Some of my best friends are Zionists – The Case of the Sunday Times Kevin Myers

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Zionists defend anti-Semitic journalist because he is a devoted supporter of Israel

It used to be the case that anti-Semites used to deny their anti-Semitism by protesting that ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ .  This attitude was best exemplified by Himmler.  In a speech to leaders of the SS in Posen, Poland in October 1943 he declared:

And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew.’ (some laughter) 

Himmler went on to describe the trials and tribulations of the SS:

‘Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.’

This speech was recorded and used in evidence during the Nuremburg Trials.  

Zionist UK Media Watch forgives Murdoch's pro-Zionist Sunday Times

Today anti-Semites deny their anti-Semitism by proclaiming their devotion to Israel and Zionism. The Jewish Chronicle's editor, Stephen Pollard, exemplifies this practice.  

When speaking about Michal Kaminski, a prominent anti-Semitic politician and a leading member of Poland's far-Right Law and Justice Party, (as well as being Chair of the European Conservative and Reform Group in the European Parliament), Pollard exclaimed that: "Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."

In other words if you support the Israeli state then you cannot be anti-Semitic.  This does of course have a certain logic to it, at least for Zionists.  If you believe that anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism, then it follows that supporters of Israel and Zionism cannot be anti-Semites.  It is, as Tony Lerman described, an 'Alice in Wonderland' conclusion.

However it does ignore the fact that most of the far-Right in Europe - from France's Le Pen to Austria's Herr Strache - not forgetting our own British National Party and the EDL, manage to combined anti-Semitism and Zionism without any problem at all.  The Trump administration in the person of Steve Bannon of Breitbart also manages to combined  Zionism and anti-Semitism without any problems.

Pollard's defence of Kaminski was even too much for some Zionists, such as The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland. [Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski]. Kaminski denied wearing the Chrobry sword, the symbol of the far-Right anti-Semitic National Radical Camp Falanga.  Kaminski issued a categorical denial: “No, I never wear it. I don’t even know which symbol you are referring to' before admitting that he had in fact worn it!  The Chrobry sword was banned from being worn in Poland in 1933 because of its association with attacks on Jews.  

Ms Bikont believes Mr Kaminski helped inspire anti-Semitism in Jedwabne

A BBC Newsnight Report Digging up the truth about Michal Kaminiski quotes Maria Mazurczyk, a member in 2001 of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, saying of Kaminski:

"I remember at the meeting he invited older people who remembered those times, those who had been driven out to Siberia, to say that they had not just been driven out because of the Russians, but above all because of their neighbours, the Jews."

Anna Bikont, a journalist with the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza and author of 'The Crime and the Silence', described the atmosphere in Jedwabne where "there was such a lot of hate" against Jews.''  Although Kaminski was not there she believed he had helped inspire the deeply anti-Semitic atmosphere:

"Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles".

People gathered at Jedwabne memorial in 2001

Kaminski helped form in March 2001 the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. Most people would suggest that a good name was the last thing that Jedwabne possessed. In Jedwabne, a village in Western Poland, on July 10 1941 the inhabitants herded up to 1600 Jews, men, women and children, into a barn which was then set alight.  Not all inhabitants committed this atrocious crime but many did. 

Kaminski, whom Pollard defended as a 'good friend of the Jews' proclaimed in an interview with Martin Bright of the Jewish Chronicle (9.10.09. that '“If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish Communists did in Eastern Poland.”  

Just this one quote alone demonstrates Kaminski's anti-Semitism.  Over 90% of Polish Jews died in the holocaust.  Thousands were massacred by their Polish neighbours, even after 1945, yet Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle has no problem defending an apologist for these pogromists.

The suggestion that the Jews collaborated with the Soviet troops is one of the standard justifications that Polish anti-Semites make for the pogroms and massacres of Jews.  After the Soviet troops had been driven out of Poland by the Nazis in June 1941, anti-Semites held that the Jews had collaborated with them and that they were responsible for the deportation of Polish non-Jews to Siberia. Kaminski not only led the opposition to the  national apology of Poland's President Kwasniewski but he also opposed the ceremony of remembrance in Jedwabne on July 10 2001, the 60th anniversary what happened in Jedwabne.
  
Kaminski's lies about Jewish involvement in deportations were a theme repeated by those who either denied or defended the massacre in Jedwabne (& similar massacres took place in surrounding villages like Radzilow).

