robert Spencer, the leader of "Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)", as a "very brilliant scholar and writer". He is so brilliant that along with Pamela Geller he got himself banned from entering Britain. He is responsible for Jihad Watch which is allied to David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre and Frontpagemag.com an overtly racist and Islamaphobic web site.

In a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference Murray demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.”:

“All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”

So if you sympathise with attacks on American troops in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or wherever you should be ‘forcibly deported’.  Bang goes freedom of speech.

Murray wrote in The Spectator that ‘There are certain things in Britain about which it is impossible to speak frankly. The birth rate of the Muslim population is a prime subject” The birth rate of Black and Asian people has always been an obsession with racists and neo-Nazis.

Yet this racist buffoon is given space in The Torygraph to proclaim that banning beef and hosting a Communist University means an end to civilisation as we know it.

Murray told the Telegraph’s readers that ‘tragedy always follows close on comedy’s heels and this tragedy ‘can also be glimpsed on the Goldsmiths campus.’   Why pray tell? Because Goldsmiths ‘is hosting a summer school involving a series of lectures organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain.’

Shocked as you may be dear reader there is more.

‘The lecturers include Tony Greenstein, the founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who last year achieved the almost unachievable when he was expelled from Labour for using terms like “Zionist scum” and accusing “Zionists” of “collaborating with the Nazis”. Also lecturing at the Communist summer camp is an activist called Graham Bash who will be addressing students on the subject of “How can we transform the Labour Party into a vehicle of socialism?” A lecture whose aims might be said to already have been achieved.

I know it’s not much consolation to someone who even the Tory front bench broke off relations with in 2011 because he was seen as a racist and extremist, but being expelled from the Labour Party these days, if you are Jewish and a socialist, is quite easy!

Still I don’t want to spoil a good story since The Telegraph’s readers enjoy having something to shock them over their tea and marmalade first thing in the morning. Murray engages in an attack not merely on Goldsmiths but on what he calls an ‘only slightly watered-down version of the full-throated communism’ at Cambridge University no less. He tells us of ‘a great tide has swept across the university system in America as in Britain’.  By now babbling like a hyena on heat Murray splutters that ‘It is a culture war waged with tools such as “de-platforming”, claims for “safe spaces” and more. Most of all it exists in the Academy’s fetishisation of “diversity”.’

Now where have I heard of culture wars before?  Oh yes, it is a standard  meme of the fascist right

As Noah Berlatsky wrote in Jewish Currents after a neo-Nazi opened fire at Poway synagogue earlier this year, ‘“Cultural Marxism” is a trope that is rapidly spreading from the far right to the conservative mainstream.’ It was first popularised by Andrei Brevik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi (and Zionist) who murdered 77 young people.  This is what Douglas Murray is arguing for and what The Telegraph is quite happy to print in the name of fighting socialism and defending Zionism.

Meanwhile if you are interested in a debate between Moshe Machover and myself on whether or not Israel’s Jews constitute a nation, then take yourself off to Goldsmith’s College this Friday for a no doubt riveting debate! Beef I’m afraid will not be on the menu!

 The details are here! And here is the timetable.  Our debate is timed for 4.45 p.m. this Friday at Goldsmith's University St James London SE14 6AD

Tony Greenstein

EXCLUSIVE Iain McNicol’s Dirty Tricks Brigade Infiltrates Labour Against the Witchhunt Meeting

Brighton Councillor Caroline Penn Makes Bogus Accusations of Harassment in bid to Help McNicol’s Court Case

Right-wing Brighton Caroline Penn's bogus complaints of harassment, which the Police have refused to act upon, is now being used to try and prevent the disclosure of documents in my application under the Data Protection Act.  In Penn's world an accusation is tantamount to guilt - and it is guilty until proven innocent

 On March 18^th 2016 I was suspended from the Labour Party. I was given no details of what I was accused of and the first time I learnt about the charges was when those Labour supporting papers, The Telegraph and The Times printed spurious articles stating that I had been caught up in what had become Labour’s false anti-Semitism campaign, the latest victim of which is Israeli Professor Moshe Machover.  Both papers later retracted their allegations.

On May 30^th 2016 I was interviewed by Harry Gregson, Labour’s Regional Organiser as part of the ‘investigation’. The meeting was recorded and a transcript can be viewed here.

McNicol claims to have 'lost' this document - clearly it's not just the identity of the sender or  recipient that has been 

Soon after I submitted a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 1998 for all the documentation they had one me.  On July 15^th, 20 days late, the Labour Party responded with a bundle of over 350 pages.  The identities of most correspondents were blacked out and some pages were entirely blacked out.

