How the Zionists Suppress Free Speech at Michigan State University

Far-right Israeli Education Minister involved in sex scandal with under age girls

Yocheve Menashe - minor bureaucrat in Israeli Education Ministry is allowed to censor Michigan University Discussion List

Michigan State University Allows Israeli Government Official to Censor Discussion of anti-Semitism

This is another example of how 'freedom of speech' in American universities is under constant attack by Zionists.  Not content with trying to abolish the Politics Department at Ben Gurion University, who having suppressed, a minor bureaucrat in Israel's Ministry of Education. Yocheve Menashe, is allowed to censor a discussion thread at Michigan State University.  This is one of a number of similar attempts to close down discussion on Zionism and anti-Semitism at US universities, so that only one perspective - that of Zionism - is allowed to be discussed.

You might have thought that Yocheved might have more important things to occupy herself with, especially since her far-Right Education Minister, Gideon Saar, is embroiled in a sex scandal involving sex with under-age girls.  You may want to write to Yocheved to remind her that Israel is supposed to be the 'only democracy in the Middle East'.  But then again maybe not, since it is determined to be the only democracy in the West too!

Below is a message from Terri Ginsburg about her experiences with censorship c/o Yocheved and Michigan University.

Dear Heather Hawley:

I am writing you in your capacity as Associate Director of the H-Net international listserv consortium to lodge a complaint against unfounded censorship and improper moderation practices by the editor of H-ANTISEMITISM, Yocheve ("Yo") Menashe ( https://www.h-net.org/people/person_view.php?id=125228).

Recently a discussion thread entitled "Islamophobia is Rational, Judeophobia is not!" has been circulating over H-ANTISEMITISM (see: http://www.h-net.org/~antis). This thread has more or less presented a series of anti-Muslim posts articulated within an entirely prejudicial, subjective and pro-Israel framework.  No perspectives representing Islam or Arabs, contemporary Middle East scholarship, or substantive critiques of western Middle East policy have yet been visible within the thread.

Indeed my own, perfectly reasonable contribution to the thread (see below) has been denied circulation by Ms. Menashe--who, as you may be aware, works for the Israel Minister of Education, a decidedly, unabashedly Zionist agency with a documented record of animosity toward Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives.  My post contains a link to an article I published recently in a special double-issue of the prestigious academic journal, Arab Studies Quarterly.  The article focuses specifically on the topics of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the contemporary U.S. academy.  Among other things it argues that criticism of Israel does not equate with antisemitism and that antisemitism and Islamophobia are politically overdetermined, historically interrelated phenomena, neither of which is rational.  In short, my post is entirely relevant and pertinent to the discussion thread in question and should by all right be permitted circulation to the listserv.

This is not the first time Ms. Menashe, who has been moderating H-ANTISEMITISM for nearly a decade, has refused to approve my posts, or posts professing views similar to mine, to that listserv (or in fact to H-HOLOCAUST, which she has also been moderating for the same period of time).  In past instances, moreover, when I and others have asked her to explain her negative actions, she has either failed to reply or offered perfunctory excuses.  Hence I am now contacting you directly.

As a person of Jewish background very much concerned about free and open inquiry, dialogue, and debate over the problems facing Palestine/Israel, the Middle East, and the larger Arab and Muslim world, I am disturbed that an individual representing a particular government--especially one that has been condemned globally for persistent and pervasive human rights and international law violations--has been permitted to edit an open scholarly discussion forum such as H-ANTISEMITISM, an academic listserv hosted by a U.S. university (Michigan State) and therefore subject to U.S. laws and regulations.  It is clear that Ms. Menashe's position within an Israeli government agency is preventing her from performing her moderator duties with the requisite objectivity.  Such a situation not only contradicts the First Amendment and numerous Federal court decisions which decry improper (not to mention foreign) government interference in academia, but travesties the collegial mission and ethos of academic freedom ostensibly upheld by the highly regarded H-Net, and should not be allowed.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Terri Ginsberg, Ph.D.
(International Council for Middle East Studies)
H-ANTISEMITISM subscriber since 14 June 1999

*******************************
To: H-ANTISEMITISM@H-NET.MSU.EDU
From: Terri Ginsberg
Subject: Re: H-AS KAMINS (DAVIDIY): Islamophobia is Rational. Judeophobia is not!
Date: November 2, 2012, 9:32 AM EST

Dear Colleagues,

Kindly peruse a recent article of mine that discusses this issue while offering some corrective to the definitions supplied thus far on H-ANTISEMITISM:

http://www.academia.edu/1016830/The_Deployment_of_Anti-Semitism_Controversy_and_Neutrality_in_Ginsberg_v._NCSU .

Thanks in advance for your comments and critique,

Terri Ginsberg

__.

arabstudiesquarterly.plutojournals.org

THE DEPLOYMENT OF “ANTI-SEMITISM,” “CONTROVERSY,” AND “NEUTRALITY”IN GINSBERG v. NCSU

Terri Ginsberg

This article considers the way in which North Carolina State University (NCSU) deployed the concepts, “anti-Semitism,” “controversy,” and “neutrality” against me in the negative employment decision it made for me during academic year 2007-08. Most readers of this journal are probably well-aware that “anti-Semitism” has become the favored charge against many academic scholars and others who have publicly criticized Israel, US Middle East policy, and Zionism. Under this rubric, all but the mildest admonitions have been met with recrimination by Zionist organizations and from academic institutions that compel answerability to them, on grounds that such criticisms constitute “anti-Semitism.” Criticism of Israel has come at this juncture to be conflated almost completely with “anti-Semitism,” and scholars who engage in it—Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Rashid Khalidi, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, among others—are consistently in danger of losing, or already have lost, their academic jobs and/or professional reputations (see: Klug, 2004).
1
At NCSU, where I was employed as a renewable, non-tenure-track TeachingAssistant Professor, and where I had been encouraged repeatedly to apply for a tenure-track position, I was severely admonished and effectively fired for my criticisms of Zionism and Israel and support for the airing of Arab and Muslim views. I am a Jewish anti-Zionist, and unlike Zionist and many non-Zionist academics, I do not exclude anti-Zionist discourse from my classroom or scholarship and public speech. The University’s negative actions occurred after I provided a favorable introduction to Ticket to Jerusalem (2002), a Palestinian film directed by Gazan refugee Rashid Masharawi, at a campus screening series which NCSU faculty had invited me to co-curate and to which I had in turn invited guest presenters of Arab and Muslim backgrounds. The actions continued as a senior colleague soon after issued me a teaching evaluation, which, although favorable, nonetheless suggestedthat I remove from my Holocaust and Film syllabus some course content involving

Dr. Terri Ginsberg received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, is a member of the Board of Directors and Public Programmer at the International Council for Middle East Studies and a Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Rutgers University.
ASQ33_3&4 01 text 22822/09/2011 08:50

“ANTI-SEMITISM,” “CONTROVERSY,” AND “NEUTRALITY” IN GINSBERG v. NCSU 229ASQ 33.3/33.4 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals
anti-Zionist discourse, namely, an excerpt from an interview with Joel Kovel, then a professor at Bard College and author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (2007), that had recently been conducted by Amy Goodman on her award-winning daily news show,  Democracy Now!

Perhaps taking a cue from earlier concerns expressed to us by a colleague that such discourse would likely incite antisemitism amongst students enrolled in the course, my evaluator described Kovel’s work as “radical” and “controversial” and “ancillary”to the course (see Kovel’s article in this special issue). In the immediate wake of these events, I was corralled into a closed faculty meeting with the directors of the Film Studies and the interdisciplinary Middle East Studies Programs. There I was asked to resign from the screening series; the director of the Film Studies Program
subsequently refused to purchase films directed by Palestinians for my Spring2008 course on cinema of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and my application for the tenure-track position was quickly bumped from number one on the interviewee list to  persona non grata.  In what follows, I shall explain how NCSU used “anti-Semitism” against me ina particularly ironical fashion that resonates with prior academic cases, for example those involving Finkelstein, William I. Robinson, and Douglas Giles, the flrst two of whom are also Jewish anti-Zionist professors, and the last of whom was also acontingent, untenured instructor at the time. Like Finkelstein and Robinson, theviews I expressed in my scholarly writing and campus speech, both in the classroom and in public, concerning Israel and, in relation, the Holocaust, prompted NCSU faculty to position me as uncollegial and non-objective, ideologically “biased”and value non-neutral—in effect, as both an “anti-Semite” and a “pro-Palestinian” propagandist, and therefore as an undesirable member of the University community.

Like Giles, my untenured employment status made it easier for the University to take  punitive action against me by refusing either to interview me for the tenure-track  position or to renew my contract, or subsequently to permit me a campus hearing after I timely flled a grievance with the NCSU Faculty Senate.
2
I shall contend in this article that accusations of value non-neutrality and “anti-Semitism” against me and other anti-Zionist scholars, regardless of their religious and political (non-) affiliations, are specious because the accusations themselves are “uncollegial” and non-objective, and that negative employment actions taken againstus are unethical and morally suspect—in fact, antisemitic and expressive of particular  political-economic interests. Most criticism of Israel is founded in legitimate—if regularly marginalized—scholarship that is far from antisemitic. In fact, to purport the opposite betrays less of an interest in protecting Jews, much less in fostering critical inquiry, than in perpetuating a prevailing anti- Arab racism, for which it isat the same time acceptable, or at least expected, that persons of Arab or Muslim  background (the latter often becoming conated with the former) should naturally ASQ33_3&4 01 text 22922/09/2011 08:50

230 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY arab studies quarterly.plutojournals.org
criticize Israel, and their speech to that effect tolerated (as long as it doesn’t challenge the basic tenets of Zionism), whereas it is not acceptable—in fact it is intolerable— for Jews to do the same (or more). Even convinced Zionists such as Rabbi Michael Lerner and Justice Richard Goldstone, neither of whom is an academic, have been lambasted and publicly discredited for citing Israel on its irrefutably severe and deadly oppression of Palestinians. I will argue in this article that Jewish criticism of Israel, often smeared as “self-hating” and irrational, is in truth the target of far more dangerous, because profoundly ideological, accusations levied by the very proponents of Zionism who are the real antisemites in this case.

In order to prove this point, we must flrst define “anti-Semitism,” which I shall do  by drawing upon the work of Ora Wise (2005), a Jewish educator whose writing on antisemitism innovatively collocates traditional scholarship on the topic, some of it common knowledge, with important challenges drawn from Wise’s conversations and encounters with the writings of critical scholars such as Finkelstein (2005), Mazin Qumsiyeh (2004), Ilan Halevi (1987), and Joseph Levine (2008), and from her own experiences as an anti-Zionist activist and public intellectual.
3
According toWise, the term anti-Semitic is traceable to Moritz Steinschneider, a Jewish scholar who, in 1869, used it to describe French academic Ernest Renan’s pseudo-scientific theorization of racial hierarchy in the latter’s 1862 Etudes d’histoire réligeuse.

At the bottom of Renan’s hierarchy is found the “Semitic race,” and at its top, the Aryan race.” For his designation of these categories, Renan himself drew upon the writings of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, whose infamous 1853-55 screed, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, is the credited progenitor of the very concept,“race.”

In the subsequent writings of Russian nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke,this usage of the term “anti-Semitism” was promoted to the point that “Semitic” and “Jewish” became nearly synonymous. The related German term antisemitismus was coined by German reactionary Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 book, The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism, Considered from a Non-religious Point of View. By now, the term explicitly signified Jew-hatred, perceived as a rational and scientific means of justifying colonial Europe’s racist practices at home and abroad.

Wise continues that, despite the hyphenated prefix, “anti-Semitic” and “Semitic”are not antonyms. As she notes, renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, a Zionist, advocates in his book,  A History of the Holocaust, for a non-hyphenated spelling of the word: “‘anti-Semitism,’” he says, especially in its hyphenated spelling, is inane nonsense, “because there is no ‘Semitism’ one can be ‘anti’ to” (Bauer, 2001: 38). Although the term has referred historically to prejudice against Jews, in recent decades, arguments have emerged in favor of its applicability to anti-Arab racism and to prejudice against other people(s) who speak “Semitic” languages (Ethiopians, Assyrians). European linguists did identify a sub-group of “Afro-Asiatic” languages they named “Semitic.” The term refers to a family ASQ33_3&4 01 text 23022/09/2011 08:50.

Jonathan Hoffman – Another Victim of anti-Semitism

Hoffman Booted out as Zionist Vice-President

the photo that did it for Hoffman

Hoffman's nemesis - Mick Davies

A glum Hoffman looking worse for wear

It is my sad duty to report another example of the spread of ‘anti-Semitism’. Jonathan Hoffman, veteran of many a picket, especially when the EDL was around, has been sacked as an officer of the Zionist Federation.  It would appear that the Hoffman era has now come to an end.  Well it was fun while it last.

Xtrata and UJIA/JLC boss - Micky Davis - doesn't take criticism from Zionist peti-bourgeois lightly

Yes my dear reader, I can hear you now tut tutting about the injustice of it all.  No one has done more for the Palestinians, sorry I mean Zionism, than Jonathan  Hoffman.  Almost single handedly he rescued the Ahava picket and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.  The photograph of him dancing down the street with the Jewish Nazi & Kach supporter Roberta Moore, ex-fuhreress of the EDL’s Jewish Division, brought forth more unmerited criticism, with even the Union of Jewish Students Daniel Sheldon putting the boot in and attacking him for lying about that particular picture. 

One of the more loveable things about JH was he was easily wound up

But what did it for Hoffman was when he got out of his depths and criticised, via a letter in the Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere, Mick Davis, for pointing out that a minority Jewish state ruling over a majority of Palestinians was inevitably an Apartheid situation.

Hoffman contemplates humiliation at Ahava

Mick Davies is boss of the large mining company Xtrata and head of the (unelected) Jewish Leadership Council and the United Jewish Israel Appeal.  He is no petit-bourgeois Hoffman and Garfield.  When Hoffman got together a petition signed by 60 ultra-right-wing Zionists, that the Jewish Chronicle printed, Mick Davis threatened to sue for libel.  End of petition.  As Davis has, as Hoffman admitted, somewhat deeper pockets than him, he backed down (he has a habit of backing down when threatened with libel – his namesake David Hoffman threatened to sue him when alleged that a photo of him and Roberta Moore was ‘photoshopped’.

The result is that Jonathan Hoffman is no longer an officer of the Zionist Federation.  No doubt there’s been much rending of clothes and wearing of sackcloth in North London this week.
It hasn’t been a good time for Hoffman.  Last month, Hoffman (a supporter of Republic no less!) was told to stop blogging when working as the Greater London Authority’s Chief Economist Advisor!  You can see some of his ‘work’ here.   If you think this is another example of anti-Semitism then Jonathan can be reached at jonathan.hoffman@london.gov.uk.

As for myself, well I was personally responsible for launching the 'Save the Hoffman' campaign but sometimes one just has to admit to defeat.

Tony Greenstein

Zionist Federation elects its new board

 A former IDF lieutenant has been elected the new chair of the Zionist Federation.

Solicitor Paul Charney made aliyah from South Africa in 1986 and served in an armoured division of the Israeli army for four years until 1996.

After moving to Britain he set up a law firm. Mr Charney is a member of Conservative Friends of Israel and previously worked with the Jewish Association of Business Ethics.

He will lead the ZF’s new board, elected at Sunday’s biennial conference. Eric Moonman and former chair Harvey Rose will serve as joint presidents, with Howard Ross and David Duke-Cohan as vice-chairs.

Former vice-president Jonathan Hoffman was not re-elected.

Around 100 people attended and heard from Dr Shimon Samuels, director for international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and Dr Mordechai Kedar, an expert on the Arab world and Palestinian Authority.

ZF director Alan Aziz said: “The conference illustrated how people will use criticism of Israel to showcase their own antisemitism.”

Sodastream Zionists Become Violent as Frustration Shows

Christian Bigot Objected to the Police when I called her a Christian Bigot!

After a frustrated Zionist became violent

Apparently this photo of Zionist women putting on handcuffs is libellous!

Another Successful Mobilisation Against    'Eco' Stream

Once again Brighton PSC and others demonstrated outside Sodastream in Brighton, or Ecostream as it calls itself (!), to express their opposition to the sale of stolen goods from stolen land.  Apart from an incident at the end when a Zionist launched an attack on me, clearly the frustration is showing, the event was remarkably uneventful.  A big thank you to Michael and friend, ex of the Ahava demonstration, for coming down from London.

Oh and one hysterical Zionist woman who accosted me saying that I had libelled her by printing her photo on last week’s report.  Quite how a photograph can be libellous I couldn’t work out unless she believes it paints her as even more unattractive than she is in person!  So I shall reprint it again!

The main theme of the Christian Fundamentalist woman in blue was that the Occupation provides Palestinians with jobs!  I seem to recall that this was the favourite argument of Margaret Thatcher and apologists for Apartheid (South African version).  Apartheid provided jobs and boycotts hurt the Black so, ipso facto, one must oppose Boycott and thereby support Apartheid.  The racism seeps out of the pores of these people.
Tony Greenstein

For more information on Sodastream see codepink, Palestine Chronicle and Jewish Voices 4 Peace

Denis MacShane – Labour Friends of Israel Stalwart and Smear Merchant

The Guardian's Comment is Free always had time for this hypocritical 'opponent' of anti-Semitism and supporter of Bush's CIA coup against Chavez

Fraud Came Naturally to MacShane   -  a CIA supporter who falsely accused Anti-Racists of ‘anti-Semitism’

The 'expert' on anti-Semitism caught out by his own lies

MacShane - Member of Labour Friends of Israel Policy Council - Suitably well qualified!

CIA Supporter MacShane  featured all over 'left' Zionist anti-Boycott site Engage

They say you shouldn’t kick someone when they’re down, but in the case of Denis MacShane I’ll make an exception!   MacShane, a former President of the National Union of Journalist, was a right-wing turncoast of the first order.  As a Minister under Blair, he supported the CIA and Bush’s coup against Hugo Chavez.  He wrote  in the Guardian that:

Some of the references to MacShane on the Engage site

“While the left in Spain, France, Italy and Latin America has always had doubts about the populist, demagogic style of Chavez, he has had a free run in Britain. Ken Livingstone organised meetings to worship him and got involved in a bizarre oil deal. The NUJ [National Union of Journalists] and Labour MPs have made pilgrimages to Caracas to buy the Chávez line.”

MacShane was a strong supporter of the Labour Friends of Israel - as was Robert Maxwell

Some years I wrote an article for the Guardian’s Comment is Free:  Stop conflating anti-Zionism and anti-semitism that:

“barely a murmur has greeted the report of the all parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, chaired by the rightwing Labour MP Denis MacShane, who in a previous life as a junior Foreign Office minister greeted the CIA coup that temporarily overthrew Hugo Chávez of Venezuela by denouncing the latter as "a ranting, populist demagogue" (Hugh O'Shaughnessy, March 12 2007).

MacShane was a right-wing free marketeer and anti-communist of the first order.  It is fitting that someone who supported Bush’s attempt to make Venezuela into another Chile under Pinochet should be the the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, as well of course as a Policy council member of the Labour Friends of Israel

MacShane was caught out fiddling his expenses and creating bogus invoices.  His real crime was trying to protect those who steal and defraud the Palestinians of their land in the name of ‘biblical rights’.  That was the real crime, compared to which his other misdemeanours are trivial.

MacShane - Maxwell - Ronson - Madoff  Zionist Fraudsters All

Robert Maxwell - there is nothing good that can be said of the man who stole from Daily Mirror Pensioners - hence his State Funeral in Israel

 Another Zionist fraudster, somewhat more important and influential than MacShane, was Cap’n Bob Maxwell, owner of Pergamon Press and former MP for Buckingham, as well as the ex-owner of the Daily Mirror, whose pensioners he ripped off in a failed attempt to keep his operations afloat.  As the Association of Mirror Pensioners says, it   

Mount of Olives Cemetry where Robert Maxwell was buried

'was formed in 1990 and its spirited existence continues – though it was formed originally simply to make a legal challenge to Robert Maxwell. Memories are sometimes short and hazy but no pensioner or Mirror employee of the time will forget the traumatic news splashed across all the front pages in December 1991. They confirmed what the Association always knew: Maxwell was a crook. It had taken a month since his plunge into the Atlantic on November 4 to discover that more than £400 million was missing from our pension funds.'

Maxwell,  a dedicated Zionist, was given a state funeral: 

On 10 November 1991, Maxwell’s funeral took place on the Mount of Olives Har Zeitim in Jerusalem, across from the Temple Mount. It had all the trappings of a state occasion, attended by the country’s government and opposition leaders. No fewer than six serving and former heads of the Israeli intelligence community listened as Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: "He has done more for Israel than can today be said" (Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, St. Martin's Press, 1999) 

He was exposed as a Mossad agent and by all accounts killed by them too.

There is little doubt that Maxwell was a Zionist agent according to Yitzhak Shamir's eulogy

This photo of Mount of Olives

See a good account of this particular Zionist crook in Socialist Worker Robert Maxwell: who backed the man who stole the pensions?

Paul Foot the most famous Mirror journalist and SWP member, who was sacked by Cap’n Bob, was one of those who lost his pension. 

‘Maxwell, the BBC publicity material state, “is a gripping, dramatised account of how greed and ambition destroyed a man and led him to commit one of the world’s biggest-ever frauds”.

It is a view of the last 18 months of the life of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror, the New York Daily News and Macmillan Publishing, among a web of more than 400 companies.

Maxwell died mysteriously in 1991, just before the full extent of his fraud, which culminated in ripping off £450 million from the pension funds of the Daily Mirror staff to prop up his media empire, became public.

….

But the essence of Maxwell was not that he was a complex person, but that he was a lifelong bully and thief who ultimately became a monster.
….
long before New Labour, Maxwell was Labour’s businessman. Indeed the whole New Labour operation was about breaking the party’s links with organised workers and bringing in more people like Maxwell.

Among Maxwell’s Labour cronies were Geoffrey Robinson – Tony Blair’s former paymaster general and the man who provided Peter Mandelson with an interest free mortgage.

Robinson was a director of one of Maxwell’s companies. Another crony was Peter Jay, a former ambassador and son-in-law of former Labour prime minster Jim Callaghan.

In 1991, when he was a Mirror journalist, New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell was so attached to Maxwell that he thumped Guardian journalist Michael White for making a quip about “Captain Bob, Bob, Bob” after Maxwell drowned falling from his yacht.

Maxwell did sterling service for the Labour Party. He used his ownership of the Daily Mirror, to run a smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, alleging he was corrupt.

Scargill and the socialist values he represented were seen as a barrier to the “modernisation” of the Labour Party.

The vile attacks, which lasted for the best part of a year, were baseless, yet they did terrible damage.

Another set of Maxwell’s friends who get off far too lightly are those in the boardrooms of the City of London.

These people had known for decades that Maxwell was a crook, but they cared little so long as they got a percentage of the ill gotten gains.

In 1971 a Department of Trade and Industry report said plainly, “Robert Maxwell is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a public company.”

When the official report into Maxwell’s final fraud was published – a decade after the events – it listed numerous organisations. These included:

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, which, said the report, bore “substantial responsibility” for letting Robert Maxwell get away with his manoeuvres. The bank made £23 million profit from its Maxwell dealings. It was fined £160,000.

Samuel Montagu & Co, now part of HSBC bank, masterminded the initial stock market launch of Maxwell’s MGN corporation. The report says it included “inaccurate and misleading” details in the share prospectus.

Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte accountants “failed to report abuses” to pension fund trustees.
Labour peer Lord Donaghue, a Maxwell director, ought to have been able to find out what was going on. But he never asked the obvious questions.

City firms Lehman Brothers, Nikko, Capel Cure Myers, Morgan Grenfell and NatWest Investment Management were all found guilty of breaches of rules.

Crooked Zionist Gerald Ronson was awarded a  CBE in the New Years Honours List - Chairs the Zionist Community Security Trust

Ronson - mega capitalist thief

Mr Ronson, 72, pictured with his wife Gail and daughters Lisa (left), Nicole and Hayley, was honoured for his work over more than 50 years raising and donating more than £100million to charities.

The Guiness Four - Ronson second from left

And then of course there is another mega Zionist crook, Gerald Ronson, who owned the largest private company in Britain, Heron Ltd.  He managed to get himself sent down for a year in the Guiness Scandal but still got himself awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours Lists for 'services to charity'!  Which just goes to show that money will, literally, buy you anything. 
From prison to the palace: Gerald Ronson, jailed for Guiness scam, picks up CBE 24 May 2012

Property tycoon Gerald Ronson received the CBE from the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace yesterday, 22 years after he was jailed for his part in the Guinness share-trading scandal.
 
He spent six months in jail after he and three others were convicted over a scam in which the Guinness share price was boosted during a takeover battle.


Once worth £548million, he has bounced back since his release and was 345th in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List with £220million.

It was bestowed upon the great survivor of the Guinness share-trading scandal in this year’s New Year Honours list for his services to charity - amid controversy over rewards to ‘the Tories’ friends in the City’.

He was accompanied by wife Dame Gail Robinson, 65, who received her title when she was herself honoured for charitable services in 2004, and three of their four daughters, Lisa, Nichole and Hayley.

Afterwards Mr Ronson, said he felt ‘very privileged and honoured’ to receive his CBE for his work over more than 50 years raising and donating more than £100 million to charities including the NSPCC, the Prince’s Trust and Jewish Care.

Beaming: Gerald Ronson with his CBE medal at Buckingham Palace, London following an Investiture ceremony hosted by the Princess Royal

Mr Ronson was jailed in 1990 for his part in the Guinness scam. It is rare for a former prisoner to receive such an honour, and one of his co-defendants, the late Jack Lyons, was stripped of his knighthood after they were convicted along with two other top City figures.

Ronson & Daughters

Lyons, who was spared a 30-month term because of his poor health, was knighted by the 1973 Labour government and had his title taken away by John Major.

Ronson founded Heron Group - now Heron International Plc - when he was 17, brought self service petrol stations to the UK in 1960s and was once the 14th-richest person in Britain and worth £548million.

In 1990 he was, along with Lyons, Ernest Saunders and Anthony Parnes, convicted over Guinness’s £2.7billion takeover of the Scottish drinks group Distillers.

The fraud had the effect of boosting the Guinness share price. As it rose, the group’s offer to Distillers’ shareholders increased in value, helping Guinness fend off a bid from rival Argyll and secure the deal.

Ronson was convicted of conspiring to create a false market, two charges of false accounting and one of theft.

He was fined £5million and sentenced to a year, but freed after six months for good behaviour.
Since his release he has bounced back and this year was ranked equal 345th in the Sunday

Ronson became known in the UK as one of the "Guinness Four" for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s, along with Ernest Saunders and occasional business associates Jack Lyons and Anthony Parnes. He was convicted in August 1990 of one charge of conspiracy, two of false accounting, and one of theft, and was fined £5 million and given a one-year jail sentence, of which he served six months. In 2000 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 1990 trial had been unfair because there had been an improper collusion between the DTI inspectors and the prosecuting authorities.[7] A further appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, that sought to have the Human Rights Act 1998 applied retrospectively, and claimed that the trial jury had been "nobbled", failed in 2001.[8] A final appeal to the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom) failed in 2002.

Ronson now chairs the Community Security Trust charity, which targets anti-Zionists and was responsible for feeding false information to the Home Office on Sheikh Raed Salah. Raed Salah deportation case disintegrates in UK court, but verdict still to follow http://electronicintifada.net/content/raed-salah-deportation-case-disintegrates-uk-court-verdict-still-follow/10935

The Guinness Four (from left): Ernest Saunders, Gerald Ronson, Jack Lyons, Anthony Parnes

Guinness Four fail in fight for acquittal

 Guinness Four graphic


They were convicted in what was dubbed the trial of the 20th century.
But the Guinness Four have failed to win acquittal in what could have been the legal appeal of the 21st.

While the famous black beverage itself may promise rewards to those who wait, Jack Lyons, Anthony Parnes, Gerald Ronson and Ernest Saunders have failed to clear their names after 15 years of legal battles in the UK and on the Continent.

Convictions - achieved thanks to an insider trader who inspired a Hollywood blockbuster, as well as a man once tipped as a Conservative Party leader - have withstood challenges based in part on the evidence of a supergrass who helped sink a £132m drug ring.

Landmark takeover

Friday's decision will come as a particular disappointment to Mr Lyons whose campaigning to "lift a cloud of injustice" prompted the latest hearings.

The Guinness Four

Ernest Saunders: Former Guinness chief executive. Jailed for 5 years, halved on appeal, for false accounting, conspiracy, and theft.

Jack Lyons: Consultant. Fined £3m for theft and false accounting. Stripped of knighthood
Anthony Parnes: Trader. Jailed for 30 months, reduced on appeal to 21 months, for false accounting and theft.

Gerald Ronson: Businessman. Jailed for a year, and fined £5m, for false accounting and theft.

He was in 1986, when asked to advise Guinness on an ambitious takeover proposal, Sir Jack Lyons, a management consultant renowned for his philanthropy, whose acquaintances included former prime minister Sir Edward Heath.

Guinness, with Mr Saunders as chief executive, had hatched plans to buy Distillers, a larger drinks firm which owned whisky brands including Dewars and Johnnie Walker.

The move would consolidate Guinness's transformation, under Mr Saunders' leadership, from a stout brewer into a drinks business of international standing.

And he earned widespread plaudits for pulling off the £2.6bn deal, trumping a bid from foods group Argyll.

'Greed is good'

But, having been the toast of the City, Mr Saunders was within months being grilled by official inspectors.

His downfall was prompted by the arrest for insider dealing of Ivan Boesky, the US arbitrageur who coined the phrase "greed is good", echoed in the film Wall Street.

In a plea bargain, Mr Boesky told US authorities of a share dealing arrangement organised to underpin Guinness's stock price when it was pursuing Distillers, boosting the attractiveness of the bid.

In December 1986, the UK Department of Trade and Industry opened investigations into the takeover, and a month later charged Ernest Saunders with an array of financial offences.
Mr Lyons was charged in October 1997, as a DTI inquiry overseen by promising Conservative minister Michael Howard dug deeper into the mechanics of the deal.

Gerald Ronson, the Heron boss credited with bringing self-service petrol stations to Britain, was charged days later, with the last of the Guinness Four - stock trader Anthony Parnes - charged the following March.

Trial of the century

Companies in Mr Ronson's Heron group were to receive a £5m "success fee" for their support, should the deal come off, the DTI found.

Ernest Saunders in 1996

Ernest Saunders: resumed business career after jail

Mr Saunders had his five-year sentence halved on appeal, and was released from prison after only 10 months when a medical report said he was suffering from the irreversible brain disease Alzheimer's.

Mr Saunders was unable to recall three numbers backwards, or to remember the name of the US president, a psychiatrist said.

Since his release, Mr Saunders has worked as a marketing consultant for the likes of Carphone Warehouse, and is said to consider the Alzheimer's diagnosis an error.

Landmark ruling

Mr Saunders was also, with the rest of the Guinness Four, able to continue a campaign for full acquittal.

While the four suffered rejection in an appeal bought on the basis of evidence relating to City takeover guidelines, Mr Lyons had a conspiracy for conviction quashed in 1995.

And a year later came the landmark ruling which paved the way for the latest appeal.
It was based not on questions of guilt or innocence, but on the way the information presented to the Crown Court had been obtained.

Human rights

For the DTI investigators had, backed by UK law, forced the four men to answer questions under threat of a fine, or two-year jail sentence, if they failed to respond.

European Court of Human Rights: gave key verdict

Yet international human rights guidelines, enshrined into UK law last year in the Human Rights Act, guarantee the accuseds' right to silence should they fear incriminating themselves by talking.

Mr Saunders' conviction was in 1996 ruled "unsafe" by the European Court of Human Rights, which last year issued the same verdict in cases bought by the rest of the Guinness Four.

Further pressure from Mr Lyons saw the convictions of all four men referred to the UK Court of Appeals for this month's hearings.

Supergrass

But while the four said the Human Right Act should apply retrospectively, appeal court judges on Friday cited a precedent rendering the point unarguable.

In any case, "there was and is substantial evidence against the appellants, quite apart from their compelled answers", Lord Justice Rose said.

The judges also rejected claims that the jury in the original trial may have been "nobbled", despite evidence from police informer Michael Michael, who helped earlier this month in the jailing of 34 people.

Relief

So the Four who masterminded a remarkable takeover have proved less successful in achieving a legal coup.

Not that financial regulators will mourn Friday's ruling.

A decision in favour of the Four would have meant that after the two most significant UK fraud investigations of recent years - the Maxwell and Guinness affairs - not a single conviction would have stood.

Ernest Saunders was also remarkable because he is the only person alive known to have recovered from Altzheimer's disease.  Despite being incapable of remembering who he was, he has bounced back into a new business career! [Tony Greenstein]

Bernie Madoff

Bernie Madoff of Ponzi fame - but at least he only stole from thieves

And then of course there is Bernie Madoff, who is in a league of his own, having constructed a Ponzi pyramid scheme which literally raked in billions of dollars.  But Bernie is maybe more deserving of mercy than the rest since his main victims were the rich and Zionist groups like Hadassah and Elie Wiesel. [see It's an Ill-Wind that Blows No Good']

Eritrean refugees protest in front of ministry of defense, Tel aviv

Israel – the ‘Light unto the Nations’ Treats Refugees as ‘Infiltrators’ and Terrorists

 Date: 18 October 2012 20:50:29 BST

Eritrean refugees living in Israel take part in a protest outside Ministry of Defense on October 18, 2012 in Tel Aviv,

The protesters were calling for the ousting of the dictatorship regime in Eritrea, and the release of all political prisoners. they wore demanding as well recognition as refuges and stooping the jailing policy of the Israeli government


Israel's government and its racist Minister Eli Yishai of Shas, refuses to recognise refugees as legitimate.  Zionism, with its demand for a pure Jewish state means that non-Jews shouldn't be admitted (unless they are rich and American/European)

Anti-Apartheid Activists - 'Boycott Israel'

Over 150 Former International Anti-Apartheid activists call on S. Africa’s ANC to boycott Israel

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Geography Lesson

26 October 2012

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At the opening plenary of the African National Congress’ (ANC) 3rd International Solidarity Conference (26-28 October), former Dutch anti-apartheid activist, Adri Nieuwhof, presented a statement on behalf of over 150 former international anti-apartheid activists to the ANC. The call has the support of signatories from more than 19 countries, belonging to over 35 organizations. It also has the backing of long-time international ANC supporters such as E.S. Reddy, Alice Walker, Victoria Brittain and Prexy Nesbitt.

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The statement begins:

“We – former international anti-apartheid activists – supported the ANC and the people of South Africa in their fight for liberation and against apartheid by mobilizing support for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. We succeeded to put the crime of apartheid on the agenda of political parties, trade unions, churches…and concerned citizens. We called on people not to buy apartheid products and we discouraged tourism to the country. We campaigned for a weapons embargo, an oil embargo, a Krugerrand boycott, a sports, academic and cultaural boycott.”
 
The former international anti-apartheid activists then go on to express their “deep concern” regarding Israel’s ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people with “total impunity”.

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The statement by the former international activists (who once mobilized in their countries for the isolation of Apartheid South Africa) specifically calls on the ANC (South Africa’s ruling party) to explicitly support the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel campaign:

“On the occasion of the 3rd ANC International Solidarity Conference, we call on the ANC to support the Palestinian people in their fight for freedom, justice and equality…. We call on the ANC to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as expression of the party’s solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people to enjoy their rights.”
Nieuwhof commented after presenting the statement on behalf of her international anti-apartheid counterparts: “We once galvanized world opinion against Apartheid South Africa, the time is to now galvanize world opinion against Apartheid Israel. I am confident that the ANC will heed our call.”

Signatories to the call include the former United Nations Centre Against Apartheid director, E.S. Reddy; Prexy Nesbitt of the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism; the acclaimed author and US civil rights activist, Alice Walker; Mireille Fanon, the daughter of Frantz Fanon and the current President of the Fanon Foundation; Victoria Brittain from the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement and Kate Gilford of the Mozambique Angola Guinea Bissau Information Committee.

BDS South Africa salutes the former international anti-apartheid activists who have made this call to the ANC and are encouraged by their consistency – they once supported the oppressed South African people, and now the oppressed Palestinians.

The ANC’s 3rd International Solidarity Conference is taking place this weekend in South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria/Tshwane, and will conclude on Sunday the 28th of October.

Read the full statement with the names of all the signatories.

Colin Shindler and the Self-Abasement of the Zionist ‘Left’

Meir Yaari - one of the leaders of Mapam - well versed in the dialectics of colonialism

Shindler's Bleat in the Socialist New York Times

Colin Shindler

How ‘Socialist Zionism’ Ended Up Supporting the Zionist Right & Lieberman

Colin Shindler who, for some reason, is a professor at the School of Oriental & African Studies, is virtually the sole remaining survivor of Mapam in the UK.  Mapam are or rather were, ‘Marxist’ Zionists who believed you could reconcile internationalism and workers solidarity with Zionism.  To them socialism and imperialism were bedfellows.  It has to be said that Colin is not a particularly bright fellow and he refers talking in shallow Zionist soundbites as a substitute for any deeper analysis of the issues.  But one has to take people as one finds them and it has to be admitted that it would take a genius to reconcile Zionism and socialism today.

In 1949 Mapam was the second largest party in Israel’s Knesset, with 19 out of 120 seats. See Israel's Elections - The Death of 2 States and the Zionist Left.  Today Mapam has disappeared into Meretz, the Civil Rights Party, which had a total of 3 seats in the 2009 Israeli elections.  You might have thought Colin, being a professor, might have done some hard and innovative thinking about why it is that Yisrael Beteinu, party of the fascist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman (who has now joined Netanyahu’s Likud) got 5 times as many seats as the rump party of Meretz at the last general election and which gained more even than the Israeli Labour Party (13), which until 1977 had formed every single Israeli government.

Mapam on May Day Parade - socialism once a year

Not a bit of it.  Instead the trite and shallow Shindler wrote an Opinion Piece for the New York Times The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews.  The NYT has just appointed ex-BBC head Mark Thompson, who is not only a Zionist rogue who prevented the Disaster Emergency Committee from making an appeal for the children and victims of Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2009, but is in it up to his neck in the Jimmy Savile cover-up.  Indeed NYT journalists are starting to call for Thompson’s head before he even takes up his post in order that the NYT avoids being tarnished by the cover up of  child abuse in which Thompson is believed to have engaged.  However I digress.

In his Opinion piece Shindler falsely claimed that the European left is reluctant to take a stance where anti-Zionism ‘spills over’ into anti-Semitism.  He gave no examples nor could he.  Instead he mentioned a few examples in France of where Islamists had targeted Jewish synagogues and schools.  All reprehensible and all brought about by those such as Shindler who claim that Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians is carried out on behalf of all Jews, wherever they live.  Unfortunately there are Muslim fools as well as Jewish racists who get taken in by this nonsense.  However what it has to do with the Left beats me.

It would of course have been more honest if Shindler had declared his own cards and explained that he used to be a UK representative of Mapam, a ‘Marxist-Zionist’ party that found the contradictions between socialism and Zionism  too difficult to reconcile and decided to choose nationalism and Zionism rather than socialism.

child pioneers - the image of a country without its indigenous populace

Shindler could have explained how the ‘shooting and crying’ philosophy of Mapam didn’t prevent Mapam from forming the core of the Palmach shock-troops in the 1947-8 Nakba and how they were prime amongst those who massacred and expelled.  How Mapam’s Kibbutz Ha'artzi Federation was also Jewish only and how Mapam’s Kibbutzim were the most eager to confiscate Arab land.  The most notable case being Kibbutz Baram, which was established when the villagers of the Arab village of Birim were persuaded to vacate their lands during the fighting and promised they would be allowed back after the fighting ended.  In the meantime Mapam’s ‘socialists’ took the land over and refused to relinquish it.  Even Menachem Begin, the Likud leader, supported the Arab villagers!

Mapam May Day Rally

Or Shindler could have explained why, when Israel attacked Egypt during the Suez War and Ben-Gurion was forced to withdraw his troops, Mapam stated a demonstration against withdrawal.  Hardly the actions of socialist internationalists!

I know no one on the Left who has any problem at all in denouncing bomb attacks against European Jews.  The real problem is that most far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Europe support Israel and Zionism!  In the UK, the fascist English Defence League march with Israeli flags as they attack ‘Muslims’.  A phenomenon that Shindler 'forgot' to mention.  Just as he forgot to mention the meetings between Ron Prossor, Israel’s UN Ambassador and Marine Le Pen, who is equally hostile to Muslims.

Shindler is equally wrong to suggest that European leftists identify with Political Islam.  We all know it is a reactionary political current.  But we also recognise that it was western imperialism – be it in Saudia Arabia, Afghanistan or indeed the Gaza Strip in the 1980’s, where the USA and Israel itself which backed Islamists against their secular opponents.  Indeed it was the Israeli government under Netanyahu in the 1980’s which helped create the very Hamas they decry today.

The suggestion Shindler makes, that there is any divorce between the Left’s hatred of Nazi Germany and its anti-colonial tradition is absurd.  Socialists have always opposed Apartheid in South Africa and the colonisation of Africa and the Middle East.  The Left was unanimously opposed to the Suez War and likewise Jean Paul Sartre, who Shindler quotes, was vehemently opposed, unlike Israeli ‘socialist’ Zionists, to the French colonisation of Algeria.  Of course there was a generation of the European Left who were so traumatised by the Nazi genocide of the Jews that they supported a Jewish state in Palestine not realising that one wrong could not undo another.  But they have long since recognised the error of their ways - people like Tony Benn and even Gerald Kaufmann.

But perhaps Shindler has forgotten what Marx wrote in respect of Ireland and the British working class.  ‘A nation that oppresses another nation shall not itself be free.’

What Shindler cannot and will not understand is that a ‘Jewish’ state in the context of support by western imperialism, cannot be other than one in which being Jewish means being privileged.  That is demonstrated in the Ha'aretz opinion poll of 23rd October in which 59 percent, supported preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to government jobs, 49 percent wanted the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones and 42 percent didn’t want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don't want their children in the same class with Arab children.

This is the ugly reality that Professor Colin Shindler, in his berating of the European left chooses to ignore.  Unfortunately the idea of Jewish jobs and Jewish land were not inventions of the right-wing Zionists but his socialist Zionist compatriots.  It was not Likud who campaigned in the 1920s and 1930s for Jewish Labour, Land and Produce but the Labour Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair (Mapam’s forerunners) included.

The real story that Shindler doesn’t tell is that ‘socialist’ Zionism only came about as an attempt to reconcile the irreconcileable.  Zionism began by rejecting the fight against anti-Semitism.  However the Jewish masses of the Russian Pale of Settlement first and foremost had to defend themselves against the pogromists.   It was impossible, if Zionism was to achieve any base, for them to abstain entirely from the fight against the anti-Semites.  Socialist Zionism was always a hybrid creature.  In Russia,  Poalei Zion collapsed into the Bolsheviks and in Warsaw in the fight against the Nazis, Left Poalei Zion (there was also a Right PZ), which the historian Emanuel Ringelblum of Oneg Shabbat was a member of, joined forces with the anti-Zionist Bund and was virtually an anti-Zionist group itself by the end.

Socialist Zionism was always a miserable creature and it is better that Zionism has come out in its true colours.  However there are still one or two left-overs from the 'socialist' Zionists, like Colin Shindler, who have learnt nothing from their abject defeat.

Tony Greenstein
 
Opinion

The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews

 LAST week, Twitter shut down a popular account for posting anti-Semitic messages in France. This came soon after the firing of blanks at a synagogue near Paris, the discovery of a network of radical Islamists who had thrown a hand grenade into a kosher restaurant, and the killing of a teacher and young pupils at a Jewish school in Toulouse earlier this year. The attacks were part of an escalating campaign of violence against Jews in France.

Today, a sizable section of the European left has been reluctant to take a clear stand when anti-Zionism spills over into anti-Semitism. Beginning in the 1990s, many on the European left began to view the growing Muslim minorities in their countries as a new proletariat and the Palestinian cause as a recruiting mechanism. The issue of Palestine was particularly seductive for the children of immigrants, marooned between identities.

Capitalism was depicted as undermining a perfect Islamic society while cultural imperialism corrupted Islam. The tactic has a distinguished revolutionary pedigree. Indeed, the cry, “Long live Soviet power, long live the Shariah,” was heard in Central Asia during the 1920s after Lenin tried to cultivate Muslim nationalists in the Soviet East once his attempt to spread revolution to Europe had failed. But the question remains: why do today’s European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?

In recent years, there has been an increased blurring of the distinction between Jew, Zionist and Israeli. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant group Hezbollah, famously commented: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”
Whereas historically Islam has often been benevolent toward Jews, compared to Christianity, many contemporary Islamists have evoked the idea of “the eternal Jew.” For example, the Battle of Khaybar in 629, fought by the Prophet Muhammad against the Jewish tribes, is recalled in victory chants at Hezbollah rallies: “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return,” and the name Khaybar sometimes graces Hezbollah rockets aimed at Israel.

Many contemporary Islamists see little difference between the Jewish opponents of the prophet in seventh-century Arabia and Jews today. Importing old symbols of European anti-Semitism — depictions of Jews as enemies of God or proclamations of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy — has helped cement such imagery. If there is a distinction between Islamic anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism, it has been lost on French Islamists.

The fear of Jewish domination of the Middle East has become a repetitive theme in the Islamist media — which has become more influential as religious parties have gained ground in the wake of the Arab Spring. This is a factor in the general refusal of the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas to publicly meet members of the Israeli peace camp — a far cry from when Palestinian nationalists willingly negotiated with dovish Israelis before the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn.

The old left in Europe was forged in the struggle against local fascists in the 1930s. Most of Europe experienced a brutal Nazi occupation and bore witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The European left strongly identified with Jewish suffering and therefore welcomed the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. Some viewed the struggle for Israel in the same light as the fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War.

But the succeeding generation of the European left did not see things this way. Its frame of reference was the anticolonial struggle — in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia and a host of other places. Its hallowed icon was not the soldier of the International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain, but Che Guevara — whose image adorned countless student bedrooms. Anticolonialism further influenced myriad causes, from America’s Black Panthers in the 1960s to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.

It began with Israel’s exclusion from the ranks of the nonaligned nations more than 50 years ago, when Arab states refused to attend a 1955 nonaligned conference in Indonesia if an Israeli delegate was present. The Jewish state was snubbed in favor of such feudal kingdoms as Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen. And Israel’s collusion with imperial powers like Britain and France during the Suez crisis the following year cemented its ostracism.

Given the deep remorse for the misdeeds of colonialism, it was easier for the New Left of the 1960s to identify with the emerging Palestinian national movement than with the already established social democratic Israel. This deepening hostility toward Israel was present in Europe before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and before the rush to build settlements on the West Bank.

AMID this rising hostility toward Israel, the French philosopher and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre advocated a different way forward. He was scarred by the memory of what had happened to France’s Jews during World War II — the discrimination, betrayals, deportations and exterminations. He understood the legitimacy of Israel’s war for independence and later commented that the establishment of the state of Israel was one of the few events “that allows us to preserve hope.” Yet Sartre also strongly supported Algeria’s fight for independence from France.

This double legacy of supporting Israel and the Algerian struggle symbolized the predicament of the entire postwar European left. Sartre argued that the left shouldn’t choose between two moral causes and that it was up to the Jews and the Arabs to resolve their conflict through discussion and negotiation. Sartre tried to create a space for a dialogue, lending his name and prestige to private and public meetings between the two sides such as the Comité Israël-Palestine in the 1970s. His approach reached its apogee with the many quiet meetings between Israelis and Palestinians in Europe that eventually led to the Oslo accords. But Sartre’s vision was stymied as Israeli settlements proliferated after 1977, strengthening the left’s caricature of Israel as an imperialist power and a settler-colonial enterprise. Some prominent voices on the European left have mouthed time-honored anti-Semitic tropes in their desire to appear supportive of the Palestinian cause. Ken Livingstone, a former newspaper editor and mayor of London, has a long history of insensitive remarks about Jews — from publishing a cartoon in 1982 of Menachem Begin, then Israel’s prime minister, in Gestapo uniform atop a pile of Palestinian skulls to likening a known Jewish reporter to “a concentration camp guard” 20 years later. Today, he contributes to Press TV, the English-language outlet for the Iranian government.

Sometimes the left distinguishes between vulnerable European Jews who have been persecuted and latter-day “Prussians” in Israel. Yet it is often forgotten that a majority of Israelis just happen to be Jews, who fear therefore that what begins with the delegitimization of the state will end with the delegitimization of the people.

Such Israelophobia, enunciated by sections of the European left, dovetailed neatly with the rise of Islamism among Palestinians and throughout the Arab world. The Islamist obfuscation of “the Jew” mirrored the blindness of many a European Marxist. Despite the well-intentioned efforts of many Jews and Muslims to put aside their differing perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the offensive imagery of “the Jew” has persisted in many immigrant communities in Western Europe. Islamists were willing to share platforms with socialists and atheists, but not with Zionists.
The New Left’s profound opposition to American power, and the convergence of reactionary Islamists and unquestioning leftists was reflected in the million-strong London protest against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was organized by the Muslim Association of Britain, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain. When some Muslims voiced apprehension about participating in the protest with non-Muslims, the M.A.B. leadership decreed that it was religiously permissible if halal food was provided and men and women were given separate areas. Such displays of “reactionary clericalism,” as the early Bolsheviks would have called it, were happily glossed over.

Sartre understood that the conflict was not simply between Israelis and Palestinians, but between those advocating peace on both sides and their rejectionists. This conflict within the conflict is something that many on Europe’s left, as they ally themselves with unsavory forces, still fail to comprehend.

Instead, the swallowing up of both the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps by political polarization has accelerated the closing of the progressive mind. And static fatalism has allowed the assailant of synagogue congregants and the killer of young children to fill the vacuum.

Colin Shindler is an emeritus professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of “Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimization.”This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 28, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the city in France where a teacher and pupils at a Jewish school were killed earlier this year. It was Toulouse, not Strasbourg. 
In addition, the biographical note misstated the name of the institution where the writer, Colin Shindler, is a professor. It is the School of Oriental and African Studies —   not the School of African and Oriental Studies — at the University of London.