But speaking of holocaust deniers, no one comes closer to this than the former Irish Sunday Times journalist Kevin Myers, who was sacked last weekend. As the Independent  and Jerusalem Post noted Myers had previously written that “There was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths.”

It was therefore no surprise that in his column for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, under the headline: “Sorry ladies, equal pay has to be earned,” Myers wrote: 

“I note that two of the best paid women presenters in the BBC – Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted – are Jewish. Good for them.

“Jews are not general noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity.”

You would think it obvious that Myers is a died-in-the-wool anti-Semite.  Surely our good friends the Zios are jumping up and down about this genuine, bona-fide, 24 carat anti-Semite?

The Zionist UKMedia Watch is hot on 'anti-Semitism' of the anti-Zionist variety

After all, there is no group which is as hot on ‘anti-Semitism’ as UK Media Watch, a division of the American McCarthyist group CAMERA.  When the Guardian published a letter of mine earlier this year praising the late Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman, they were outraged.  Their headline told it all:  ‘How the Guardian’s decision to publish extremist Tony Greenstein normalises antisemitism’.  They wrote that ‘Kaufman’s most insidious comments about Jews occured during a Commons debate on the war in Gaza in 2009, a speech alluded to by left-wing extremist Tony Greenstein in a letter published on March 3rd in the Guardian.’ 

Gerald Kaufman, Jewish MP and Father of the House of Commons was a wicked anti-Semite for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany

Even worse was Kaufman’s statement that the Israeli government uses non-Jewish guilt over the Holocaust  in order to justify their murder of Palestinians.  One would have thought this was a self-evident truth. Israel shamelessly exploits the Holocaust for political purposes. Indeed if it were not for the Holocaust then Israel would have been called to task for its racism years ago.

You would therefore assume that UKM would be down on Kevin Myers and the paper that printed his anti-Semitic comments like a ton of bricks.  Well I’m afraid you are wrong.  UKMedia Watch tweeted that it found the Times to be “generally good on issues of antisemitism.’  Naturally because Murdoch’s Times is also virulently pro-Zionist.

Zionism washes anti-Semitism whiter than white

The Zionist leaders of the Irish Jewish community were even worse.  The Jewish Chronicle reported that ‘Maurice Cohen, chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, insisted Mr Myers was not antisemitic, and had “inadvertently stumbled into an antisemitic trope”.’  Zionists love ‘tropes’ possibly because it rhymes with ‘dopes’ which is as good a description of them as any.

I'm not sure how you 'stumble' into anti-Semitism or any form of racism.  You either are or you are not anti-Semitic.  Perhaps its permanently dark in the South of Ireland, such that columnists are forever stumbling into one error or another.  

Of course there is another explanation.  Besides being a rank anti-Semite, Kevin Myers is also a fervent Zionist.  His belief that Jews are grasping, money grubbing, never knowingly under-paid sits well with his support for Israel.  According to Cohen though, it is all down to Myers having ‘ a particular curmudgeonly, cranky, idiosyncratic style.’

Of course Myers is not the only non-Jewish Zionist who has stumbled into ‘anti-Semitic tropes’.  There is Arthur J Balfour, a passionate Zionist who in 1905 introduced, as Prime Minister, the Aliens Act whose aim was to keep Jews fleeing the Czarist pogroms out of Britain.  In the Introduction to the History of Zionism by Nahum Sokolow, who later became President of the Zionist Organisation, Balfour made his anti-Semitism clear when speaking about Zionism:

"For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason it should receive our support."

Balfour told Chaim Weizmann that he shared the “anti-Semitic postulates” of Cosima Wagner, who would become one of the first patrons of Adolf Hitler. Balfour did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society but he was happy to send them to Palestine.

Another strong supporter of Zionism, in whose Cabinet Balfour was Foreign Secretary, was Prime Minister David Lloyd George.  He described Herbert Samuel, who was Home Secretary and who went on to be the first British High Commissioner in Palestine as “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.”

Indeed it is hard to think of a non-Jewish Zionist who wasn’t an anti-Semite.  From Edouard Drumont to Eichmann non-Jewish anti-Semites have nearly all been avid supporters of Zionism.   