In March of this year I filed an application with Brighton County Court to force Iain McNicol and the Labour Party to unredact the documents under s.7(9) of the DPA.  A date was set for the hearing on August 8^th.  Unbeknown to me, the fools at Labour Party headquarters had forgotten that they had responded to my original SAR on July 15^th and they decided to send me a second bundle on November 10^th.  Not only that but they sent it to an address I hadn’t lived at for 14 years, so I didn’t receive it!

Caroline Penn has sent the  solicitor for Iain McNicol an email as part of an attempt to help keep secret the dealings of the Compliance Unit - I have redacted Penn's phone number

On the day before the hearing it dawned on me that we were talking about two different sets of documents.  McNicol’s legal team were unaware of the bundle of documents sent in July.  In some ways this has been a very useful exercise because it has been interesting to compare the two sets of documents.  On the retirement of Mike Creighton, who had been with the Labour Party for 23 years, a new set of bureaucrats had taken over who clearly had less scruples than Mike. 

They didn’t send me so many redacted documents because they decided not to send them at all.  Anyone applying for a SAR is to some extent reliant on the honesty of the Data Controller.  If they are dishonest and simply don’t reveal the existence of the documents there is little you can do unless you can persuade a court that a search warrant should be issued ex parte.  The Information Commissioner has done this on occasion but it is extremely rare.

This Twitter exchange is apparently proof of abuse - Poison Penn asks if I have a problem with Jewish people - a strange question from a non-Jewish Zionist and my response is no, just with racists like her

The result was that the hearing had to be postponed until next Monday 30^th October.  [see Don’t Ever Underestimate the Stupidity of McNicol’s Witch-hunters]  They had put in for £7,000 costs but I persuaded the Judge that they should be disallowed any costs for the last hearing. 

Given their duplicity it is clear that McNicol’s minions are feeling the heat.  There is clearly information in the documents that they will move heaven and earth to ensure isn’t revealed.  When all else fails it seems it’s time to bring in McNicol’s dirty tricks brigade.

Last Saturday the inaugural meeting of Labour Against the Witch-hunt held its first meeting.  An Executive of 4, including myself were elected.  Amongst our first tasks was the setting up of a Facebook group. [see Labour Against the Witchhunt Forms in Response to Expulsion of Moshe Machover – Join Us]

Imagine my surprise when I received an email from McNicol’s solicitor, Jai Sharda today.  Perhaps he wanted to agree to a settlement?  Unfortunately not.  He told me that he had received an email yesterday from a person whose identity had been redacted ‘for obvious reasons’ warning me that ‘your actions of intimidation and harassment are continuing to cause considerable distress. You are requested, once again, to immediately refrain from any engaging in further such conduct.’

Pretty serious allegations, if true.  Indeed I wondered why this person hadn’t contacted the Police to have me arrested.  The problem was, of course that she had contacted the Police and they had sent her away with a flea in hear ear.  I am referring to Brighton Councillor Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn.  This blushing violet had made two complaints to the local constabulary. 

Caroline Penn, like Jeremy Newmark and all the Labour Party’s other witch hunters operate under the belief that if an accusation is made against the Left or anti-Zionists it must be believed.An accusation is itself proof of guilt.  The Jewish Labour Movement  even proposed a Rule Change to the last Labour Party conference to that effect.  The ‘victim’ is always right even when they aren’t a victim.

Here we seen 'Poison' Penn attacking people like Mel Melvin and Greg Hadfield who have been expelled or suspended.  She taunts Greg because he has been suspended twice -  'once in 2014 for intimidating behaviour'  yes but the allegation was dropped.  According to Penn, you are guilty of whatever she accuses you of until proven innocent.  The Compliance Unit however never clears someone they just drop the charges.  

Unfortunately for the JLM Shami Chakrabarti had to remind Jeremy Newmark that even bourgeois justice demands something in the way of evidence before you convict someone.  This isn’t Israel.  Labour can't implement the equivalent of Israel's Administrative Detention whereby someone can be detained for years on end without a trial on the basis of a secret policeman’s say so.

The Compliance Unit leaked the details of my suspension whilst refusing to tell me anything - below are the retractions of both papers

Of course it’s quite understandable why Penn and people like Brighton Council leader Warren Morgan are confused. When Brighton Labour Party was suspended on July 2^nd 2016 after the Left had won a majority of the officer posts, Warren Morgan, backed up by Penn made false allegations of spitting.  Immediately McNicol and his lackeys suspended the party, cancelled the elections and handed power back to the defeated candidates!

