Francesca Albanese - False Allegations of Anti-Semitism Against UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine for Mentioning a ‘Jewish Lobby’

 When accusations of ‘anti-Semitism are used to Justify Israeli War Crimes then all you do is make anti-Semitism respectable

Death to the Arabs demonstration in Jerusalem - like the Nazis?

On 14 December The Times of Israel revealed that Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories had, on July 31 2014 published an open letter  on Facebook attacking the United States and Europe for criticising the victims of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. Israel murdered over 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, in Operation Protective Edge.

In her post Albanese said:

“America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities,”

Although it would have been more accurate to use the term ‘pro-Israel lobby’ there was nothing anti-Semitic about her post. Those who attack Albanese do such so with all the sincerity of righteous hypocrites. The hypocrisy of the Zionists is like the US government giving lectures on human rights to China or Hitler complaining of racial discrimination against the Sudeten Germans.

The Israeli Mission to the UN didn’t bother to hide its real agenda.

​Antisemitism is a persistent malice that has infected the United Nations Human Rights Council for far too long.

It would have been more honest if the Israeli Mission had simply said that talk of human rights for Palestinians was in itself anti-Semitic. After all Bezalel Smotrich, who is now in charge of the Civil (actually Military) Administration in the West Bank only recently declared that human rights organisations are an  ‘existential threat’ to Israel. This is the real agenda of those who are attacking Albanese.

Naturally Deborah Lipstadt, a junk holocaust historian and Biden’s ‘anti-Semitism’ envoy got into the act saying that

Such blatant antisemitic rhetoric — particularly when it’s an established pattern — is simply unacceptable.

Lipstadt is the same person who accused Jewish supporters of BDS of enabling anti-Semitism. She described anti-Zionism, which used to be the majority position of all Jews, as anti-Semitic in itself. It’s no wonder that Lipstadt has been so silent about Jewish neo-Nazis being Cabinet Ministers in the new Israeli government.

The fact is that the pro-Israel lobby, in particular the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does sees itself as a Jewish  lobby. They are also seen by other Jewish organisations as a Jewish lobby.

For example AIPC engineered the defeat of Senator Charles Percy, a moderate Republican from Illinois, in his re-election campaign in 1984 after he had declined to support an AIPAC-sponsored letter and referring to Yasser Arafat as a “moderate”. AIPAC contributors raised more than a million dollars to help defeat Percy. Tom Dine, the Executive Director of AIPAC, boasted shortly after Percy’s defeat:

“all the Jews, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians —  those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message.”

Jews you notice, not Israel supporters or Zionists, celebrated. In 2005, Steven Rosen, then a senior official with AIPAC, told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker.

“You see this napkin?” Rosen asked Goldberg. “In twenty-four hours, [AIPAC] could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

When Senator Bernie Sanders said he would not attend AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington, DC, because he was

concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.

the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations [CPMAJO] called Sanders’ words “irresponsible and counterproductive,” saying, “AIPAC brings together a bipartisan diversity of all sectors of society from across the political spectrum.”

Why should these American Jewish groups feel the need to defend AIPAC if it is only a pro-Israel organisation? Clearly they see being Jewish and pro-Israel as one and the same thing.

Bear in mind that Donald Trump, the anti-Semitic President of the USA, who believes that Jews owe Israel their loyalty, was directly responsible for the largest massacre of Jews in the US’s history when 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh died. These groups kept silent about Trump’s responsibility then.

It is impossible to draw a line between AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby on the one hand and the Jewish community and Jewish organisations on the other. That is as true of the United States as Britain. Indeed it is worse in Britain.

The Greater Miami Jewish Federation lets the cat out of the bag with its explanation of who AIPAC was and where it had come from:

AIPAC was established in 1954 by leaders of the American Jewish community who recognized that Israel’s needs could not be satisfied by philanthropy alone. The economic, military and political support necessary for Israel’s survival could only come from the U.S. government. AIPAC’s mission ever since has been to nurture and advance the U.S.-Israel relationship.

In other words AIPAC, which is an openly pro-Israel lobby group, was founded by the leaders of America’s Jews. It is nothing but hypocrisy to then turn around and complain about the use of the words ‘Jewish Lobby’.