It is no surprise that Frank Coughlan, a columnist in The Irish Independent should provide the answer to the mystery why UKMediaWatch,  Maurice Cohen of the Irish Jewish Representative Council and assorted Zionists believes that Kevin Myers has been much misunderstood.  Coughlan, who described the critics of Myers as ‘the haters’ ( a strange way to describe opponents of a myogynist and anti-Semite) explained thus:

It is ironic, for instance, that the anti-Semitic paragraphs that have surely finished his career came from the same pen that has defended Israeli foreign policy more consistently and eloquently than any other Irish journalist.

In November 2011, he wrote a waspish piece on the Irish left and its obsessive hatred of the Jewish homeland, a theme he has returned to again and again. The very same left that has now turned on him for being anti-Semitic.

'a year later, a headline had him stating emphatically that the only thing Africa had ever given the world was Aids.'- Frank Myers

After all, the poor misunderstood little Zionist was racist and abusive to everyone.  Coughlan writes that:  ‘‘More controversially again, a year later, a headline had him stating emphatically that the only thing Africa had ever given the world was Aids.’

Racist?  Perish the thought.  He was simply ‘Deliberately provocative’ even when ‘he picked at some tender scabs, particularly the treasured myths of romantic republicans.  Countess Markievicz, whom he thought mad, bad and dangerous to know, was caught in the crossfire a number of times.’

The Countess of Markievicz, for those who do not know, was a dissident member of the British aristocracy who supported Irish Republicanism.  She was ‘an Irish Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil politician, revolutionary nationalist, suffragette and socialist.’ who was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, though she did not take her seat and was also the second woman to hold a cabinet position in the world (Minister for Labour in the Irish Republic, 1919–1922)

Being a combination of Republican, socialist and suffragette the good Countess probably represented the trinity of evil as far as Myers was concerned!

In many ways Myers was an ideal journalist for the Murdoch press.  They will be hard pressed to find a replacement bigot.

As the Guardian's 'anti-Semitism' campaign against Corbyn continues its time to BOYCOTT the Guardian

Howard Jacobson’s blindness to Zionist racism in the cause of fake anti-Semitism

Howard Jacobson - blind to the Palestinians

Zionist lobby group boasts of its success in neutering Guardian coverage of Zionism & Palestine

There was a time when the Guardian had the best Middle East correspondent of any paper, David Hirst, who wrote an excellent book, The Gun and the Olive Branch.  Now they have Jonathan Freedland, a thriller writer, who cannot see beyond his Jewish identity to understand that Zionism is a murderous,  racist settler colonial movement.

The Guardian carries Jacobson's junk article which speaks about support for Israel and omits to mention the Palestinians

Where once the Guardian and its Comment is Free column was an arena of lively debate, today anti-Zionists are effectively barred.   A decade ago I contribute a number of articles such as an article on the Royal Family's reception for the Jewish National Fund [Israel's Royal Welcome]  Such is the state of affairs at the Guardian, that the Zionists openly boast about how they have cleansed CIF of anything remotely opposed to Zionism and the Israeli state.

French fascist leader Marine Le Pen, combines anti-Semitism with a devotion to Israel

UK Media Watch, formerly CIF Watch, which is devoted to suppressing favourable coverage of the Palestinians or unfavourable coverage of Israel and Zionism in the media, boasts of its success with the Guardian.

'partly due to our efforts, the Guardian’s malign obsession with Israel had somewhat abated, and their legitimization of antisemitic tropes (above and below the line) had at least diminished.

The latter improvement in editorial decisions... occurred both as the result of our relentless naming and shaming of Guardian contributors who expressed such Judeophobic views, and at least two important decisions by the paper’s readers’ editor which had the effect of institutionally delegitimizing these narratives.  The readers’ editor we’re referring to is Chris Elliott ."

Geert Wilders - leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, virulently anti-Islamic and sees Israel as a bastion of the West

The one newspaper which could be relied on for objective coverage of Palestine and Zionism has now gone over to the dark side.  It is time that socialists and supporters of the Palestinians boycotted the Guardian.  In many ways its coverage is worse than paper such as The Daily Mail precisely because people expect The Guardian to be more balanced and fairer.

In its latest propaganda article, The Guardian has commissioned an article, Let’s be clear – antisemitism is a hate apart, from Howard Jacobson.  In his attempt to show that anti-Zionism is really a modern form of an ancient plaint, anti-Semitism, Jacobson’s literary talents seem to desert him.  His arguments are wooden and stilted as his hackneyed phrases betray a poverty of imagination. 