So it is no surprise that  Caroline Penn has sent an email alleging she is suffering ‘enormous distress’ that she has received ‘further abuse’ and is now concerned about her ‘personal safety and of others that have also complained about Mr Greenstein.’ She also finds it strange that I have not already been expelled.  The amazing thing is that this email says absolutely nothing about what this abuse constitutes.  It is totally vacuous, like its writer.

What is however interesting is that the email is accompanied by the minutes of Labour Against the Witch-hunt of last Saturday.  These minutes were only distributed to members of the Labour Against the Witch hunt Facebook group.  It is therefore clear that someone on the Labour Right, with whom Penn is in contact with, has taken it upon themselves to infiltrate LAW under false pretences.  There is nothing in the minutes that is at all damning and nor is there anything in a screenprint containing dialogue between members of the group.

In other words by her own admission Caroline Penn is party to the infiltration of a group set up to fight expulsions and suspension in the Party by someone who has been operating under false pretences.  And yet she has the audacity to complain of ‘abuse’ and ‘intimidation’.  If  you go to the Police Information Notice that I was issued with you can find out what her complaints are:

Poison Penn's Complains

1.      I have used social media to make contact with Ms Penn – well yes but she has also contacted me on social media.  That’s the nature of Twitter and isn’t in itself an offence.

2.      I have encouraged other people to send abusive messages to her.  What she means is I have tweeted responses to her Zionist nonsense and encouraged others to do so.  On no occasion have I asked anyone to be abusive to her.

3.      I have also ‘used anti-Semitic abuse towards her.’  This is a difficult one.  She is not Jewish unlike me.  How can I be anti-Semitic towards someone who is not Jewish?  There is something called associative discrimination which is where you believe someone to be Jewish when they are not.  For example in Israel there have been a number of times when Jews who look like Arabs have been attacked by those who believed them to be Arabs.  That is an example of anti-Arab racism.

Police Information Notice Detailing the Allegations Against Me but taking no view of the merits of the allegations

      However I have encouraged no one to consider Poison Penn Jewish!  She is without doubt a racist non-Jew a Zionist and an anti-Semite!

4.      Its true I have used the term Zio which is short for Zionist.  Many Zionists are non-Jewish, like Penn and many Jews are not Zionists like me. 

5.      It is true I have called her a racist since she is a member of the JLM.

6.      It is not true I have said she is a Nazi or a member of the BNP.  

      

      I don’t for one moment believe that the email in question was the work of Caroline Penn herself.  To put it bluntly she is not the brightest tool in the box.  Someone in Labour Party HQ realising how weak their case is, has decided to try and use Penn’s already existing false complaints against me to the Police despite the Police themselves turning them down.

[see Racist Labour Councillor, Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn, Complains of ‘Harassment’ on @Cllorcaroline @thepennydrops and Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn @Cllorcaroline @thepennydrops Complains Again

These two emails are from the Jewish Labour Movement, almost certainly Israeli state agent Jeremy Newmark, whining 'is it acceptable to publish a full transcript of a post-suspension interview in this manner?'  Newmark doesn't say what manner would be acceptable.

Open Letter to Joan Ryan MP – Chair of Labour Friends of Israel

Letter to Joan Ryan MP

 To:    Joan Ryan MP

Chair, Labour Friends of Israel

          House of Commons

          London SW1A 0AA

Thursday, 25 August 2016

To:  joan.ryan.mp@parliament.uk

Dear Ms Ryan,

As the only Jewish member of the Labour Party to have been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’, I note with interest the open letter which you recently wrote to Richard Burgon MP regarding his comments that Labour MPs should quit Labour Friends of Israel and that Zionism is the enemy of peace. 

You suggested that the comments were so far outside the boundaries of what passes for acceptable political debate in the salons and interview rooms of Westminster, that they must have been misreported.  I think we can assume that this is merely a literary device on your part.  If you had any doubts that the above comments were genuine, you would have written a private not public letter.   

I shall not indulge in fake politeness on a subject which involves the racial subjugation and immiseration of millions of human beings.  When one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza are forced to live through a decade long siege, when people die because basic medicines cannot be imported and when they are forced to drink polluted water, 95% of Gaza’s water is polluted as a result of Israel’s water theft and bombing of water purification plants, then one should not engage in semantics.  Keeping Palestinians thirsty is no doubt part of Israel’s war on ‘terrorism’.