Likewise Alma, a Jewish Feminist group asked What are the different American Jewish organizations that focus on Israel? before listing AIPAC and the Zionist Organisation of America as Jewish groups. I have to confess I didn’t hear any complaints.

It may be that Albanese misspoke but anti-Semitism it is not. It’s like suggesting that associating the Mafia with Italians is racist.

The hypocrisy of these attacks on Albanese is even more nauseating when you consider that Zionists, when discussing amongst themselves, make no distinction between being Jewish and Zionist.

That is why if you are anti-Zionist you are called anti-Semitic or worse (Kapos, self hater etc.). But occasionally the mask slips. The Zionists themselves talk about a Jewish Lobby.

Alex Brummer, a Jewish Chronicle columnist and City Editor of the Daily Mail referred  to the Jewish Lobby in the Jewish Chronicle of 5 December 2003 without any protest.  In an article Straws in the Wind or More Hot Air  Brummer described AIPAC as ‘one of the more right-wing and effective of the Jewish lobby groups’. I don’t recall any protests about anti-Semitism but of course Brummer was a right-wing Zionist.

Similarly the then Prince Charles referred in a private letter to Lauren van der Post to the 'Jewish Lobby':

“Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US? I must be naive, I suppose!” 

In the Jewish Chronicle of 11 April 2008 Nathan Guttman, in an article 'Alternative' US Lobby prepares to launch’ referred to 'attempts to create an alternative Jewish lobby'.  Again I don't recall any howling about anti-Semitism from the usual suspects.

The fact is that the Zionist lobby considers itself a Jewish lobby and then criticises anyone who calls them out. It’s much like the IHRA so-called definition of anti-Semitism which states that

‘Manifestations [of anti-Semitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.’

Yet the IHRA also states that ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is also anti-Semitic!  In other words anti-Semitism can mean anything the Zionists want it to mean. All that matters, as Humpty Dumpty observed, is ‘which is to be master.’

There was a similar outbreak of political hypocrisy when Gerald Kaufman, the former Jewish Labour MP, referred to ‘Jewish money’. The Zionists howled about anti-Semitism yet I found nearly 600 references to Jewish money in the Jewish Chronicle. The Witchhunt of Gerald Kaufman - Crucified for Supporting the Palestinians.

Even worse, Albanese compared Israel and its works to Nazi Germany! According to the ToI in 2015 she shared a picture of a Nazi trooper and a Jewish man side by side with an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian. Even worse in an interview with Italian media compared the Nakba, the Zionist mass expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians, to the Holocaust.

The Times of Israel solemnly informed us that ‘comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is considered antisemitic’ according to the IHRA. To compound her crimes ‘Albanese has recently spoken out against the IHRA definition.’ Clearly the woman is shameless and beyond help!!

Let us put to one side that Israeli leaders have regularly compared Palestinian or Arab opponents to the Nazis and Hitler since Zionist leaders have a free pass when it comes to such comparisons. The policy of the Nazis when they came to power in 1933 was to expel not to murder its Jewish citizens. That came later in 1941 onwards.

Ben-Gvir, Israel's new Security Minister led the mobs chanting Death to the Arabs

The most popular slogan amongst anti-Semites in 1930s Europe was ‘Death to the Jews’. Is it really anti-Semitic to point out that in Israel today, the favourite chant of Jewish mobs is ‘death to the Arabs’? The third largest political bloc in the Knesset today is led by the political representatives of those who cry for the murder of all Palestinians.

There are many comparisons between pre-1939 Nazi Germany and Israel. Israel, like Nazi Germany, is an ethno nationalist state. The French Revolution established for the first time the idea of a separation between church and state. The Israeli state is a throwback to the feudal era in the age of imperialism.

Geoffrey Alderman, a devoted Zionist and the historian of British Jewry poured scorn on the IHRA and its equating comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany as anti-Semitic. Alderman noted that many countries have been accused of behaving like Nazis. Tom Segev, an Israeli historian observed:

All Israeli governments have used the Holocaust as a political argument. Every Arab leader since 1948 has been compared at least once to Hitler. All Arab countries have compared Israel to the Nazis.

Netanyahu even claimed that Hitler would never have perpetrated the holocaust but for the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.

In my book Zionism During the Holocaust I quote Israeli historian, Professor Idith Zertal as describing how, in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, how Israel has exploited the holocaust:

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.[1]

Zertal also described how, during the Nakba in 1948, Yosef Nahmani, a senior officer of Haganah, was stunned by the cruelty of Israeli troops. He described how in Safsaf, the villagers raised the white flag but 60-70 men and women were massacred and asked: ‘Where did they learn cruel conduct such as that of the Nazis?’ According to one officer, ‘The most eager were those who had come from the [concentration] camps…’ According to Zertal

there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics’.

Every war has been an ‘existential’ one. The Green Line between Israel and the West Bank was called the ‘Auschwitz borders’ by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban .

Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest, before Netanyahu’s anti-Semitic friend Viktor Orban shut it down, wrote that

a profound existential "Angst" fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief, shared by so many today, I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, "this must never happen again," and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again.

So when we read the statement of Michèle Taylor, U.S. ambassador to the UNHRC that ‘We are appalled,” about Albanese’s comments we should recognise the doublethink of US imperialism. Not once has the US condemned the racism of the apartheid state that it funds.

In the West Bank there are 2 legal systems for 2 different peoples – Palestinians and Jewish settlers, yet the US has the effrontery to condemn Albanese whilst funding Israeli apartheid. Such is the hypocrisy of imperialism and its condemnation of ‘anti-Semitism’.

This was before the Ukrainian War - now the Azov Battalion is kosher

Whitewashing neo-Nazis: The CPMAJO & the ADL 

Among the numerous  Zionist groups, who are members of the CPMAJO is the Anti-Defamation League. It describes itself as an anti-hate group though Black Lives Matter repeatedly called it a racist pro-cop organisation. 

Up till the war in Ukraine the ADL hadn't hesitated to call the Azov Battalion a neo-Nazi group. But once the war had started ADL began to white wash it. On November 9 the ADL issued an email stating that it “does not” consider Azov as the “far right group it once was.” 

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)

On 17 March Electronic Intifada published an extraordinary interview by Andrew Srulevitch, ADL's director of European affairs with David Fishman, of the academic committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

“We’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA … and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII,” Srulevitch asked. “Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?”

Fishman replied that:

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons,” 

“For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine,” 

As Ali Abunimah noted, Fishman’s lie that Bandera and other Nazi collaborators are “symbols” of the “fight for Ukrainian independence” mirrored the claims from American white supremacists that their display of the Confederate battle flag is merely to honor their “heritage”.

Fishman is an Academic Prostitute willing to harness his academic reputation to the political needs of Zionism. Daniel Lazare, in Who Was Stepan Bandera? wrote that Bandera’s OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists]

had played a leading role in the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in Lviv and dozens of other Ukrainian cities on the heels of the German invasion, and now they served the Nazis by patrolling the ghettoes and assisting in deportations, raids, and shootings. 

Beginning in early 1943, OUN members formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their first major act was an ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at driving Poles out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia.

“When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question,” a Polish underground source quoted a UPA leader as saying. “We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.”

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe in Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, wrote that UPA killed 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives, and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off.

Simultaneously, UPA mounted attacks on Jews that were so ferocious that Jews actually sought the protection of the Germans. “The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews,” a survivor testified in 1948. “Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews.”

Yet CPMAJO has no problem  with one of its constituent organisations, ADL, whitewashing and justifying Bandera and his OUN/UPA which participated in the murder of 1.5 million Jews with the Nazis.

Tony Greenstein

See History of Fascism in Ukraine Part II: The OUN during World War 2, 1941-1945   

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[1]        Zertal, p. 100.

Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn - The Time Has Come to Break With the Labour Party

Labour has Expelled Anti-Racists & Anti-Zionists Whilst Welcoming Islamaphobes, Zionists & Misogynists 

It is time to Create a New Party of the Working Class and Oppressed

Dear Jeremy,

There are very few things in life, apart from our leaving of it, which we can predict with any certainty. But of one thing I am sure. You will not be a Labour Party candidate at the next election.

When you said that the political establishment, from the Sun to the Mirror, the Times to the Guardian, was waging an all-out war against you you were right.  There was nothing that they feared more than an opponent of neo-liberalism, NATO and imperialism. You stood for hope and change which is why, at the 2017 General Election you nearly won despite the wall to wall opposition of the British Establishment.

The tragedy, and it is a tragedy, is that you tried to appease those who are unappeasable. Instead of fighting back you adopted their narrative. You failed to realise that when a wild animal attacks, you need to shoot it not offer it your arm in the hope it spares the rest of you! This was your clear failure.

Almost from the start you sought to placate your opponents. When 97% of the constituencies supported Open Selection of MPs in 2018, it was you who persuaded Len McLuskey to break the mandate of Unite and vote against it. This was the pivotal moment when the Corbyn Project came to an end.

How did Starmer and the Right regain control of the Labour Party? Was it by arguing that we should transfer even more money to the super rich? That we needed to wage a few more wars? Did Wes Streeting argue, as he does now, that we need to privatise the NHS even more when it was privatisation that led to the deaths of thousands of people from COVID when outsourcing of PPE meant that there no stocks available to the NHS when the pandemic broke?

Of course not. Instead they said that you were an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews. Suddenly the Islamaphobic and racist Labour Right donned the clothes of anti-racism. Jews (but not anyone else of course) were the victims of racism.

You above all people should have known that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the only response of apologists for Israel’s Apartheid State. They have nothing else to say when defending the murder of children .

When you were accused of anti-Semitism, instead of realising that this was because of your support for the Palestinians you kept repeating that you weren’t anti-Semitic. The Zionists weren’t concerned about your attitude to Jews. You repeated the nonsense that if you deny you are anti-Semitic then you are part of the problem.

Those who accused you of ‘anti-Semitism’ were the same people who, like Tom Watson, had defended Labour MP Phil Woolas when the High Court threw him out of Parliament after a campaign based on ‘making the White folk angry.’

Tom Watson, who declared that he wouldn’t rest easy until every last anti-Semite was expelled, wrote that ‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.’ These were the same people who introduced the Hostile Environment Policy under Alan Johnson.

If anti-Semitism had been a genuine problem in the Labour Party then Watson, Margaret Hodge and co. wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.  When Hodge proposed all-White housing waiting lists in Barking the BNP sent her a bunch of flowers.

Historically anti-Semitism has been the home of the Labour Right not the Left. When Ramsay MacDonald came back from a visit to Palestine, the guest of the Labour Zionists, he wrote:

‘The rich plutocratic Jew (who) is the true economic materialist is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ [1]  

Do you know who printed this garbage? Poalei Zion, which now calls itself the Jewish Labour Movement!

In September 1942 the Coalition Government received pleas to admit Jews from Vichy France which 2 months later was overrun by the Nazis. The Home Secretary was Labour’s Herbert Morrison, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson. What was his reaction?

Lesley Clare Urbach wrote that:

Fearing that Britain would be inundated with appeals to take in refugees if the government allowed humanitarian reasons as a basis of admitting Jews to Britain, Morrison advised the cabinet to reject these requests.

 You might think, given all the nonsense about ‘left’ anti-Semitism by the Labour Right and the ex-left AWL that it was the Left that consigned Jewish refugees to death in Auschwitz.

In October 1942 Eleanor Rathbone MP and Lord Astor asked Morrison to issue 2,000 visas for Jewish children and the elderly in Vichy France. Morrison rejected the request stating that ‘anti-Semitism was under the pavement and that if we let in large numbers of Jews this would cause an anti-Semitic outburst.’

Fear of ‘anti-Semitism’ was apparently the reason for consigning these people to Auschwitz, despite nearly 80% of British people supporting their entry. In other words the anti-Semites had a veto.

But this was not the real reason. When told that they were in danger of being exterminated Morrison responded that ‘of this fact he was not sure.’ In other words Morrison was a holocaust denier.

Morrison feared that after the war these Jews ‘might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.’[Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, pp. 115-116]. Morrison’s real fear was of Communist Jews .

I was the first Jewish member to be expelled from the Labour Party. I was suspended because I had compared Israel’s refusal to allow Jews and non-Jews to marry to Nazi Germany where, under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews and non-Jews could not marry. I was expelled for calling Louise Ellman MP a supporter of Israeli child abuse for defending the Israeli army’s treatment of children. Apparently I had ‘shamed’ her even though the woman is shameless.

Instead of defending me and all the others who were being targeted you did the opposite. On page 306 Labour’s Leaked Report read that:

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were expelled or forced out of the party. Did you rebuild trust with the ‘Jewish community’, i.e. the Board of Deputies and JLM?  Of course not. They went on to demand more victims like Chris Williamson MP, Pete Willsman etc.

I have fought racism and fascism all my life.  I’ve even written the only book on the fight against fascism in Brighton. Marc Wadsworth introduced Stephen Lawrence’s family to Nelson Mandela, which helped build the campaign that led to the conviction of his murderers.

Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish anti-racist led the campaign to stop Nigel Farage being elected in Thanet and Ken Livingstone pioneered anti-racism work in local government yet, as Marc said, you threw us under the bus until there was no one left but you.

Of course there were a few anti-Semites in the Labour Party. It would be surprising if there weren’t in a party of 600,000. But there were a hell of a lot more Islamaphobes that no one was concerned about.

No doubt Labour has a few paedophiles in its ranks but does anyone say that Labour has a ‘problem’ with paedophillia? Of course not. If the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign had been in good faith then they would have turned their attention to Boris Johnson, whose novel 72 Virgins spoke of Jewish media moguls with big noses rigging elections.

Did it never occur to you that the demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ that the Board of Deputies organised outside Parliament in March 2018 had nothing to do with anti-Semitism? In its 260 year history the Board has never organised an anti-racist demonstration.

In October 1936 when Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists threatened to march through the Jewish East End, over 200,000 Jewish and non-Jewish workers rose up to stop them. In what became known as the Battle of Cable Street the fascists were repulsed. What was the attitude of the BOD? It told Jews to stay at home, keep their heads down and do nothing.

In my book, Zionism During the Holocaust, I describe how, when news of the deportations of Jews, from Slovakia to Auschwitz, broke in the Spring of 1942, the Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews organised a demonstration and asked for the Board’s co-operation.

The Board refused. Their demands ‘went against the grain’ of their passive attitude to anti-Semitism. The Federation held a public demonstration and a rally anyway. The Bishop of London, two Christian MPs and the Czech Interior and Rehabilitation Ministers spoke, but not the Board. Both the Secretary, Abraham Brotman, and the President, Selig Brodetsky, refused to attend.

Corbyn on what he likes in Israel

Yet the Board, which refused to organise demonstrations against the Nazis and which opposed the Boycott of Nazi Germany, was only too happy to organise a demonstration against you. Is it not obvious that the only concern of these Zionists was support for Israel?

Only two days ago Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi, the Secretary of Jewish Voices for Labour, was expelled from the Labour Party for having committed the crime of getting elected to Labour’s NEC. Today if you are Jewish you are 5-6 times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party. This is what Starmer’s pledge to ‘tear out the poison of anti-Semitism’ has amounted to.

Not only is Starmer a ‘Zionist without qualification’ i.e. a racist but he is a liar and fraud who said anything to get elected Leader. Like all scoundrels he has wrapped himself in the Butcher’s Apron. No sooner was he elected than he dumped the 10 pledges on which he stood. His treatment of you is a shocking act of duplicity but why the hell did you appoint him in the first place? Were you unaware of his role in the persecution of Julian Assange? His first vote in 2015 was to abstain on the Tory Welfare ‘Reforms’.

The removal of the Whip from you, the blatant gerry mandering and fixing of reselections such as Ian Byrne and Sam Parry, the racist and misogynist hounding of Apsama Begum, whose former husband has been allowed to wage a campaign of harassment against her, to say nothing of his support for Khalid Mahmoud, a front bencher who was found by an Employment Tribunal to have unfairly dismissed Elaina Cohen for whistleblowing about the corruption of her boss tells you everything you need to know about this legal shyster.

I don’t say that you were the main culprit in the defeat of the Corbyn Project. That accolade belongs to Jon Lansman of Momentum and John MacDonnell with a supporting role by Owen Jones.

200,000 people have left the Labour Party. The Left has been defeated and the Right are determined to ensure that never again can a socialist be elected as leader of the Party. Democracy has been abolished, left-wing pressure groups proscribed and anti-Semitism openly used as a factional weapon by the right. At the same time Islamaphobes like Trevor Philips, who believes Muslims are a ‘nation within a nation’ are readmitted to Starmer Labour.

There isn’t a piece of paper that you could put between Starmer and Sunak. Indeed sometimes they are to the right of the Tories as with Yvette Cooper’s demand for more refugees to be deported.

Starmer has failed to give any support to striking workers. Far from criticising the government’s failure to restore the nurses’ pay to what it was in 2017 Starmer has criticised their demand for a 19% increase. Yet there hasn’t been a squeak by Starmer at the 23% average increase in the pay for FTSE 100 Chief Executives.

Labour under Starmer is a neo-liberal party of capitalism. It stands for nothing and promises nothing. It rejects the call for the return to public ownership of rail and the privatised utilities despite two-thirds of the population supporting renationalisation.

The 200,000 who have left the Labour Party have not gone away nor have the nearly 13 million people who voted for Labour’s 2017 Manifesto. Parties exist, not as an end in themselves, but as vehicles for social change. The Labour Party is not that party.

It is time for you to make a clean break with Starmer’s Labour Party and lead the fight for a socialist party that stands for the interests of ordinary working class people. In the process you will encourage some of your colleagues to also make a break. The Labour Party stands for war, poverty and continued privatisation. It is time for you to make amends for the failure to fight the Right when it was possible.

In solidarity,

Tony Greenstein

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[1]        A Socialist in Palestine, p. 6.  Poalei Zion Publication, 1922, London,

Xmas Appeal for Jenin’s Al Tafawk Children’s Centre

 18 Months Ago, During the Bombing Of Gaza, Israel’s Military Destroyed the Centre. They Even Tore Up Children’s Books

Please donate to our Xmas Fundraiser

https://gofund.me/c73095a6

In May 2021, whilst Israel was bombing Gaza and killing another 60 children the Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces were busy at work in Jenin. Having nothing better to do they raided the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre ‘looking for arms’.

And just to be sure that they weren’t hidden anywhere they took door handles off doors, destroyed the stairs, smashed up the water pipes and as the icing on the cake one Jewish Nazi tore up the children’s books.  All you understand as part of a search for arms because where better to find a revolver than between the pages of nursery rhymes?

The reason given for this last act of destruction was that the children would only grow up to be ‘murderers’ and so there really was no need to read.  Those with an eye to history will remember the speech of Heinrich Himmler on October 6 in Posen, Poland to the Higher SS Police commanders when he explained why Jewish children also had to die.  It was because they too would become murderers and avenge their parent’s deaths.

Only two days ago 3 Palestinians were murdered and 8 injured when the Israeli military shot up a car. This continuous wave of attacks, meant to stem the growing Palestinian resistance has made Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, Israel’s prime target alongside Nablus.

Mahmoud - a child murdered with impunity by Israeli soldiers earlier this year

The Al Tafawk Children’s Centre plays a key part in ensuring that the children of the Jenin refugee camp have somewhere to go, a place of safety. Yet even here tear gas wafts in as bored Israeli soldiers fire off a few volleys at the Centre. Their outside garden has been trampled on by the military and there is a constant threat to the children as the military eyes the Centre from outside.

The Al Tafawk Centre offers a place for children to play in relative safety

The reason is clear.  Any Palestinian civil organisation is a threat to Israel’s desire to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. As Prime Minister Yair Lapid, the moderate you will remember, said – Israel’s goal is ‘maximum land and maximum Jews’.

With openly fascist Ministers now in charge of the military administration in the West Bank we can expect even worse to come.

Many of the children have seen their parents hurt or injured and one of the 3 Palestinians killed 2 days ago was the father of one of the children using the Centre.

I have a simple request to make of you.  We can celebrate Xmas in peace knowing that our children are not likely to be shot ‘by accident’ by  the British army, or at least not yet. But in Jenin it is different.  Israel has thought nothing of shooting live bullets at the vehicle which brings children to the Centre each day.

No doubt if one of the children is killed then Luke Akehurst of          We Believe in Israel will justify it, claiming that it was all a ‘tragic accident’.  This is the Israeli army’s last defence when their excuses have run out as with the murder of the 4 children playing on  Gaza’s beach in 2014.

The Israeli military thought nothing of firing at the car taking the children to the Centre

I have a simple request to make.  The Centre provides what is often the only meal of the day for over 150 children. It provides a place to play and it employs teachers to teach them. Every other month we pledge to give at least £1,000 from the Brighton Trust.  However we can only do this if people are willing to contribute to our Crowdfunder. Please help us.

So I am asking you, as the festive season approaches to dig deep and make a donation, however big or small, to our Crowdfunder.

Many thanks

Tony Greenstein