Heinz Christian Strache - leads the Austrian Freedom Party, which was formed to rehabilitate Austrian Nazis - a welcome guest of Likud to Israel recently

How can one write about Israel without once mentioning the Palestinians?  Israel is a state that receives the largest amount of aid of any country, despite its small population, from the United States.  It is a state armed to the teeth, with nuclear weaponry, whose military has ruled over 4.5 million people for 50 years.  Palestinians live in the same territory as 600,000 settlers yet unlike them they are subject to a different legal system of Military Law.  By any definition this is Apartheid.  At the hundreds of checkpoints that cover the West Bank there are separate entrances for Jewish settlers and Palestinians,  yet Jacobson has convinced himself that our reasons for opposing Israeli Apartheid is because of anti-Semitism!

Jacobson may be a distinguished novelist but there is nothing original in what he writes about anti-Semitism and Zionism.  Jacobson offers us no special insights that cannot be gained from Israeli hasbara (propaganda).  For Jacobson criticism of the Israeli state can be explained by the fact that ‘in the matter of the existence of the State of Israel... all the ancient superstitions about Jews find a point of confluence.’  Apparently criticism of Israel and Zionism has nothing to do with land discrimination and theft, the underfunding of the Arab education sector, the Judaisation of areas of Israel where there are not enough Jews, extra-judicial executions, torture of children or house demolitions.  It’s all because we are anti-Semitic!

Jacobson though is but the latest Guardian sock puppet.  In the past year it has run a series of articles about ‘anti-Semitism’ with the aim of portraying Labour under Jeremy Corbyn as a party in the grip of a tsunami of anti-Semitism.  Articles it has printed include The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism and Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too which is a rewrite of an earlier article in the Jewish Chronicle  Hatred is turning me into a Jew by Nick Cohen, Why Jews in Labour place little trust in Jeremy Corbyn by Joshua Simons,  Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem and My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority by Jonathan Freedland Antisemitism is a poison – the left must take leadership against it by Owen Jones, which he rewrites annually.  The Guardian has refused to print articles rejecting the idea in the above articles that anti-Zionism is a modern form of anti-Semitism.

Howard Jacobson made his name as a comic novelist.  It is a genre that he should have stuck to because there is little that is amusing or revealing in his discursions into anti-Semitism.  Jacobson pronounces that the Chakrabarti Report into racism and anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was ‘a soft inquiry’ and ‘was stillborn’.  Instead of explaining what it is he disagreed with in the Report he insinuates that the elevation of Shami Chakrabarti to the House of Lords was the payment of a bribe .  The Chakrabarti Report was a serious attempt to investigate the spurious anti-Semitism allegations of the Labour Right, the Tory press, and the Zionist movement.  Chakrabarti found that the Labour Party was not overrun by anti-Semitism. 

Indeed it is one of the curious aspects of the anti-Semitism allegations that no hard evidence has ever been produced.  The one serious attempt to investigate these allegations by Asa Winstanley How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis showed that the evidence for the allegations was spurious, fabricated and in the specific case of Oxford University Labour Club, set in motion by a former intern, Alex Chalmers, for BICOM, Britain’s main Israeli propaganda organisation.

Howard Jacobson’s theme is anything but novel.  It is that anti-Semitism is ‘unlike other racisms’.  It ‘exists outside time and place and doesn’t even require the presence of Jews.’  In response to the Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker, the founder of the Lovers of Zion, likewise wrote that ‘Judaephobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable. [Pinsker, Autoemancipation,  Berlin 1882 p.5.]

The logical conclusion is that if anti-Semitism cannot be explained then it cannot be fought.  It doesn’t even require Jews.  It exists in the realm of the metaphysical like all those other racial myths.  After all ‘when Marlowe and Shakespeare responded to an appetite for anti-Jewish feeling in Elizabethan England, there had been no Jews in the country for 300 years.’  Jacobson is wrong, there were Jews in England but the memory of the Jews and the roles they performed in society had not disappeared.  It is all too easy to characterise Marlowe and Shakespeare’s productions as anti-Semitic when they simply reflected not only popular perceptions but the actual role that Jews played in medieval society.