You profess outrage that anyone could suggest not wanting to associate with LFI.  You must be aware that in 1982 large numbers of MPs, Tony Benn and Eric Heffer among them, resigned from LFI because of its support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when some 20,000 civilians were killed and 100,000 injured. 

During the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli soldiers besieged Beirut in alliance with their fascist friends the Phalange (named in honour of Franco’s Falange).  Israel’s army lit up the night sky with flares and sent Phalangist death squads, armed with knives, to perpetrate an ISIS style slaughter of the inhabitants of the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.  Some 2,000 women, children and old people were slaughtered, women had their breasts cut off and young boys were castrated. 

Despite this atrocity, Israel’s then Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon went on to become Israel’s Prime Minister between 2001 and 2006.  Your friends in the Israeli Labour Party formed a coalition with Sharon, the ILP ‘s current leader, Yitzhak Herzog, serving as Minister of Housing and Construction.

You profess to be surprised that Richard described Zionism as an ‘enemy of peace’.  You even advise him to take note of Shami Chakrabarti’s advice to use the term ‘“Zionist” advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically.’  I am happy to follow her advice.  I can assure you I would never use Zionism ‘euphemistically’ given it is one of the most pernicious racial movements in colonial history.    

The Zionist movement was formally established in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, at the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.  As you probably do not know, it was originally scheduled to be held in Munich, Germany but the local Jewish community objected because Zionism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Zionism reflected the anti-Semitic belief that Jews did not belong in the countries of their birth.

Zionism’s aim was the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine in alliance with a colonial power.  In 1917 it formed just such an alliance with British imperialism, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration.  Like many colonial movements it campaigned on the slogan of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’  The native Palestinians were invisible in the eyes of the Zionists.

You claim that Zionism is ‘the broad ideological movement for Jewish national self-determination in Israel.’  Perhaps you would enlighten me as to when Zionism was first described as a ‘national liberation movement’?  It appears you are attempting to bask in the reflected glory of liberation movements such as the African National Congress.  Incidentally, the notion that Jews form a separate nation is, in itself, deeply anti-Semitic and basis of the world Jewish conspiracy theory.

Zionism was a movement of settler colonialism.  That was why Israel was the best friend of Apartheid South Africa, breaking the arms embargo and supplying it with weaponry including nuclear weapons.  Perhaps you were not told about the visit of John Vorster, South African Prime Minister to Israel in April 1976?  Vorster, who was interned during the war for his support of the Nazis and membership of the Broederband, nonetheless paid homage to the Holocaust dead at Yad Vashem!

Israel is the state that helped train the death squads of Central America, supplied the Argentinian Junta with weaponry (despite murdering up to 3,000 Argentinian Jews) and armed and trained the Guatemalan army which in the 1980’s murdered up to 200,000 Indians.  Your suggestion that Zionism shares anything in common with the ANC is obscene.

The aforementioned Theodor Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, asking for his support for Zionism.  Herzl wrote ‘How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you?  How indeed?  Because it is something colonial.’  This can be found in Herzl’s Diaries, Vol. 4, page 1194.  The founders of Zionism always saw it as a colonising movement.

You are right.  Zionism was indeed a consequence of European anti-Semitism, in the 19^th (not 20^th) century.  It was unique amongst Jewish movements since it accepted the basic premise of the anti-Semites that Jews were aliens in the lands in which they lived and were born.

You said that it is a great pity that ‘the Labour Party’s relationship with the British Jewish community has been so damaged by the events of the past year.’  I agree.  The deliberate making of false claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ by MPs such as Ruth Smeeth and papers such as the Daily Mail, which in the 30’s opposed the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, has indeed been damaging.  I can only hope that you use your influence to bring these false accusations of anti-Semitism to an end.

You profess to support a two-state solution.  Why then do you support the military dictatorship in the West Bank and the unremitting attacks on Gaza?  Your call for a 2 State solution serves only as a cover for Apartheid.  It enables Jewish settlement to take place whilst providing a pretext for the denial of any political or civil rights to the indigenous Palestinians.

Perhaps you could name even one Israeli government Minister who believes in a 2 state solution?  Deputy Foreign Minister Tsipi Hotoveli is typical when she said that ‘This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognize Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”

Even the ILP does not support a 2 state solution.  It supports segregation and a Bantustan.   Herzog explained that ‘I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel.’  If you don’t understand why this is racist imagine someone saying they didn’t want a Jewish Prime Minister in Britain. [Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?]

In an ILP election video Herzog was described as ‘someone who “understands the Arab mentality” and “has seen Arabs in all kinds of situations,” including “in the crosshairs.”  Why did we forget about Herzog's anti-Arab campaign? +972 Magazine 23.3.15.  Again imagine someone describing the ‘Jewish mentality’.  Racist?  Historically the Israeli Labour Party was more racist than Likud.  It was the party of the Nakba, the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinian refugees.

You state that you support a negotiated settlement in Israel/Palestine.  Israel has spent billions of dollars on building its settlements and stealing its land and water.  It’s not going to negotiate them away.  As Martin Luther King famously wrote in Letter From a Birmingham Jail ‘Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.’

You say you support peace.  Perhaps you could tell me if you have ever opposed Israeli repression in the Occupied Territories?  You supported the 2014 war in Gaza which killed 550 children.  You have kept silent about the continued destruction of Palestinian homes and European Union funded structures, over 600 of which have been destroyed this year alone, in the West Bank.  Have you nothing to say about Jewish roads and separate entrances for Jews and Palestinians at checkpoints?  What I do know is that Louise Ellman, an LFI officer, supported the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children as young as 12 in a recent debate in the House of Commons.

Your complaints about Hamas’s Charter, which is a dead letter, would be more impressive if it wasn’t for the fact that Israel played a crucial part in the creation of Hamas as a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.  [see Israel’s Jerusalem Online News Agency for Wikileaks revelations or the Wall Street Journal How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas]

I would be more impressed by your concern about anti-Semitism if you displayed an equal concern about the most recent survey by Pew Research Centre which found that a plurality of Israeli Jews (48%) support the physical expulsion of Israeli Palestinians and 79% believe that Jews should be given preferential treatment. [Israel’s Religiously Divided Society]

You will be pleased to hear that I agree with you that ‘fostering links with, and supporting, progressive forces in Israel is an important task for an internationalist party’.  However the ILP is not such an organisation.  There are such organisations, like the soldiers group Breaking the Silence, which has revealed the truth about Israeli military atrocities but the ILP is hostile to it.

I hope you will now understand why increasing numbers of Jews oppose Zionism and why we join Archbishop Desmond Tutu in supporting a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.  Boycotting Apartheid is never anti-Semitic nor racist.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Why Zionism is a murderous, expansionist and racist settler colonial movement

Joan Ryan MP, formerly a junior Home Office Minister under Blair/Brown, is a pretty non-descript right-winger, with no obvious talent other than to claim vast sums of money as expenses.  She was one of those caught out changing her second homes designation as she attempted to get the tax payer to buy her another house whilst paying for repairs on her main accommodation.  As such she was an excellent choice as Chair of Labour Friends of Israel - no principles and no morals.

On 8^th August Richard Burgon MP, who is one of the best Labour MPs there is, a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, made the unremarkable statement that Zionism is an ‘enemy of peace’.  Yes, I hear you say, so what?  You might be forgiven for thinking that Burgon had informed people that the Earth is round or that 1+1=2. 

As befits a Zionist, Ryan nominated Liz Kendall last time around and Owen Smith this time - hostility to Corbyn goes with the grain

Any objective view of Israel, which has just bombarded the utterly defenceless people of Gaza with 50 rocket strikes in response to the launching of a firecracker, could not help but conclude that Richard Burgon was simply making a statement of the obvious.  Not so Joan Ryan.

Ryan and her Zionist friends decided to try and rewrite history - not this time about the Nakba (Catastrophe) of the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees in 1948 but Ryan's own Catastrophe!

Joan Ryan is the Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, a group whose sole mission in life is to defend Israel right or wrong and which boasts of its relationship to the racist rednecks of the Israeli Labour Party.  Zionism she whined was a ‘Jewish national liberation movement’.  Quite who she thinks it was liberating Jews from is impossible to determine.  Possibly the laws of logic and rationality. 

To say that Zionism is a national liberation movement is like saying that Apartheid in South Africa was a liberating force or that Nazism was a German liberation movement (of course Hitler believed it was liberating the German people from a mixture of the Jews, Freemasons, Versailles etc.).  It is the rationale of the oppressor, who finds justification for their activities in some supposed oppression.  They come to believe that the people they are oppressing are in fact their oppressors.  It is a characteristic of all settler states that the settlers develop a siege mentality in which they are the subjugated.  Israeli Jews are the same in this respect as the Afrikaaners were. 

Ryan tweets her support for Owen Smith

Zionism however never liberated Jewish people from anything.  On the contrary they collaborated from the very start with the Jews' anti-Semitic oppressors.  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, declared in his Diaries that he saw in Zionism a 'divine will to the good'.  Anti-Semitism was seen as a useful force for 'educating' Jews into leaving their homes and colonising Palestine.  This attitude never changed and in the 1930's they adopted the same attitude to the Nazis, but this time with fatal results.

According to his official biographer, Shabtai Teveth, after Hitler came to power David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared that it was imperative to ‘turn a disaster… into a productive force’ and that ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.’  [The Burning Ground, p. 850] 

Zionism was never a national liberation movement because it never liberated anyone from anything and because the Jews were and are not a nation.  It was a nationalist as opposed to a national movement in just the same way as the Nazis were a nationalist movement.

You see here how Labour Friends of Israel follows both the Likud agenda, in attacking a respectable NGO on the basis of allegations only by Israel.  Their Palestinian worker has been tortured into making a confession, held without a lawyer for 40 days - none of this bothers this LFI whose professions of 'peace' are worthy of Netanyahu
It is also no surprise that LFI join in the disgusting attack on Shami Chakrabarti, suggesting that her peerage was the price paid for a report that the Zionists initially welcomed

As I explain to Ryan in my letter, Zionists have only recently called themselves a national liberation movement.  Zionism likes to capture the zeitgeist of the moment.  Today colonialism is out of fashion.  Liberation movements have inspired people who have seen the people of the colonial countries rise up and replace their oppressors, even if in most cases they have replaced the faces of the colonial oppressor with one of their own nationality.  American and European domination has continued behind the façade of self-rule.

When Zionism first began no one would have described it as a form of national liberation.  They openly called themselves colonists and appealed to the European imperial powers on that basis.  Next year we will ‘celebrate’ the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration when the anti-Semitic Arthur James Balfour promised the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist movement over the heads of the indigenous population and, incidentally, against the opposition of the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu.  It wasn’t the Jews who wanted Zionism it was anti-Semitic Evangelical Christians.  The Balfour Declaration was an agreement between British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.  To describe such a movement is grotesque but then the LFI is indeed a grotesque and nasty little group.

During the original expenses scandal Joan Ryan was found with her paws in the kitty.  She was lucky not to be prosecuted as would a benefit claimant.   She is a fitting choice as Chair of LFI

Expenses Scandal

Joan Ryan herself is an unremarkable person.  She is not known as a parliamentarian or speaker.  She is of the far-Right Progress faction.  She was an MP until 2010 when she was defeated at the General Election.  Unfortunately she came back in 2015 Her entry in Wikipedia is extremely revealing.  According to the Evening Standard (26.10.07.) in 2005/6 she made the second highest expense claim of any MP.  In 2006/7 she did even better, achieving first place with a total of £173, 691.  It was no wonder that her electors rejected her in 2010.

In May 2009 Ryan claimed more than £4,500 under the Additional Costs Allowance for work on a house she had designated as her second home.[Telegraph 17.5.09.]   In February 2010 Ryan was asked to repay £5,121 mortgage interest which she had corruptly claimed.  [Evening Standard 4.2.10.]

Not surprisingly Ryan found her greed somewhat embarrassing and unhelpful when she was trying to get back into Parliament.  The Independent of 9th March 2012 reported that:

"[a]t least 10 attempts have been made from computers in Parliament to remove information about [Ryan's] expenses claims and a further 20 efforts to delete the information, some from her constituency of Enfield North, have also been recorded in Wikipedia's logs."

Ryan’s Wikipedia entry reports that to this present day ‘similar edits to hide Ryan's record continue to be made.' [Telegraph 26.5.15]   At least 10 attempts were made from computers inside the Houses of Parliament to remove information about Ryan’s expenses claims and a further 20 efforts to delete the information, some from her constituency of Enfield North, were also been recorded in Wikipedia’s logs. The efforts were successful and all mention of expenses claims were removed and instead replaced with a paragraph about edits to Wikipedia.

During the 2015 general election, The Daily Telegraph returned to this issue. In Ryan's case, the entire expenses section was deleted, including information on repairs and decorations on her home paid for out of her MP's expenses; the edits were made while Ryan was not an MP, and according to the Telegraph she denied involvement, though it’s difficult to think who, apart from her Zionist friends, would be interested in cleaning up her record.

Below is the letter that I wrote to Ryan.

Joan Ryan MP - racist who was caught by the expenses scandal - claimed the highest of any MP in 2006/7