George H.W. Bush - The Death of a War Criminal

How the Mainstream Media Turn Villains into Saints

It is sickening the way the press eulogise dead war criminals and US Presidents in particular.  I can remember the BBC gushing over Ronald Reagan when he died and making a tribute programme to the man who unleashed the Contras in Nicaragua and supported the death squads in El Salvador. Ronald Reagan was seen as a beacon of hope for democracy even whilst he did his best to impoverish the poorest Americans.  But this is how our opinion makers work.

George Bush was the man who headed the CIA, a criminal organisation which subverted democratically elected governments in Latin America and brought the regimes of Pinochet and Videla to power in Chile, replete with their torture chambers and mass disappearances.  Bush represented all that was most vile in American politics and the fact that the Clintons are gushing all over his memory should teach us that when it comes to US politics there is no essential difference between Republicans and Democrats.

George Bush was the son of Senator Prescott Bush, a businessman and banker who made much of his fortune trading with Nazi Germany even after war was declared.  But as one of America's leading families, almost akin to  royalty, he escaped prosecution for aiding the enemy at a time of war despite financing Fritz Thyssen one of the largest steel and coal barons who organised finance for Hitler.

People won't remember the shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes of the US Navy. 290 people, including 66 children, were murdered. George H W Bush was not the kind quirky, friendly soul that is made out today.  George H.W. Bush in 1988 responded to the mass murder by saying: "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are." was his Trumpian response. 

The USS Vincennes

See The ‘Forgotten’ US Shootdown of Iranian Airliner Flight 655­By Jeremy R. Hammond | Jul 3, 2017

Below is an article by Mehdi Hassan on Bush’s legacy.

Tony Greenstein

The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice

Mehdi Hasan

December 1 2018, 4:38 p.m.

President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 16, 1991, after U.S. forces began military action against Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm. Photo: Charles Tasnadi/AP

The tributes to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man “of the highest character,” said his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. “He loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to another former president, Barack Obama, Bush’s life was “a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.” Apple boss Tim Cook said: “We have lost a great American.”

In the age of Donald Trump, it isn’t difficult for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of him as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with “class” and “integrity.” It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a “blowhard,” and that he eschewed the white nationalist, “alt-right,” conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said, “firing a shot.” He spent his life serving his country — from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and eight great-grandkids.

Yes I know this was written for his son but it is equally applicable  to the father

Nevertheless, he was a public, not a private, figure — one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen way. “When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms,” as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued, because it leads to “false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts.” The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him — his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent — than much of the political and media classes might have you believe.

Consider:

He ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should forever be associated with Bush’s 1988 presidential bid. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts — where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor —  had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called “Weekend Passes,” released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.

As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater bragged, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” Bush himself was quick to dismiss accusations of racism as “absolutely ridiculous,” yet it was clear at the time — even to right-wing Republican operatives such as Roger Stone, now a close ally of Trump — that the ad had crossed a line. “You and George Bush will wear that to your grave,” Stone complained to Atwater. “It’s a racist ad. … You’re going to regret it.”

Stone was right about Atwater, who on his deathbed apologized for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did.

He made a dishonest case for war. Thirteen years before George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Keating concluded, “was sold on a mountain of war propaganda.”

For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait “without provocation or warning.” What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an effective green light to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a week before his invasion, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed that he was doing so in order “to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” As Scott Peterson wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, “Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated … that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.”

Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert. “It was a pretty serious fib,” Heller told Peterson, adding: “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”

President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to discuss the Persian Gulf War. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP

He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, “a serious violation of the laws of war.”

U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”

Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.

By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.” (Sound familiar?)

He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet his vice president’s involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention. “The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete,” wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his final report on the Iran-Contra affair in August 1993.

Why? Because Bush, who was “fully aware of the Iran arms sale,” according to the special counsel, failed to hand over a diary “containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/contra” and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — on the eve of Weinberger’s trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. “The Weinberger pardon,” Walsh pointedly noted, “marked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.” An angry Walsh accused Bush of “misconduct” and helping to complete “the Iran-contra cover-up.”

Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn’t it?

 A U.S. marshal, left, looking for a suspect, shows a mug shot to a man found allegedly using drugs in a crackhouse, according to police, in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1989. The police raid was part of President George H.W. Bush’s war on drugs. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

He escalated the racist war on drugs. In September 1989, in a televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House . … It could easily have been heroin or PCP.”

Yet a Washington Post investigation later that month revealed that federal agents had “lured” the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that they could make an “undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity” (the dealer didn’t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions). Bush cynically used this prop — the bag of crack — to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.”

The result? “Millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS — all in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ that did nothing to reduce drug abuse,” pointed out Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014. Bush, he argued, “put ideology and politics above science and health.” Today, even leading Republicans, such as Chris Christie and Rand Paul, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure.

He groped women. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, in late 2017, at least eight different women have come forward with claims that the former president groped them, in most cases while they were posing for photos with him. One of them, Roslyn Corrigan, told Time magazine that Bush had touched her inappropriately in 2003, when she was just 16. “I was a child,” she said. The former president was 79. Bush’s spokesperson offered this defense of his boss in October 2017: “At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures.” Yet, as Time noted, “Bush was standing upright in 2003 when he met Corrigan.”

Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility; he engaged in race baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe.

Felicia Langer RIP - Born 9th December 1930 in Poland - died 21st June 2018 in Germany

In memory of Felicia Langer, the first lawyer to bring the occupation to court

 Felicia Langer died on June 21^st this year. She was probably the first radical Israeli whose name I knew.  I can remember that she was a hate figure for people in the local Jewish community as someone who was 'anti-Israel'. She was known as both an Arab lover and a communist - a deadly combination.  

Below are two appreciations of the life of this wonderful woman who dedicated her life to supporting those who were the target of Zionist oppression.

Tony Greenstein

Felicia Langer was a Holocaust survivor, a communist, and one of the first Israeli lawyers to defend Palestinian residents of the occupied territories in the Israeli Supreme Court. She died in Germany. 

By Michael Sfard  By +972 Magazine

Published June 24, 2018

Attorney Felicia Langer in 2008. UNiesert, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0)

Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer died Thursday in Germany.

Langer was a human rights and peace activist, a communist, and one of the first attorneys to represent Palestinian residents of the occupied territories in Israeli courts. In Israel’s Supreme Court, she pioneered legal practices that today seem natural and obvious but were once considered outrageous. She was the first to challenge the expulsion of Palestinian political leaders from the West Bank, the first to challenge the army’s practice of demolishing the homes of Palestinians suspected of militant activities, the first to accuse the Shin Bet of torturing detainees, and the first to fight the practice of administrative detention.

In those days, there were very few Israeli lawyers willing to represent Palestinians. Langer — a Polish-born Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor who moved to Israel, joined the Communist Party, and defended Palestinians — became a hated figure among the general public. She was a Jew and a woman who joined forces with “the Arab enemy.” When I interviewed her during research for my book, The Wall and the Gate, she told me that there were periods when taxi drivers in Jerusalem would refuse to pick her up, that the threats against her were so severe that she was forced to hire a bodyguard, that she had to take the sign off of her office in Jerusalem, and that her neighbors asked her to clean off the words “you will die soon,” spray painted on her office’s door, because “it was not aesthetically pleasing.”

Langer fought, almost alone, against the heads of the judicial system at the time, against people with tremendous political and public power, like Justice Meir Shamgar and state attorney (and later a Supreme Court justice) Mishael Cheshin. The hearings in Langer’s cases were contentious. She never hesitated to accuse the establishment of carrying out crimes against her clients and to represent them — some of whom were members of the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, such as Nablus Mayor Bassam Shaka and Hebron mayor candidate Hazmi Natcheh — as victims of an evil regime.

Over the years, others followed the path that Langer blazed. First among them were Leah Tzemel, Elias Khoury, Raja Shehadeh, and Avigdor Feldman. Many others have joined since, as Langer’s path became a road, then a highway. But, in the 1990s, she came to see that highway as a fig leaf — that the judicial system was exploiting legal proceedings for public relations purposes and pro-Israel propaganda. She closed her office and moved to Germany, where she continued to fight the occupation and struggle for peace and coexistence.

Felicia Langer exits the High Court in Jerusalem, after the hearing of the appeal against Bassem Shaka’s expulsion. November 22, 1979. (Herman Hanina)

Veteran residents of Jerusalem will tell you that the winter of 1968 was particularly harsh and snowy. And they know that when it snows in Jerusalem, Hebron is usually also covered in white. In the winter of 1968 both of these biblical cities and the road between them were blanketed in snow. But neither snow nor impassable roads could stop Felicia Langer. With her famous determination, she decided to take to the slippery road and drive from her office in downtown Jerusalem to the Hebron police station. A Palestinian sheikh from East Jerusalem  had come to her office in the middle of the storm and told her that his son, who had just returned from studying in Turkey, had been arrested and taken to the Hebron station. When the parents sent their son clean clothes through the authorities in the detention facility, they received, in return, a dirty bundle that contained a bloody shirt. They had no idea what had happened to their son and they were very worried. Having been retained by the father to represent the son and visit him, Langer took a file folder and marked it with the number 1, the first case involving a subject of the occupation. Client number 1, the son of an East Jerusalem sheikh, would be the first of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Palestinians Langer would represent before the Israeli authorities over the next twenty-two years.

The Hebron police and the jail were housed in an old building in the center of the city, the Taggart Building, named after a British police officer who had gained expertise suppressing insurgencies in India and who designed fortified police stations all over Mandatory Palestine for His Majesty’s forces. The Israeli army was the third regime to use the structure, following the British themselves and the Jordanians.

When Langer arrived, she looked not just for the sheikh’s son, but also for two other clients, ‘Abd al-‘ Aziz Sharif and Na’im ‘Odeh, both members of Palestinian Communist movements in the Hebron area. Unlike the sheikh’s son, who, Langer found out during her visit, was suspected of membership in Fatah and infiltration into the country, the two Communists were suspected of nothing. They had been arrested under special powers stipulated in the Defense (Emergency) Regulations that were enacted by the British Mandate and had survived long after it ended. The regulations permit “preventive” (or administrative) detention, which is designed not to respond to an act already committed but to stop the potential danger posed by the detainee. Administrative detainees are neither accused nor suspected of anything and may be held without trial or charges being brought. Langer’s clients, Sharif and ‘Odeh, were to be the first raindrops in a monsoon of administrative detentions that would flood the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Langer was born in Poland in the early 1930s. Nearly all her relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. She and her parents managed to escape the Nazis to the USSR, but her father fell victim to Stalin’s regime. He died a short while after being released, in very poor health, from a Soviet gulag where he was held in dreadful conditions. Langer nevertheless became a devout communist. After immigrating to Israel, she joined the local Communist Party and became a pivotal activist. She began practicing law in 1965 and for a while worked in a Tel Aviv law office as an associate litigating all sorts of cases, but immediately after the 1967 war, Langer decided to devote her practice to representing Palestinians living under the occupation and opened her own office in Jerusalem.

In the late 1960s, she was one of just a handful of lawyers representing West Bank residents. Most of these lawyers were Palestinian citizens of Israel, almost all of whom had ties to the Communist Party of Israel (known as Maki). At the time, communist factions were deeply entrenched in Palestinian urban centers and the connections between the Israeli and West Bank and Gaza Communist movements paved the way for lawyers from Israel to represent Palestinian residents under occupation. Following Langer’s lead, these lawyers laid the groundwork for the extensive legal activism that continues today, activism marked by partnership, Sisyphean legal battles, and trust, given daily by Palestinians to Israeli lawyers, some of them Jewish, to represent them before Israeli institutions, primarily the High Court of Justice. This trust and partnership was maintained through five decades of occupation: even in the hardest times, when it seemed as though all the bridges between Palestinians and Israelis had been burned or bombed, solidarity in the fight against human rights violations did not wane.

Langer arrived in Israel in 1950, after living through the rough years of the war in the USSR, where, as we know, her family had fled from Poland. Her father had been sent to the gulag for refusing to become a Soviet citizen (he feared being unable to return to Poland after the war). After he died in late 1944, Langer and her mother struggled to provide for themselves in extremely harsh conditions, selling their few possessions to survive. When the war ended, Langer returned to Poland, where she met her future spouse. Her mother, who had remarried, emigrated to Palestine; Langer and her husband answered her pleas and eventually followed her.

In the early 1960s, Langer realized a dream, and, unusual at the time for a woman who had a child, she enrolled in the Hebrew University Law School branch in Tel Aviv. Her past compelled her to represent the disempowered, to fight for people who, like her family and herself, were victims of government malice. She studied law to put her worldview, which had crystallized during the war, into action and challenge discrimination and injustice. By the mid-1960s, Langer had become a qualified lawyer, but her attempts to find work in the public sector were unsuccessful.

Langer claims she was written off because of her Marxist convictions and her membership in Maki, Israel’s Communist Party, at the time. She had no choice but to turn to the private sector. But there she faced a different obstacle—her own conscience. After refusing to represent a man who was a pimp and was trying to evade paying alimony, she realized she had to set up her own practice if she wanted to pick her cases according to her many principles. In her practice Langer represented clients who aligned with her ideological commitments: detained protesters, women whose rights had been violated, and Arab citizens of Israel in conflict with the authorities. This continued until 1967, when, in the space of six days, 1.5 million Palestinians came under Israeli occupation. At a time when Israeli society, with its many Holocaust survivors, was dedicated to the notion that the moral of the rise of the Nazis, their conquest of Europe, and the Final Solution was that the remnants of the Jewish people were obliged to build an invincible country that would protect Jews from victimhood, Langer drew a different lesson: any discrimination or occupation was fraught with danger, not just by the Germans and not just against Jews.

Representing Palestinians who had suddenly come under Israeli military rule, a regime of all-powerful army generals, was the very fulfilment of the goal for which she had studied law. The only lawyers representing the occupied at the time were a handful of Palestinian Israelis. Langer was a far cry from the typical defender of Palestinians: a woman, a Communist, and a European Jew. With her Polish accent and command of Latin, her partnership with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians may have been the strangest sight in the Middle East. To provide access to West Bank residents, Langer rented a small office on Koresh Street in Jerusalem, which would be her home base for the next twenty-three years. She soon became synonymous with the fight for Palestinian rights. To others she was a traitor and an enemy sympathizer.

In 1990, after a long career of public and dramatic battles with the authorities, Felicia Langer closed her Jerusalem office and left Israel to take up a teaching position in Germany. In an interview in the Washington Post Langer said, “I couldn’t be a fig leaf for this system anymore.”

Michael Sfard is an Israeli human rights lawyer and the author of The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights (Metropolitan Books, 2018).

Felicia Langer obituary

Holocaust survivor who became a human rights lawyer in Israel and defended Palestinians in the country’s courts

Daphna Baram

Thu 12 Jul 2018 16.56 BSTLast modified on Fri 10 Aug 2018 17.00 BST

 Felicia Langer in 1991. Her personal ethical boundary was that she would not represent anybody who was suspected of having blood on their hands. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

In 1959, Felicia Langer qualified in law in Tel Aviv and joined the Israel Bar Association. Her first years as a lawyer were unremarkable, but the six-day war in 1967, with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, provoked a change.

The following year she started her own practice and began representing Palestinians in the Israeli courts, and in the military courts that were a part of the apparatus of the occupation. Langer, who has died aged 87, defended Palestinians who had demolition orders against their homes and activists facing deportation.

Her own ethical boundary was that she would not represent anybody who was suspected of having blood on their hands. And while her choice to defend Palestinians turned her into a hate figure among many Israelis, who branded her “the terrorist lawyer”, her refusal to represent those accused of violent crimes drew criticism from the ranks of some in the anti-Zionist left.

Langer’s most famous client was Bassam Shakaa, who was elected mayor of Nablus in 1976, whom she defended against a deportation order, filed by Israel in response to his criticism of the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Langer won the case – amid mass demonstrations and the collective resignation of all West Bank mayors – and Shakaa remained in Nablus.

By 1990, Langer had decided she could no longer work within the Israeli legal system, and told the Washington Post: “I want my quitting to be a sort of demonstration and expression of my despair and disgust with the system.”

She added, articulating a dilemma that faces many human rights activists in Israel: “I realised that all this time, by bringing Palestinians to the courts, I had been legitimising the system, but the system had not brought the Palestinians any justice. And I decided I couldn’t be a fig leaf for this system anymore.”

Langer moved to Tübingen, southern Germany, and accepted teaching positions in the universities of Bremen and Kassel.

She was born Felicia Veitt in the Polish town of Tarnow, close to the German border, a city with a large Jewish population. Seven days after the outbreak of the second world war, the Nazis occupied Tarnow and the Veitt family fled to Russia. There, Felicia’s father, a lawyer, was arrested because he refused to take a Soviet passport, for fear that he would not be allowed back into Poland when the war ended.

The family spent the rest of the war in one of Stalin’s gulags. Felicia’s father died in 1945, and she and her mother returned to Poland, where they found that many family members had perished. Despite these experiences, Felicia was an avid communist for the rest of her life.

In 1949, she married Mieciu Langer, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The couple followed Felicia’s mother, who pleaded with them to join her, to Israel in 1950 and settled in Tel Aviv, where Felicia studied law at the local outpost of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Langer’s books about her experiences in the military courts included With My Own Eyes (1975) and These Are My Brothers (1979). Youth Between the Ghetto and Theresienstadt (1999) recounted her husband’s wartime experiences. Quo Vadis Israel? The New Intifada of the Palestinians (2001) analysed the second Palestinian uprising following the disappointment that followed the Oslo accords.

Her activity for Palestinians won her many awards, among them the Bruno Kreisky prize for human rights in 1991, and membership of the German Federal Order of Merit in 2009 and the Palestinian Order of Merit and Excellence in 2012. But according to her own account, the accolade that brought tears to her eyes was the naming of a square in her honour in the centre of a refugee camp near Nablus.

Mieciu died in 2015. She is survived by her son, Michael, and three grandchildren.

• Felicia Langer, lawyer, born 9 December 1930; died 21 June 2018

The Death of My Father Rabbi Solomon Greenstein

The Death of a Father and a Generation of Working Class Jews

Thursday, 1 December 2011

In the past few weeks I’ve posted fewer articles than normal. That is because my father died in the Royal Liverpool Hospital at approximately 1.00 a.m. on Saturday 21st November.

I was rung up at about 12.30 a.m. by the hospital to tell me that he was dying and I immediately rang my mother, who got into a taxi. I drove up to Liverpool soon after to go straight to the hospital to be with my mother.
Dad was a travelling rabbi and most of the synagogues he ministered to in the provinces have now closed as their Jewish communities have dwindled to virtually nothing. Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry (which may still be going), Merthyr Tydfil and then Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool and Fairfield which was his last synagogue.

I had been up to Liverpool about 3 weeks previously when it was feared he might not last but my younger brother Jonathan managed to get him transferred from a care home to hospital where a drip could be put in. I won’t bother describing the attitude of these people to the elderly except that people go there essentially to die and the homes see their job as palliative – making people ‘comfortable’ rather than seeing whether they may be able to have a few extra years. I don’t want to be maudlin. Dad was 99 which is a good age by any measure and was in pretty good health until the mid-90’s.

With all this discussion about Jewish identity these days I thought maybe I should also chip in! I am fairly unusual among anti-Zionist Jews in that I come from an Orthodox Religious Zionist background. I had broken effectively with Zionism by the age 16, but maybe the formative break with my father was when I was 14 I declared I was an atheist, not something that goes down too well with the Orthodox, of whatever faith.

It would be pointless to say we were close, having seen each other relatively little over the past few years. We had argued ferociously when I was younger and I left home at 18. Nonetheless I shed some tears seeing what had been a strong, aggressive man lying so weak and helpless on his bed. I also couldn’t help but wonder why it was always impossible to pierce beneath the exterior.

I guess that I learnt something of how to be a good parent from my father, even if it was the opposite of how he would have behaved. But he was also in the tradition of the old bible belt preachers, with a gun in one hand and the bible in the other. I can remember in the Stoke shul my dad threatening to take one of the congregants outside, and not for a breath of fresh air either! I must confess I didn’t know about his boxing until I read the obituary below but it doesn’t surprise me. There were a few other, similar incidents, about which I shall not write about.

Needless to say dad fell out with most of the synagogues and move on after a while. Dad grew up in the East End and he described to me on a number of occasions what it was like living with the violence and thuggery of Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. He described one kid to me who had been put through a plate glass window by the fascists and he was proud of having been present at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the fascists were prevented from marching through the East End. He hated anti-Semitism but he didn’t see that racism was wrong whoever was the target. Nonetheless he always voted Labour since he remembered Tory support for anti-Semitism in the East End, though he forgot that the small English Zionist Federation backed those Tories in the 1900 General Election.

I can remember visiting with him two of his sisters - Jessie and Lottie - in the East End. They both lived in poverty and squalor, the former in particular. It is often forgot now by Jews who live in Edgware or Golders Green that not so long ago most Jews lived in great poverty. Instead of being sub-Thatcherites they solidly voted for the Left and in Mile End in 1945 it was the Jewish voters primarily who put Phil Piratin, 1 of only 2 communist MP's elected as such in Britain, into parliament.We had many arguments as can be imagined. And also some good times on holiday. One or two things are too personal but I can remember dad always had a sticky wrapped sweet in his pocket! I can also remember dad bailing me out of Walton gaol in Liverpool back in 1972. I’d been done, hitching back from the Windsor pop festival, for possession of dope and received a fine of £30 or 28 days in prison from an austere London magistrate. When I said I didn’t have the money to pay he looked up from his glasses and said ‘Well get a job then’. Presumably members of his class didn’t understand that Liverpool then and now had high unemployment.

I was picked up in a raid on a squat and dad was quite content to let me serve out the sentence. Unfortunately the local rabbi was doing his rounds and on coming across me immediately informed my parents. It was one thing having me languish in a Victorian prison, but quite another letting anyone in the Jewish community find out! Dad was no intellectual nor did he have any pretensions to the contrary, unlike many of today’s rabbis. He did however have a good memory. He knew the whole of the Torah (Pentateuch) by heart. Dad had a good innings and fought to live to the end. And for all living creatures death is the end.

The funeral was held on Tuesday 24th November in the Jewish cemetry.
Tony Greenstein

Minister was a champion boxer
Jewish Telegraph – Liverpool Edition – 25.11.11.

REV Solomon Greenstein, who was minister of the old Fairfield synagogue at the time of its closure, died on Shabbat, aged 99.

He also taught at King David High School and worked as a shochet.
Born in Whitechapel in London's East End in 1912, he was the son of Polish immigrants Rabbi Alter Natan Greenstein and Fayge Rivka.

He studied at the prestigious Etz Chaim yeshiva for seven years and followed his father into the ministry, although in his schooldays he was a keen sportsman, being a champion swimmer and boxer.

He also loved chazanut and studied for a time with the acclaimed chazan Herman Bornstein, of Princes Road Synagogue.

In 1952 he married Esther (nee Mechulam), a primary school teacher from Wallasey who had been active in the local Bnei Akiva.

The couple settled in London, but moved to Merseyside in 1965 when Rev Greenstein was appointed minister to the now defunct Birkenhead Synagogue in Balls Road.
He served as a hospital chaplain and was introduced to the Queen at the opening of Arrowe Park hospital.

After retiring, Rev Greenstein was able to indulge in his passion for painting by attending night classes and he also enjoyed listening to music.

His son Jonny, who lives in Jerusalem, said: "Dad was scrupulously observant, putting on tallit and tephillin every morning even into his 90s when he needed help.
"A week before he died I asked him what he wanted and he replied 'kiddush' which shows how much Judaism meant to him."

Rabbi Malcolm Malits, Allerton Synagogue's emeritus minister, said: "Rev Greenstein was very knowledgeable and we were colleagues at King David.

"He must have been a good shochet because he once worked at Cardiff under the watchful eye of the renowned Rabbi Ber Rogosnitzky - if he was good enough for him, that was quite a compliment."

Dr Eric Toke, former chairman of Fairfield Hebrew Congregation, said: "Rev Greenstein was a charming man who did everything he could to help the congregation and I remember his interesting and illustrative sermons."

Rev Greenstein is survived by Esther, sons Anthony, who lives in Brighton, Jonny, David, who lives in Prestwich, 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

One of his grandchildren, 17-year-old Tamar Greenstein, recently performed in London with the Jerusalem Conservatory Orchestra.

While in the UK her piano trio was invited to perform at the Yehudi Menuhin school and at the home of renowned virtuoso Murray Perahia.

Posted by Tony Greenstein at 03:41

Rest in Peace – Terry Liddle

Terry Liddle 1948 – 2012, Comrade

I first met Terry at an AGM of the Alliance for Green Socialism.  I didn’t know him very well but despite his disability he was full of vigour and anger at the system.  I would like to carry the commemoration below by someone who knew him better, Pete McClaren who was on the Socialist Alliance Executive Committee and now the Trade Union Socialist Coalition Steering Committee.

Tony Greenstein

Comrades,

I would like to make a brief tribute to Terry.

i knew Terry very well, as many of you on these lists did.  He was a friend and comrade, someone I had known since the early days of the Socialist Alliance in the 1990's when he was the Secretary of Greenwich SA.  He regularly attended national meetings once they started to take off around 1996, and was on the SA National Council and other national bodies.  I was always impressed by Terry's complete lack of sectarianism and his determination to build left unity.  He always spoke in a most positive way to move the socialist alliance project forward.  He was committed to his work in Greenwich, where he was  a tower of strength to those within his community that he helped empower.  He was a genuine libertarian, environmentalist socialist - but a socialist first and foremost.

Terry became part of the campaign to try and save the original SA from being closed down by the then leadership of the SWP in the early part of this century.  He remained a member after it was closed down, and when it was re-launched in 2005. He was Treasurer of the re-launched SA in its early years, and, until very recently, I still received stuff from the Electoral Commission in his name!   Indeed, he remained a member until now, being fully paid up for 2011 even though deteriorating health meant he could no longer attend meetings.  We would correspond regularly, by phone, and more recently by email.  He was a true friend and a committed socialist.

Terry was a tower of strength to the movement, and he will be sorely missed.  My thoughts are with his family and close friends at this very sad time

I would like to find out about the funeral arrangements as I would like, if at all possible, to pay my respects on behalf of the Socialist Alliance - and all socialists generally.  Please forward details once known

I will forward this to others who may have known Terry

In Unity

Pete

Terry Liddle 1948 – 2012, Comrade

Terry Liddle died on November the 16/17 November 2012 aged 64 , after suffering ill health for a long time.

Many people on the left will have memories of Terry. There are those much more familiar with him than myself. A full obituary will be difficult to write. But this is one tribute to his memory.

I first became acquainted with Terry around 1979-1980, when he was involved in setting up an explicitly socialist atheist group. With my house-mate John, a cockney anarchist and shop steward at Warwick University, I joined. But living in Leamington Spa we had only written contact.

This group, according to the secularist anarchist Nicolas Walter, was bound to run into difficulties, as non-belief in religion takes many, often clashing, forms on the left. Indeed the organisation did not last. But Terry continued to place atheism, along with left democratic socialism and republicanism, at the centre of his politics.

Terry was, as they say, involved in many left wing groupings. In the Labour Briefing pamphlet Why Socialists Should Stay in the Labour Party (1991-2) he wrote with self-depreciating humour, “After a decade as an intransigent ultra-left sectarian, joining the Labour Party wasn’t easy. Staying in it is harder still.” But like other contributors (including myself) he placed his hopes in building a Labour left that would “work as a unified coherent force”. This would challenge the Party’s rightward drift, and give body to the “hopes and dreams of our class.”

The “long hard slog” of refounding the left led Terry, like many of us (such as the writer of the pamphlet’s introduction, Mike Marqusee, then Editor of the Briefing) outside the Labour Party.

A full history of these attempts to form a fully socialist party, principally in England, around the Socialist Alliance (SA), has yet to be written. Its derisory votes in the General Election of 2001 counted less towards it dissolution than the bandwagon launched by George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) backed the Respect party.

The type of ‘vanguard’ Leninism offered by groups like the SWP never attracted Terry. Still less would he follow Galloway’s populist ‘anti-imperialism’, support for ‘Muslims’ and self-promotion, into Respect. His hostility, widely shared on the left, looks more than justified when we look at Respect’s present, sorry, state. Terry sought a different future for the left in democratic and robustly socialist groupings and networks.

Terry Liddle was anchored in the activist and intellectual traditions of the British left. His own family background included a grandfather who was a member of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF). He had his forebear’s two volumes of Hyndman’s autobiography (Reminisces of an Adventurous Life, and Further Reminisces). An article on the heritage of  William Morris illustrates the depth not just of his reading, but equally his easy familiarity with the heart of the historic labour movement and the left. As he wrote, “Morris belongs neither to Marxists, Anarchists or Greens. He belongs to all of toiling humanity, for his is a message of hope for their freedom.”

Terry entered left-wing politics early. His experiences in the Young Communist League (YCL) in South London (he told me they felt that us young North London leftists considered ourselves a bit ‘above’ them), left him a committed anti-Stalinist.

Terry was a Marxist. But it was the kind of democratic Marxism, which many of us believe in, which crosses over with other types of socialism, left libertarian thought, and anarchism. As such Terry kept alive two strands from the pre-Great War left, secularism, and republicanism. He was open to new, and different, ideas, from feminism to ecology. He was also an advocate of animal rights, relating this to the writings of 19th century socialist, Henry Salt, on the issue (Extending the Circle of Compassion What Next. No 29.2004).

This openness was illustrated in some of his last writing. This year he reviewed a collection of Colin Ward’s writings, (Autonomy, Solidarity Possibility – a Colin Ward Reader). He stated, after a friendly overview of the Editor of Anarchy’s ideas on “autonomous direct action”, “Anarchists are all too often seen as crusties in ragged black clothing with mangy dogs on strings or mindless nihilistic trouble makers. But anarchism has always been a part of the movement for working class self-emancipation. It has a long history and some important thinkers.” (Chartist July/August 2012).

I feel glad that I was able to tell Terry how much I appreciated this piece.

Atheism remained, as well, very much part of Terry Liddle’s outlook. he set up the Freethought History Research Group. He was active in the Humanists. He was supported the main thrust of  French laïcité, particularly the ideas of the important left wing of French secularist thought and campaigning.

Terry wrote sympathetically on the ‘New Atheism’. He distinguished it from purists, like the National Secular Society, who are largely concerned with the separation of Church and State. Writers like Dawkins, Hitchens and Frank Harris were ‘science based’ and interested in arguing about the truth of faith. This was valuable, if with limits. While he was critical of Christopher Hitchen’s entrance into the “camp of imperialism” Terry had no time for those who have become “apologists for political Islam” (War on the Heavens. The Rise of ‘New Atheism and its Meaning for Socialists. New Interventions Vol. 13. No 4. 2011).

He commented, “While the New Atheism provides an arsenal of ammunition to hammer religion, to undermine the foundation of its mythology, it falls short in failing to describe or make an analysis of the ideological role played by religion in sustaining the alienated social relations of social relations of bourgeois society.” (Ibid) He cites FA Ridley, “Once a Communist order was fully established, the twin foundations of religion would be torn up by the roots.” (Ibid)

Terry’s contribution to the left was outstanding.

He was a great bloke.

He will be much missed.

Terry Liddle: farewell, Comrade

November 22, 2012 at 6:56 am (atheism, good people, libertarianism, secularism, socialism)

“Comrades when I’m dead and gone, no more than dust on the breeze
I beg you grant me one last wish, comrades do this for me please
Raise a glass of the blood red wine or a mug of the barley brew
Bid farewell to your comrade, one of the foolish few
Who thought we could rearrange the world, dreamed we could make all things new.”

Bruce reports:

Terry Liddle (above) died on November 17th aged 64. Comrades may remember Terry as active in the Socialist Alliance and its successor groups.

Terry’s political career started in the YCL (Young Communist League)  in the early 60s followed, I think, by a brief stint in the Healyites. When I first met him  in about 1968, he was involved in one of many attempts to take over the rump ILP (Independent Labour Party). He was a libertarian socialist who subsequently joined a variety of Council Communist groups.

He spent most of his activity in recent years on secularist / atheist activities, setting up the Freethought History Research Group.

He had been ill for a long time.

Nice tribute from Coatesy, here

Jim D adds: Terry wrote poetry and, in one of his poems (‘Death Song’, quoted from above) calls on his comrades to raise a glass of wine or ale to his memory when he dies and is no more than ”dust on the breeze.” I’m doing exactly as he instructed, right now.