As Abram Leon, the Trotskyist leader who died in Auschwitz observed:

‘Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’..[Abram Leon, The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation, p. 245. Pathfinder, New York, 1970]

Anti-Semitism was seen by Zionism as a permanent feature of Jewish relations with non-Jews, an immutable fact beyond history and time itself.  In June 1895, barely six months after the framing of the French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfuss for treason, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism wrote in his Diaries (p.6) that ‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.   Since anti-Semitism was a natural phenomenon, it could not be fought.  You might as well fight the tides.

Jacobson’s claim that anti-Semitism is a unique form of racism is a truism.  All forms of racism have unique characteristics but anti-Semitism is not a unique form of racism.  There has always been racism against groups who were seen as better off and prosperous, be it the Huguenots, the Biafrans, the East African Asians or Koreans in the United States.  The Chinese of South-East Asia were known as the ‘Jews of the East’.  Racism against the Roma is just as persistent and deadly as anti-Semitism if not more so. 

Jacobson tells us apropos of anti-Zionism that ‘The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty.’  The same can be said, with somewhat more justification of Zionism.  Anti-Zionism was a product of Jews not non-Jews.  It is noticeable that far-Right and fascist groups are some of the most ardent supporters of Zionism.  As Ruth Smeed, a spokeswoman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews admitted ‘‘The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel.  Members of the English Defence League combine the Hitler salute with flying the Israeli flag at its demonstrations.[2] 

Far-Right European parties such as Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache’s Austrian Freedom Party and Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale all combine virulent Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism with support for Zionism, without a murmur of concern from Jacobson and the witch finder generals of Zionism.   Was it not Pastor John Hagee, President of Christians United for Israel who informed us that Hitler was a hunter sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel?  Although John McCain was forced to disavow Hagee when he ran against Barak Obama in the 2008 Presidential election this did not stop Abe Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League praising Hagee. ‘We are grateful’ Foxman said, ‘that you have devoted your life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel,” 

Nor was Foxman alone.  One of the leaders of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is the neo-con editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard.  Pollard sees no contradiction between attacking Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ and defending Michal Kaminski, former MEP for Poland’s far-Right Law and Justice Party.  Kaminski opposed, in 2001, a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Jews by fellow Poles in the village of Jedwabne in 1941.  Kaminski suggested it was the Jews who owed the Poles an apology.  Pollard however insisted that Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews’ because ‘Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israel an MEP as exists.’

Far from anti-Zionism being a disguise for anti-Semitism it is Zionism which has most in common with anti-Semites. From Edouard Drumont, the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards to Alfred Rosenburg to the BNP’s Nick Griffin, anti-Semites saw no contradiction in supporting Zionism.

Jacobson and the Guardian have great difficulty in accepting that criticism of the State of Israel is not on account of some ancient hatred of Jews but because it is a state that has racism woven into its DNA.  A ‘Jewish’ state in the context of settler colonialism means a Jewish supremacist state.  Whereas Britain being a Christian state is a constitutional adornment, in Israel Jews have real privileges over non-Jews.  Israel is a state where the ‘demographic question’ is the engine of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. [see When will Israel stop seeing Palestinians as a 'demographic threat?']

Jacobson is not above deploying his literary skills in order to misrepresent his adversaries.  He says that according to anti-Zionists ‘Jews have only one motive in labelling anti-Zionism antisemitic and that is to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. This assertion defames Jews’.  Well it would if it were true but it ignores that foremost amongst these defamers are Jews themselves!  It is the Zionist movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, who use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon to deflect criticism of Israel.  Just as anti-Semites use the term ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’ interchangeably so too do Zionists.

Jacobson says that ‘Zionism originated as a liberation movement’.  Perhaps he could enlighten us as to when Zionists first described themselves so?  When Herzl founded the Zionist movement he wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist after whom Rhodesia was named asking ‘‘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.’ [Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.1,194].  In ‘Rebirth and Destiny’ [New York 1954] David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, refers throughout to colonization and colonies.  This was because, in the first half of the last century, colonialism was seen as a good thing.  Today’s zeitgeist demands that colonialism is transformed into national liberation. 

Jacobson says we need to talk of Zion.  I disagree.  We need to talk about Zionism and what it has done to the Palestinians.  The Holocaust is no excuse for the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein