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Anti-semitism

Posts Tagged ‘Anti-semitism’

Antisemitism and homophobia is better aired than buried

When David Ward was removed as a Liberal Demorcrat candidate in the upcoming General Election because his party’s leader Tim Farron operates a “no tolerance – zero tolerance – of anti-Semitic remarks”, Ward told BBC News.

“I am a liberal through and through. How on earth could I be racist or be anti-Semitic?”

Steady. That’s a rhetorical question as illustrated by Ward continuing:

“I would defy anybody to find one single derogatory comment I’ve made against a Jew which was not related to something being done in Israel.”

Looking aside from Farron’s apparent ignorance of Ward’s words before Theresa May and the Tories pointed them out to him in the Commons, and marvel at the man’s defence.

Brendan O’Neill:

Wow. There it is. The modern problem with ‘the Jews’ summed up: it is okay to hate ‘the Jews’, or at least to be derogatory against the Jews, if you’re attacking Israel, if your apparently loftier target is the Jewish State and its militarism. This speaks to the way in which attacking Israel has become a means of being derogatory about Jews, who are seen as bearing responsibility for various military crimes, and, among the more far-out left, for economic malaise and global instability, too. This is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Back to Farron, and why he thought it right to condemn Ward as soon as the media glare was shone on his opinions. Mind, this was in the same week that Farron discovered that he was ok with gay sex. It was, he said, not a “sin”. The odd thing is that Tim’s an Evangelical Christian, and they believe that homosexuality is wrong. Where does that leave Tim, then? Does the man have the courage of his convictions?

Rod Liddle:

As a Christian, then, Tim was a few burning embers short of the full Cranmer when it came to loyalty and conviction — but it saved his political skin. By way of explanation he mumbled something about specks of sawdust and removing the plank of wood from his own eye. I’d remove the large block of wood from inside your cranium, mate, before you start wittering on in that wet George Formby accent about bloody sawdust. Drop your beliefs just so the gibbering Twitter monkeys don’t get you? Sell out your god for an extra five seats in the Commons? Anyone ever tell you at Bible class about Judas?

In a free country you should be able to say what you like, however stupid or bigoted. Farron’s banning and flimflammery befuddles his message. What does he believe in? What does he think?

It’s not progressive to find Jews guilty of collective guilt because of your weird obsession with Israel over, say, China, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russian, Thailand or anywhere else with problems. And it’s just as weird to spend your time wondering about men having consensual sex because you read a book and believed everything in it to be factually true. But it is a triumph of free speech in a free society to give full throat to your prejudices and let others offend you with theirs.

Rather than this banning and revisionism being an oddity, Tim Farron’s illiberal liberalism is very much in keeping with the age of no-platforming people with whom you don’t agree and banning things that upset you. If you can’t say what you think, it’s not just the bastards and bigots who miss out. We all lose.

Posted: 30th, April 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment


A Holocaust Survivor’s obsessive collection of anti-Semitic propoganda

The Jew, Universal Enemy is a cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht (4 September 1900 – 4 April 1975), aka Fips. It appeared in Der Stürmer in 1937, the Nazi newspaper Rupprecht worked for from 1925-1945. The Herrenvolk liked his work very much.

 

 German artist Philipp Rupprecht’s poster, with words in Polish. Photograph: Arthur Langerman Private Collection

hilipp Rupprecht’s poster The Jew: Universal Enemy.

 

In 1938, Rupprecht’s illustrations appeared in Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), a book for German children about vermin Jews. After the war was over, Rupprecht was sentenced to 10- year hard labor. He was released on 23 October 1950 from the prison in Eichstätt and for the rest of his life worked as a house painter in Munich and Starnberg.

Evil always was banal.

 

antisemitism poster

 

Rupprecht’s work is part of Belgian Holocaust survivor Arthur Langerman’s collection of 7,000 antisemitic objects. Langerman calls his collection an “obsession”. It features many low-marks in anti-Jewish hatred: Edouard Drumont’s publication of La France Juive; ephemera from the Dreyfus affair; drawings by Czech artist Karel Relink; graphic propaganda.

“If I donate everything to a museum, I fear they will keep them in the basement,” says Langerman. “I would prefer it to be the basis for an institute dedicated to studying and fighting antisemitism… After the war, the type of antisemitism found in my collection was a taboo. Today, it no longer is.”

 

Der Giftpilz Fips

Der Giftpilz

 

antisemitism poster

 

Via: The Guardian, FlashbakHeinous Cartoons 1886-1945 is at the Caen-Normandy Memorial Museum, France, until 15 December

Posted: 28th, March 2017 | In: Reviews | Comment


SOAS says all old white teachers are racist and victimise BAME students

Are old white, male dons unable to teach young black students? Students at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) created a report to answer the question they pose. Called Degrees of Racism, the student union demands that “all academics must be prepared to acknowledge that they are capable of racism”.

Well, we all have our prejudices, even SOAS students and people on the Student Unions’ executive.

One student is quoted:

“Both of my tutors are white men. How can I have a rapport and feel comfortable talking to a 60-year-old white man? Our experiences of life are so different and you’re coming from completely different places.”

Wouldn’t it be good idea to learn how to relate to the old white boy, of which there are so many?

The report begins from making an argument that identity is of paramount importance in education. It paints all BAME students as victims.

The BME Attainment Gap project was conducted as studies show that there has been a gap between the degree attainment of white and BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) undergraduates at SOAS, with a greater proportion of white students attaining either a 2:1 or first class degree.

Might this be down to family money, class, society and more?

These gaps cannot be attributed to differences between students at entry at SOAS, thus suggesting factors within SOAS contributing to this finding.

So it must be racism, then. Is it “unconscious” racism, or unwitting racism, if you will, because racism didn’t prevent BAME students gaining a place at the college? We also don’t know why the BAMe students who made it to SOAS survived being taught by white teachers, who make up the bulk of education professionals.

A worrying number of students reported having experienced explicitly racist comments and behaviours in class, both from other students and from teachers.

That’s from the champions of reason and learning at SOAS student union, the same group that wants to boycott Israel and Israeli academics. Maybe if there were more Israeli academics in visible places at SOAS, the non-Israeli students would relate and understand the situation better? Because it’s all about identity, isn’t it.

Posted: 15th, January 2017 | In: Reviews | Comment


Anti-Semitism Watch: LibDem Jenny Tonge makes her move to join Labour?

Baroness Jenny Tonge has been suspended by the Liberal Democrats. Yes, we know, some news there that Tonge and the LibDems still exist. And when you hear the story you might suppose that Tonge has been auditioning for membership to the un-anti-Semetic Labour Party.

Today, a LibDem spokesperson tells media: “The party has suspended the membership of Jenny Tonge. We take her comments very seriously and have acted accordingly.”

Suspended. Not kicked out. Put on hold. That’s how big a deal anti-Semitism is nowadays among the elite. It is not their problem.  Of course, nothing is fact. As the Guardian  states: “Jenny Tonge quits Lib Dems after suspension for alleged antisemitic comments.”

Tonge noted on Facebook:

“In the course of the evening one member of the audience made a ‘rant’ against Israel quoting some very confused history which I confess I did not hear or understand! I then called the next member of the audience and moved on. The contribution was ignored by the audience after a few claps of relief! Apparently this is my sin! I am at last free of being told what I must and must not say on the issue of Palestine, lest it offends the Israel lobby here, who like to control us, as they do in the USA.

“They are trying to destroy the Labour Party with spurious accusations of antisemitism and now they have set their sights on the Lib Dems. I have never been antisemitic, and never will be. I am anti-injustice and that is why I criticise the Israeli government’s flagrant disregard for international law and human rights in the Occupied territories of Palestine and Gaza.”

The story goes that earlier this week Baroness Tonge hosted an event in the House of Lords run by the Palestine Return Council. The events was part of a campaign for Britain to apologise for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that led to the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine.

The Jewish Chronicle notes: “Attendees applauded when another member of the audience claimed that “if anybody is antisemitic, it’s the Israelis themselves.”

The paper adds:

Last week Baroness Tonge published a letter online which she said she had sent to The Guardian. In the letter, she discussed the Home Affairs Committee’s report on antisemitism, saying: “It is difficult to believe that a 75% increase in antisemitism it reports, have [sic] been committed by people who simply hate Jewish people for no reason.”

The Times reported on the event:

An audience member was applauded after suggesting that Hitler only decided to kill all the Jews after he was provoked by anti-German protests led by a rabbi in Manhattan. The speaker… said that in the 1930s Rabbi Stephen Wise, whom he described as a heretic, “made the boycott on Germany, the economic boycott… which antagonised Hitler, over the edge, to then want to systematically kill Jews wherever he could find them”.

The speaker went on:

“As opposed to . . . make Germany free of Jews, a Jew-free land. He became a madman after this boycott. Judea declares war on Germany. In Manhattan they had 100,000 people marching in the economic boycott in 1935, it was the same heretic rabbi who caused that.”

The speaker also said that Rabbi Wise told the New York Times in 1905 that there were “six million bleeding and suffering reasons to justify Zionism”. He urged the audience to note the number. This famous quotation is regularly used by Holocaust deniers to suggest that the figure of six million Jews later killed by the Nazis was a myth.

Another audience member opined:

“Chaim Weizmann [a founder of Israel] did a confidence trick back in 1917/1918. He made the British establishment think that world Jewry had power that it just didn’t have. The trouble is, 100 years on, I am not talking about world Jewry, I am talking about that segment which we called the Zionist movement, has that power and it has that over our own parliament.”

David Collier notes on his blog: “This is the transference of classic antisemitic tropes, from the hand of the Jew to the hands of the Zionist.”

The Times adds: “Lady Tonge made no attempt to challenge the provocative comments.”

David Aaronovitch observes:

“Ten years ago the baroness did the old one about Jewish financial power in the form of “the pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. She got a reprimand from her party leader for it. Six years ago it was the ancient blood libel (Jews kill gentiles for their blood or body parts, see also under Shylock), when she demanded an inquiry into absurd allegations that an Israeli aid mission to Haiti was harvesting organs from Haitians. She lost a front bench job for that.”

And no, she was not booted out of the LibDems. He conbtinues:

Before she resigned, Baroness Tonge was suspended, not expelled, from her utterly complacent party. Because actually many people don’t care that much about antisemitism any more. They say they do, but they don’t. They cluck but secretly they think antisemitism isn’t really a problem, that Jews are generally rich and can look after themselves and that — one way or another — they probably have it coming.

In the Guardian we read:

Lady Tonge, the Liberal Democrat peer, is calling for Israel to set up an inquiry to disprove allegations that its medical teams in Haiti “harvested” organs of earthquake victims for use in transplants…

Attacking Israel’s policies is one thing; insinuating that the army of the Jewish state is stealing organs or – as the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published last year, that the IDF was killing Arabs for their organs – is to repeat what antisemites were saying about the Jews in the darkest periods of history. A blood libel, in short.

One hundred and seventy years ago, the Damascus blood libel shocked the world. On 5 February 1840, Father Thomas, the superior of the Capuchin house in Damascus, and his Muslim servant disappeared. The local Jews were immediately accused of murdering the two for the intention of using their blood for making Passover Matzot. Several Jews were arrested and tortured, and some of them died, not before producing “confessions”.

The Guardian says:

The peer has a long track record of making trenchant criticisms of Israel. In 2004, when she was an MP, she was sacked from the frontbench by then party leader Charles Kennedy after she suggested that she would become a suicide bomber if she was Palestinian. At the time, Israel had endured repeated suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians during the second intifada. She was made a peer the following year.

In September, the Sunday Times noted:

A PROMINENT peer is considering defection to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party after “a lifetime” in the Liberal Democrats. Baroness Tonge said she was “thinking about” joining Labour and “a lot of people” in her party were pondering the move as they found Corbyn “a breath of fresh air”.

Smell that?

 

Posted: 28th, October 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment


No Anti-Semitism Watch: Corbyn supporters in china bowls for yamulkas video

There is No anti-Semitism in the Labour Party Watch.

In this video, Labour supporters discuss the undeniable fact there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. All diverse faces featured in this video agree that there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and anyone who says there is  (there is) has already lost the argument:

 

Posted: 22nd, September 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (2)


(No) Antisemitism in Labour Party Watch: Ruth Smeeth, Kate Osamor And Corbyn’s ‘kinder’ politics

More evidence that there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Jewish News reports on Ruth Smeeth, Labour MP:

Counter-terrorism police have launched an investigation into a fanatic who has threatened to hang a Jewish female Labour MP from the gallows. Ruth Smeeth is reportedly receiving special protection from police after receiving the foul-mouthed death threat on Facebook, which included anti-Semitic and homophobic abuse.

The Stoke-on-Trent MP is branded a “yid”, “dyke” and a “CIA agent” in the highly offensive rant which is reported in The Sun.

The abuser finishes the post by saying: “Ruth Smeeth is British and from my perspective since treason is still a capital offence in Britain, the gallows would be a fine and fitting place for this Dyke piece of Yid s*** to swing from”

Adding:

The threat was issued in July, soon after the MP fled the launch of Labour’s report into anti-Semitism in tears after being accused by a Momentum activist of colluding with the right-wing press.

Ms Smeeth accused Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of a “catastrophic failure of leadership” for failing to intervene during the incident and said the Labour Party “cannot be a safe space” for British Jews.

Ms Smeeth is quoted in The Sun saying of that incident: “I very much hold Jeremy personally responsible”.

The Facebook rant is captured and reproduced:

Ruth Smeeth facebook

The Sun says the ranter is a Corbyn supporter:

 

Screen Shot 2016-09-03 at 08.23.19

 

We hear from a Corbyn PR:

“Jeremy has consistently spoken out against all forms of anti-semitism and has contacted Ruth Smeeth to express his outrage at the abuse and threats directed against her. Jeremy condemns all abuse, and no one responsible for it is a genuine supporter of Jeremy’s. He has repeatedly called for a kinder, gentler politics.”

Smeeth is quoted by the Press Association:

Ms Smeeth told BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme. “I know that Jeremy Corbyn would condemn this, but it’s not about condemning, it’s about what people are doing in his name. What I need is for the leader of my party, the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, to make it clear what can be done. He should be naming and shaming some of the worst perpetrators who are doing it in his name, and making it clear publicly that they do not speak for him, that this is unacceptable.

“There is a vile amount of racism and intolerance and abuse online, which then feeds on to our streets and leads to a culture of intolerance that he could actually personally do something about. That’s what I’m asking him to do.”

In other news:

Exclusive: Shadow minister’s aide suspended over Zionist posts.

An aide to shadow international development secretary Kate Osamor endorsed a controversial Palestinian activist’s social media posts

Elizabeth Dudley, who was a member of Kate Osamor’s parliamentary staff, ‘liked’ two Facebook posts from a West Bank activist, who Jewish News revealed yesterday is to speak at an event organised by Newcastle Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

One incendiary post from Iyad Burnat said: “To the American people do not bother to vote in the elections. The Zionists had identified the next president.”

Another post from him that was ‘liked’ by Dudley showed the bodies of dead children with the flag of Israel alongside the swastika. Wording above said: “Is the Zionists terrorists? What is the difference between Zionism and Nazism?”

Osamor told the Jewish News: “Having been made aware of these posts, the member of staff has been suspended with immediate effect.”

Conclusion: There is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

 

Posted: 3rd, September 2016 | In: Reviews | Comment


Rio 2016: The anti-Semitic Games?

Israel’s Jewish athletes are being shunned at the 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro. Is it anti-Semitism?

Beaten by Israeli fighter Or Sasson in the judo, Egypt’s Islam el-Shehaby refused to shake his Israeli opponent’s hand. He looked like a bad sport, and in a sports arena that’s no good thing.

Reports claim El-Shehaby is an idealist unable to separate sports from race, religion and politics, rather than a sore loser. The NYPost claims El-Shabby (sic) was under pressure from Islamists to refuse to fight Sasson. The Daily Mail provides an example. “My son watch out, don’t be fooled, or fool yourself thinking you will play with the Israeli athlete to defeat him and make Egypt happy,” said the host of an Egyptian TV station. “Egypt will cry. Egypt will be sad and you will be seen as a traitor and a normalizer in the eyes of your people.”

The International Judo Federation’s Nicolas Messner says“This is already a big improvement that Arabic countries accept to (fight) Israel… There is no obligation to shake hands, but to bow is mandatory… his attitude will be reviewed after the games to see if any further action should be taken.”

 

Rio Israel race judo handshake

 

The Jerusalem Post says Syrian boxer Ala Ghasoun heard the call and refused to fight an Israeli athlete.

The Washington Times reports says the Lebanese barred Israelis from boarding a bus.

Palestinian swimmer Mary al-Atrash told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp: “There is no Olympic-sized swimming pool in the Palestinian territories that Palestinians are allowed to use, so Atrash practices at the YMCA in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. The pool is 25 meters long, half the length of the facility she’ll compete in at Rio.”

Israel say they invited Atrash to apply for a permit to travel to Jerusalem to use their facilities. She didn’t. Liel Liebovitz of Tablet Magazine added that there are several full-sized pools within the Palestinian territories.

 

Posted: 14th, August 2016 | In: Back pages, Reviews, Sports | Comment


Naz Shah: Jewish technology plot behind racism error says anti-Semitic Labour Party?

“She’s made remarks that she doesn’t agree with,” says Labout of Naz Shah, the Labout MP who doesn’t much like Jews.

As @MichaelPDeacon notes in the Telegraph: “She’s made remarks… that she doesn’t agree with. She made the remarks. But she doesn’t agree with them. She disagrees with her own remarks.”

Naz Shah Jews racist

File under: Jewish technology twists nice woman’s words.

Posted: 28th, April 2016 | In: Broadsheets, Politicians, Reviews | Comments (3)


Luton Labour Party councillor suspended over anti-Semitic tweets

Miss AYSEGUL GURBUZ

 

People in Luton voted for Warwick University student Aysegul Gurbuz to be their Labour Party councillor. The 20-year-old student of Politics and Sociology has been suspended “over claims she called Hitler ‘the greatest man in history'”.

Other tweets on her timeline include:

 ‘The Jews are so powerful in the US it’s disgusting.’
“Ed Miliband is Jewish. He will never become prime minister of Britain.”

The Daily Mail notes:

Miss Gurbuz last night denied she had written the tweets and claimed her sister may have posted them.

In the past weeks, Labour has twice suspended the deputy chairman of its Woking branch, Vicki Byrne, for posting anti-Semitic tweets, and suspended councillor Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, for sharing a Facebook post that said: ‘Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.’

We do hear from Miss Gurbuz, who told the “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism: ‘It was a joint account I had with my sister so I don’t know if she’s gone out and tweeted that, but I’m absolutely appalled right now. Where I live we’ve got very good cohesion with the Jewish community… I’m absolutely shocked.”

PS:  Mis Gurbuz stood as the University’s “Candidate for the position of Ethnic Minorities Officer”. Her manifesto:

 

Gurbuz Holocaust

 

Yeah, she wants to raise awareness over Holocaust Memorial Day – presumably not to rebrand it as a missed opportunity to get those pesky Jews?

Posted: 10th, April 2016 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)


Catholic school kids chant ‘You killed Jesus’ at Jewish opponents

catholic anti-semiticFor some time the conversation has been shaped by nuanced arguments whether anti-Israel movements are driven by anti-Semitism, and how Islamists and the Left share a hatred of Jews. Now, finally, we get to see some more in-yer-face proper old-school racism. At the all-boys Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, students taunted the visiting Newton North High School team with anti-Semitic chants. The visitors have a considerable Jewish population.

“You killed Jesus,” yelled the Catholic kinder.

Catholic Memorial President Peter Folan says the chants were “abhorrent behaviour.”

Indeed, surely the correct racist term is, “You killed Our Lord Jesus.” Where’s the respect for tradition?

 

 

Posted: 14th, March 2016 | In: Reviews | Comment


The Left hates Jews – any Jew who votes Labour is a Judenrat

Corbyn Jews Labour racism anti-semitism

 

In the FT, Simon Schama tells of “The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history”. For those of you deny the rampant anti-Semitism on the Left, here’s a question for you: Why does Jeremy Corbyn grasp the oppression of every minority except Jews?

Schama writes:

Why is it somehow proper to boycott Israeli academics and cultural institutions, many of which are critical of government policy, but to remain passive in the face of Saudi Arabia’s brutal punishment of anyone whose exercise of freedom of conscience can be judged sacrilegious? Why is the rage so conspicuously selective? Or, to put it another way, why is it so much easier to hate the Jews?

Growing up in London in the shadow of world war two my pals and I talked about who might be the bad guys, should evil come our way. We agreed the Jew-haters would not wear brown shirts and jackboots but would probably be like people on the bus. It is not the golf club nose-holders we have to worry about now; it is those who, in their indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of millions.

We used to say “Never forget”. Now Jews say, “Keep the bags packed and ready – it’s started again.”

And where will the Jews go?

 

Posted: 24th, February 2016 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)


Biased BBC presents murderous attack in Tel Aviv as anti-gay hate crime

hate crime tel avivThe BBC has been reporting on the murderous attack at the Simta Bar on Dizengoff Street Tel Aviv, Israel. Two men are dead. Four more are badly injured.

Kevin Connolly, BBC News, Jerusalem, reports:

There has been speculation that if the bar was popular with the gay community, it may have been a hate crime. It remains a possibility that there was some kind of link to organised crime. But until the perpetrator is captured, it is not clear what the motive may have been.

Why speculate, then? And if you are going to speculate, why stop there?

YNet News takes  different line:

The terrorist is an Israeli Arab man who has expressed support for ISIS in the past. The bag he left behind in the nearby shop contained a Quran. The attacker is a 31-year-old resident of Ar’ara, and was once sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to steal an IDF soldier’s weapon. He attacked the soldier at the Karkur junction, hitting him and attempting to grab the soldier’s M-16 rifle. In the end, the soldier, who later required hospitalization, managed to overcome the attacker and caused him to flee the scene.

The attacker was arrested the next day, assaulting a policeman in the process. He was diagnosed with mental problems… He apparently developed a drug and alcohol habit starting at a young age. The attacker also has a past of drug offenses. He was arrested in 2005 after selling 1.1 kilograms of cocaine to an undercover policeman for NIS 16,500. He was sentenced to treatment in a facility under house-arrest conditions.

When is a hate crime not a hate crime?

 

Posted: 2nd, January 2016 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)


NUS: Israelis are never killed by ‘terrorists’ and anti-Semitism not a problem

 

In 1972 Palestinian terror outfit Black September murdered 11 Israel athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Ilana Romano says her husband Yossef was tied up and castrated:

“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him. Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up? They watched this.”

She wants us to know what happened to the athletes before and after they were murdered.

But the Daily Mirror has a version of the story that should excite some readers:

 

daily mirror fail

The Mirror calls the murdered Israelis the “terrorists”.

The story has now been altered to read:

One of the nine Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian militant group Black September was castrated and others were tortured during a 20 hour ordeal.

As you marvel at that error of fact, research and subbing (let’s be generous), the National Union of Students says that Israelis cannot be the victims of terror.

The Jewish News reports:

The National Union of Students has been urged to apologise over the “deliberate omission” of Israel from a list of countries suffering recent terror attacks.

An NUS statement read at its National Executive Committee meeting last night highlighted attacks over the past year by “paramilitary organisations” in Nigeria, Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kenya, Palestine, and Mali.

“Those who have perpetrated these attacks, have targeted people of all faiths, of all backgrounds and of all identities. Since the attacks, we have seen an increase in retributions places on Muslim communities here in the UK and around the world. We restate the NUS’ commitment to fighting Islamophobia.

“We mourn the victims of the attacks and stand in solidarity with the families and friends o al those affected…and stand in solidarity with citizens across the world who are suffering at the hands of violence and discrimination.”

Islamophobia gets more coverage and sympathy than the murder of Israelis. You might wonder why the NUS is not committed to fighting anti-Semitism, which in light of the attack on a Paris delicatessen and the Jewish-owned theatre is very real.

Posted: 2nd, December 2015 | In: Reviews | Comments (3)


It’s the Maths, Stupid: the rise and rise of Left-wing anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is back. It never went away, of course. But it did go quiet. For years it was unfashionable to be a Jew hater. The return has been back not by the far-Right and the British aristocracy (they always hated the Jews), rather the right-on, knowing Left wing.  Many are acquiescing to anti-Semitism instead of fighting it. Anti-Semitism is edging further into the centre.

It’s the Maths, Stupid, says Saul Freeman:

I’ll share 2 of my life-long basic positions:

The UK left is where I both belong and feel “safe”.

Qualitative analysis is where it’s at, not the hard edged cold world of quant.

We’ll return to these.

My family are socialists. The Labour Party is the natural home of the working classes – which is where I’m from. Ok, I confess. I was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the heady days of Marxism Today. Seems we ended up with political post-modernism so I’m sorry about that. Joined the Labour Party then left it after hearing Ed Balls mention immigration 6 times in the space of 4 minutes.

Half-Jewish and entirely secular on all fronts, I grew up in North West London. At school there were fights in the playground when I was called “Yid” and worse. My name marked me out – it practically yelled it out – as Jewish, even though I was of course only half-Jewish. I pretty much always lost those fights.

Later on I married a Jewish woman and now have a son who is, of course Jewish.

As a politically active student I recall a sense of unease at NUS conference & on campus when groups of keffiyah-wearing students from “other political groups” seemed to be just a bit too interested in the Middle East.

After my student days I joined that group of people who – whilst not politically active day-to-day- knew exactly where right and wrong lived. Whilst we bemoaned the retreats from socialism of the Blair & Brown years, we remembered what it was to live though 18 years of Conservative government. So we never, ever voted anything other than Labour despite some friends moving off to the Greens or seeking other radical homes.

Four years of Conservative/Lib Dem government found my wife and I enraged by the assault on all we valued. I berated the local Lib Dem canvassers for enabling the old-Etonian Praetorian Guard to seize control.

As a family we attended some Reform synagogue services in an attempt to give our son some context for his Jewishness. We drifted away. I learned from my wife how to celebrate Passover but moaned like a teenager at all the “god bits”.

Then in summer 2014 Israel found itself in violent confrontation with Hamas.“So what?” I might have asked. “I’m worried about cuts to my LEA, not whatever mess Benjamin bloody Netanyahu might have got himself into now.” My relationship with Israel had so far been less than intense. I’d never been there and I regarded it with low level unease. “They need to sort their shit out and behave like the rest of us nice, liberal European (half) Jews. Just do what they need to do to get Peace. Now.

Tellingly, I’d occasionally ordered books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and had then rarely managed to finish reading them, over-whelmed and bored by the otherness of it all.

So – there we were in summer 2014, the news full of Israel doing bad things to Palestinian children (again) and my wife and I notice that some of the things we’re reading on Facebook & Twitter are not so nice. About Jews. “Okay”, we think. “That’s not news. We know about anti-Semitism. We know the Right doesn’t like Jews. Those Tories with their aristocratic disdain of the Jew sure as hell don’t like us. But that’s ok – we don’t much like them.

Actually, we also know that some writers in The Independent don’t seem to like Jews. But we’ve always been Guardian readers.  Alright, we know the Guardian does seem to bang on a bit about Israel when it’s being bad, but we just don’t read those articles.

Then on Twitter I see a post from a very prominent British musician. He’s a staple of every middle class CD collection or Spotify “world music fusion” list. He’s a good guy. He’s super smart. He’s one of us. He’s also someone I’ve worked and got drunk with – I used to be a musician too.

But his tweet isn’t funny, smart or good. It’s a graphic suggesting that the world would be a better place if all the Jews in Israel were forcibly removed to the USA, seeing as the US seems to love them so much.

So I contact this avowedly socially progressive musician from an immigrant background and, once we get past the “hey, it’s been a long time, you’re great/no you’re great!” bit, I ask him why he would post such a thing. He tells me that he’s very upset about the children in Gaza and he knows I must be too. I am, of course. But I explain that anti-Semitism and ethnic cleansing probably isn’t going to help much and that I find it a little “difficult” to see one of the good guys stoking the fire. He accepts this, apologises for any offense but reminds me that the trauma of witnessing events in Gaza (via mainstream and social media) has caused him to act the way he did. He declines my suggestion that he remove the post. We part on good terms with a promise to keep in touch – as you do – and then I quietly fume for the next couple of months.

 

anti-Semitic new statesman

 

In the meantime, my wife and I stop reading below the line on the Guardian website as it appears that pretty much every article (perhaps with the exception of the “my wife/husband doesn’t seem to want sex with me anymore” type – though I’m not absolutely sure about this) end up footnoted by comments blaming the Israelis/Jews/Zionists for whatever bad stuff the article might have been about, or not about.

I have another couple of chats with my Jewish son to check that he’s not getting any hassle at school and to remind him of what to do if he is.

My wife and I try not to focus on the fact that some of her friends have posted “Free Palestine” or “Save Gaza” messages on Facebook but don’t seem to have anything to say about the daily barrage of missiles sent by Hamas from Gaza into Israel. I start trying to actually read some of the books about Israel/Palestine that had been gathering dust.

By March we decide to visit Israel as our summer holiday. An only just sub-conscious two finger salute to what appear to be gathering forces? Our friends raise eyebrows, say “challenging” things and then tell us about their exciting plans to visit China. Or Russia. My wife had twice been to Israel when she was young and spent 6 months on a kibbutz. Brought up in a “normal” Jewish family, as opposed to my messily inter-married version, she has an uncomplicated relationship with Israel and knows exactly what it is and what it is for. Being a gentle and wise woman she never assumes that either my son or I will share this outlook and wants us to work it out for ourselves.

As summer approached I had moments when I wondered why I was taking my family to Israel. Ok, the diving in Eilat would be good but what about the Palestinians? Would I be having “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”? These moments of self-doubt were usually ended by sneaking an almost pornographic look at the comments sections on the Guardian website – “Zionist child killing scum” etc. after an article on de-forestation in Brazil.

Watching a BBC documentary on the “apartheid railway” that is apparently the Jerusalem Light Rail system whilst running at the gym had me seriously doubting both my judgement in terms of the safety of my family and my moral compass. I ran a little harder on the treadmill and tried not to have a panic attack.

Then weeks before our holiday in Israel something happened. The Labour Party had a leadership contest. And Jeremy Corbyn was standing.

I’d recently bought my wife a T-shirt that read “Labour: I prefer their early work” – (from the Guardian shop, of course) and we were intrigued, though we knew little about this obscure backbencher. Could this be a good thing? Would Andy Burnham answer our need for a more left wing candidate or would Corbyn be interesting? Who would we vote for using my wife’s union vote and my Party vote?

My wife Googled the new candidate to see what he was about. She found Corbyn’s explosively angry outburst in a C4 interview. Krishnan Guru-Murphy had asked him a question over his dealings with Hamas & Hezbollah and he wasn’t too pleased about it.

Questions over Corbyn’s deep involvement with the Palestinian Solidarity Committee Stop the War Coalition etc. deepened during the first weeks of the leadership campaign and we rapidly realised that he probably wasn’t going to be our rabbi. We started reading the Jewish Chronicle online for the first time in our lives and watched whilst it asked a bunch of questions of the self-styled “plain speaking” candidate. He declined to answer.

On social media any questions about his attitude to Israel and Jews were revealed as smears organised and propagated by “Zionist powers”. Corbyn fans declared Zionism an evil ideology and that Israel had no right to exist. We spent more time than was good for us trying to work out what was going on. It turned out that Corbyn was at best a reluctant advocate of a two State solution, describing it in pointed terms as being “the only option currently on offer”. His belief that all 7 million plus Palestinians registered by the UNRWA should be given the “right to return” to what is currently Israel made his commitment to the continued existence of a Jewish state appear less than total.

We went to Israel, relieved to be leaving what increasingly felt like a baying mob behind us. As we descended to Ben Gurion airport the lights of Tel Aviv came into view. It dawned on me that Israel was of course not an abstract and remote ideological concept – it was a real place with real cities full of millions of real people. Some of them with names a lot like mine. The Corbynistas declared it had no right to exist. But it didn’t look much like Brigadoon to me.

As our taxi driver drove towards Jerusalem he confided that he worried about those Jews who, like us, did not live in Israel. Were they safe? He knew that his family hadn’t been. “But hang on” we said. “Surely it’s the Jews in Israel that feel threatened, not us”? He looked at us like children and pointed out that Israel knew perfectly well how to look after itself, had survived several attempts to eliminate it and was not about to start again with the existential angst. We felt more sophisticated than our well-meaning taxi driver and smiled knowingly.

As our holiday progressed I realised I really liked Israel. Of course I did – I was on holiday. I had really liked Australia, Scotland & Gambia. I wasn’t too sure about Norfolk though. But standing with my Jewish son at the Western Wall I more than liked it. Climbing Masada, crossing the Negev desert, wandering through Jaffa – I really more than liked it. There were layers of meaning, some narrative to unpick. Norfolk certainly hadn’t had that effect on me.

It might have been the surreal realisation that in most places, most of the people around us were Jews. Everything was the same as anywhere else I’d been to, except that most of the people were Jews. Even the poor people. Jews collecting the bins, working in cafes, driving the buses. And there are Arabs too, travelling on the light rail (deemed ‘controversial’ by the BBC), not waving fists or throwing rocks, but working in shops and cafes alongside the Jewish Israelis.

The exception was our visit to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa. We went there to marvel at the buildings and setting and my wife recalled loving the place when she had visited it 25 years ago. So we joined the other tourists – mostly blond, blue eyed Scandinavians – and queued up to pass through the security gate. Once through, we found ourselves immediately surrounded and shouted at by people who didn’t seem to be welcoming tourists. Stunned by the beauty of the architecture but intimidated by the shouting and the black clad groups of women waving copies of the Qur’an, we left as soon as we could. My wife was shaken by the contrast with her last visit.

We visit Yad Vashem and try to spare our son from the most horrific of the images. Against all the rules forbidding photography, I sneak a picture of a Nazi-era board game that depicts Jews being sent off to Palestine. This is clearly the losing square that you don’t want to land on.

We return home and immediately I find myself spending too much time on Twitter. I conduct one of those debates-by-tweet with a writer whose work regularly appears in the Guardian & the LRB. I express my concern over politicians from the secular UK Left supporting radical Islamic theocratic groups such as Hamas & Hezbollah that want to kill Jews, non-believers and gays and restrict the rights of women. I tell him I’m not comfortable with a potential leader of the Labour Party who has long standing links going back decades with groups that want to wipe Israel from the map.

He lets me know that whilst Zionism is a morally degenerate, evil ideology & must be condemned as such, it would not be appropriate for him or others on the UK Left to pass judgement on any “representation choices of the Palestinian people that may not be congruent with my ego-ideal“. He is angered by my suggestion that the logic of this might be flawed because it offers moral & political relativism about 1 ethnicity, but is not short of a view about the choices of another ethnic group.

He speaks for what appears to be a significant slice of the British Left in finding it not at all problematic to announce that Jews have no right to self-determination. As in not being able to collectively and individually decide their political, economic and cultural fate. They must simply do as they did prior to 1948 and take what they are given, good or bad. The writer declines to identify any other ethnic groups that he extends this kind offer to.

This Guardian writer is far from the only individual who seems to find it important to tell me what is and what is not anti-Semitic. Twitter is bursting with Corbyn fans that are very keen to set me straight. They “know” I am Jewish because of my name – just as they did in the school playground. When I point out that there might be something a little unwise and unseemly about non-Jews telling Jews what is and is not anti-Semitic, they get cross. Very cross. They tend to want to shout at me about dead children in Gaza. My famous musician friend often drifts into my mind once people get to the “what about the children of Gaza?” stage.

These people who identify so urgently with Corbyn and his “position” on the Middle East also appear to have almost no knowledge of the historical, political and cultural basics. They just know.

A significant proportion of the British Left appears to be very, very concerned about what Jews do and don’t get up to.

My wife and I notice that Corbyn supporters get very excited about pointing us in the direction of Jews like the writer Michael Rosen who are themselves anti-Zionists and do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. Rosen used to be‘personally and politically close to the SWP’ and stood ass a candidate for George Galloway’s Respect Party. This makes him something of a rarity as most UK Jews do not share either of these attributes, let alone both.

We over-hear one of our very vocal left wing acquaintances saying to another left wing Hackney dweller: “Oh, you should meet X. He’s a barrister – Jewish. He’s fine though –very anti-Israel”.

Corbyn wins the leadership. Well, things can only get better. Surely?

They get worse. Corbyn uses his address to Labour Friends of Israel to engage in some not very subtle “discursive dissonance” by declining to mention theZionist entity by name. At a meeting that has the word Israel all over the tin. It’s audacious in its execution. My wife and I are stunned fish, gasping on the bank. The Left bank.

My wife realises that her union is a key player in the BDS movement, supporting boycotts of Israeli goods and services right down to picketing outside Jewish-Israeli owned businesses. Her union has been a key backer of the Corbyn campaign. She writes a letter which points out that these two aspects of union policy are a little hard for Jewish members to take right now. Her local union office doesn’t bother to reply. She resigns.

We lurch into October and Israel finds itself under attack from knife and gun wielding Palestinian terrorists.

What is the reaction from elements of the UK Left to the daily tally of horrific terrorist attacks on Jewish Israeli’s? Many like Brighton BDS and the Palestinian Solidarity Committee find it impossible to condemn the attacks. Stop the War Coalition – chaired by Corbyn prior to his winning of the Labour leadership –joins a host of these groups protesting angrily outside theIsraeli embassy. They chant for an Islamic Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”.

Gaza Boat Convoy state that if they were Palestinians they would “definitely” drive cars into elderly Jewish Israeli women waiting at bus stops.

 

Guardian anti-semitism

 

The Guardian writer who I “debated” with writes on social media that a Jewish Israeli journalist – who wrote a piece detailing the Palestinian violence – “should have his throat cut.”

The Scottish Green Party considers that this is the right moment to pass a motion which denies the right of Israel to exist as the Jewish state and demands that Hamas be removed from lists of proscribed terrorist organisations.[1]

If calls from those on the Left in the UK for the obliteration of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Palestinian state and the sheer violence and blood lust in some comments were not surreal and disturbing enough, my wife and I have noticed something else. Silence. From friends on Facebook when my wife posts anything that acknowledges the very existence of Israel or the random horror that is being enacted on its streets.

Silence from the Labour Party on the issue of the Party leader’s associations despite Jewish communities expressing their profound anxiety.

Silence from the Left. No one is falling over themselves to condemn Corbyn’s highly partisan attachment to the Palestinian movement despite its seismic shift from a violent, revolutionary secular form to the radical Islamic shape it now presents. Almost no one from the UK Left is thrusting themselves forward to say “Israel has a right to exist, as does any other legitimate state and terrorism can never be excused or condoned.”

Silence on the fact that those Palestinian groups urged on to victory over the Zionists do not share any of the values that we used to take for granted on the UK Left.

There are of course notable exceptions, and those people and groups know who they are. They would never expect me or other Jews to be grateful, because they are not bestowing this as a gift. They are simply demonstrating their commitment to first principles. Yet these first principles appear to be missing in action for many on the British Left in 2015.

And so my wife and I lose our moorings. We are of the Left, but are no longer welcome, unless we become “good Jews” who are not “bad, Zionist Jews”. We worry about our son. He will be confronted by Israeli Apartheid Week when he arrives on a University campus in a few years. If he is a Jew who believes that Israel has a right to be, he will be hated by many on the student Left. My son is an enthusiastic, articulate and kind boy. The realisation that he will be hated by those who will not see any of these attributes, but instead will see only one attribute – his Jewishness – chills me.

Strangers feel compelled to say hateful things to me. Others threaten violence to all Jews – “go back to Auschwitz, Zionist scum”. All this from the Left.

We slowly become traumatised by the sheer horror of what has unfolded around us.

Mostly, we are distressed because we cannot understand why the Left is so silent when Jews call out. We just don’t understand. None of this makes sense. We have no critical lens through which to view this rupture between us and us.

And then it hits me. Not only have I woken up to the fact that the first of my foundation strands – that I belong and feel safe on the Left – is misguided, largely because I have failed to engage with reality (or the works of Nick Cohen) until very recently, I also realise why.

It’s because Jews are aminority.

In the UK Jews make up just 0.3% of the population. Not even a lousy 1%. A tiny minority. My family – my wife and my son – are part of a tiny, tiny minority. And yet my wife and I had driven ourselves half mad wondering why our voices were not being heard. Dumb, isn’t it?

It’s not the principles, the ethics, the logic, the politics, and the narrative. It’s the bloody numbers. It’s all about the quant not the qualitative. And there goes my second foundation strand….

So this is what being a minority really feels like. And now I understand what our Israeli taxi driver was getting at. This is what he worries about. And this is why he lives in Israel, where Jews are no longer a tiny minority.

It’s the maths, stupid.

Posted: 18th, October 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)


Corbyn and the Jews: Luciana Berger signs up as Baroness Tonge waits to join Labour

tonge bergerLabour leader Jeremy Corbyn says he’s not an anti-Semite, but some people he’s associated with are. Happily for Corbyn, Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger has accepted the invitation to join his cabinet of all the boxes ticked. Corbyn had floated the sinister idea of a “shadow minster for Jews”, a Judenrat to help the State deal with any little Jewish problems. That hideous plan was dropped. Instead Corbyn looked round and offered a ministerial post to Berger.

And she accepted the role of shadow mental health spokeswoman.

In other news, Corbyn’s all-inclusive Labour Party could well welcome former LibDem MP Baroness Jenny Tonge. Tongue told the Sunday Times:

“I know that lots of Lib Dems are contemplating supporting Jeremy Corbyn, including me. I like and admire Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell (the shadow chancellor). I think they are some of the most honest people you could come across. On defence and foreign policy, Palestine and the bomb I agree with them and they are very green. I am not sure on Europe. I think the rich should be paying for the recession.”

She added:

“I have met Hamas leaders both in Damascus and in Gaza. So has Jeremy Corbyn. We were all favorably impressed by those people. We all feel it was very very important to listen to their point of view. They said a lot of wise things.”

Order Order notes:

Ambushed with the news on the Today programme, [Labour Deputy leader] Tom Watson said the woman deemed too beyond the pale to remain in the LibDems is “welcome” to join Labour.

Here are a few “wise words” from the Hamas Covenant:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised…

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

The BBC says of Hezbollah:

The party’s rhetoric calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. It views the Jewish state as occupied Muslim land and it argues that Israel has no right to exist. The party was long supported by Iran, which provided it with arms and money…

The HuffPost:

Hezbollah’s aim is not to “end the occupation of Palestine,” or even to “liberate all of Palestine.” Its goal is to kill the world’s Jews. Listen to the words of its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2, column 1.)

As for Tongue, she lost credibility with the LibDems for a few comments of her own:

Tonge resigned as party whip of the Liberal Democrats in early 2012 after saying that Israel would not survive for long in its present form.

Tonge’s remarks, made at a meeting at Middlesex University, included the observation that the American people would soon “get sick” of the billions their government sends annually “to support what I call America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East — that is Israel.” Party leader Nick Clegg called on Tonge to apologize, but Tonge refused and resigned instead.

Tonge has a well-known history of making inflammatory comments about Israel. In 2004, as a member of Parliament, she was fired as the children’s spokeswomen of the Liberal Democrats after she said she might consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were forced to endure the same conditions as Palestinians.

In 2006, she said, “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips.” That comment also was condemned by the party leadership.

 

One Guardian writer called it a “blood libel“:

She was sacked as a health spokeswoman in 2010 after she claimed Israeli troops sent to Haiti after the earthquake there were trafficking organs.

The JC:

Baroness Tonge, the Liberal peer, said this week that Israel should set up an inquiry to disprove allegations that its medical teams in Haiti “harvested” organs of earthquake victims for use in transplants.

Her call has been sharply criticised by fellow LibDems, but party leader Nick Clegg has refused to act against her.

The organ theft claims were published last week in the Palestine Telegraph, an online journal based in Gaza of which Baroness Tonge is a patron.

In a statement to the JC, she said the Israel Defence Forces were “to be commended for their fantastic response to the Haitian earthquake”. But she added: “To prevent allegations such as these — which have already been posted on YouTube — going any further, the IDF and the Israeli Medical Association should establish an independent inquiry immediately to clear the names of the team in Haiti.”

If she joins the Labour Party, what will Berger do?

Posted: 1st, October 2015 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, Reviews | Comment


Bassem Eid has a message for the bigots, anti-Semites and the BDS movement

Bassem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, has lived in the Shu’afat refugee camp. He wants to to talk about the man and woman in the street, the “average” Palestinian. In his view the Islamists, anti-Semites and the censorious Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) movement have hijacked the Palestinians, using them as devices through which these knowing can display their superior morals and dislike of the barbaric Israeli Jew.

Palestine is occupied by monocular Westerners who know best.

Posted: 17th, September 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment


Jeremy Corbyn: his little Jewish problem

corbyn jews

 

More on Jeremy Corbyn and the Jews is a rambling column from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. The headline comes in the form of an order:

Fling mud if you must, but don’t call Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite

And the teaser:

Some of the people the left-wing hopeful has been closest to are conscientious and ethical British Jews

What about the lazy and amoral Jews? Is Corbyn being over picky in selecting his Jews?

Is Jeremy Corbyn the enemy of Israel and British Jews? That is what the The Jewish Chronicle, some MPs and various sections of the media would have us believe. It is an accusation that is both absurd and menacing. The right, Blairites and hard Zionists have formed the most unholy of alliances to slay the reputation of the next likely leader of the Labour Party.

The Jewish Chronicle has not labelled Corbyn a racist. What it said was:

…although there is no direct evidence that he has an issue himself with Jews, there is overwhelming evidence of his association with, support for — and even in one case, alleged funding of — Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright antisemites.

Alan Johnson MP has also highlighted a few of Corbyn’s associates.

You can read some of words said against Corbyn here. You can read of people he has addressed as “friends“. Not all of his friends are “ethical Jews”. He’s very much the social mixer.

What evidence have his detractors produced to “prove” that he is anti-Semitic?

No, the JC has not proven anything. It asked questions:

The JC rarely claims to speak for anyone other than ourselves. We are just a newspaper. But in this rare instance we are certain that we speak for the vast majority of British Jews in expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader… If Mr Corbyn is not to be regarded from the day of his election as an enemy of Britain’s Jewish community, he has a number of questions which he must answer in full and immediately. The JC asked him earlier this week to respond. No response has been forthcoming.

1. Did you donate, as alleged by its founder, to Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), a group that publishes open antisemitism, run by Holocaust denier Paul Eisen — an organisation so extreme that even the Palestine Solidarity Campaign refuses to associate with it?

4. Why did you write to the Church of England authorities to defend Rev Stephen Sizer, a vicar banned from social media because of his habit of posting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, telling them that Rev Sizer was “under attack” because he had “dared to speak out over Zionism”?

5. Why do you associate with Hamas and Hezbollah and refer to them as your “friends”?

7. Why did you describe Raead Salah, a man convicted of the blood libel, as an ‘honoured citizen’?

No “proof” has been offered. It’s not a witch-hunt. But questions have been asked. Words do matter. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should know that. When she commented on a LibDem peer she noted:

Baroness Jenny Tonge is savaged by Zionists and her own party for saying that nation “is not going to be there forever in its present form”.

 

What Tonge actually said was:

“Beware Israel. Israel is not going to be there for ever in its present form. One day, the United States of America will get sick of giving £70bn a year to Israel to support what I call America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East – that is Israel. One day, the American people are going to say to the Israel lobby in the USA: enough is enough… Israel will lose support and then they will reap what they have sown.”

(Other words from Tonge produce a context: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party.”)

As Howard Jacobson puts it:

Magnanimity is by definition unilateral, but it takes two for it to be more than a suicidal gesture. And the question has to be asked whether a Jewish state, however magnanimous and conciliatory, will ever be accepted in the Middle East.

So much for the words. Brown adds:

That he has appeared on Press TV, the Iranian-funded station? Well, until late 2009, the Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan presented a fortnightly programme on that channel. Is Gilligan therefore also a Jew-hater? Of course not. Next: Corbyn shared a platform with Carlos Latuff, the Brazilian-Arab cartoonist who condemned Israel’s oppressive policies in Palestine.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has declared Latuff anti-Semitic but Eddy Portnoy, writing in the Jewish daily Forward, claims he is a “furious” critic of the state of Israel, not an anti-Semite. So no consensus there.

Who knew that not all Jews agreed on everything? What we don’t get to know is what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown thinks of the cartoons?

As for sharing spaces: many of us speak at conferences where some speakers turn out to have nasty views about various ethnic and religious groups. That is the complex and argumentative world we live in. To talk to those we violently disagree with is surely an obligation.

The Guardian’s Ian Black accuses Latuff of “drawing, without inhibition, on judeophobic stereotypes in the service of the anti-globalisation movement.”

“Some of the people Corbyn has been closest to are conscientious and ethical British Jews. The late Mike Marqusee, a Marxist, New York secular Jew who migrated to the UK, was his friend. So, too, is Ken Loach, a liberal British Jew and fierce defender of Palestinian rights.”

Ken Loach is Jewish?!

Richard Millett:

At a meeting she chaired in 2012, in which the ex-BBC journalist Tim Llewlynn claimed that “Zionists are scattered at strategic points throughout British business”, Alibhai-Brown told the audience that Professor Hugh Blaschko had complained to her that “Israel will bring the worst out in us Jewish people.”

It’s a shame that Alibhai-Brown attaches so much respect to the likes of Marqusee, Loach and Blaschko by dint of their Jewishness. Is she really saying that Jews supportive of Israel, the vast majority, are unethical? That’s the sad implication from someone who should be concerned with racial harmony considering her forced flight from her homeland of Uganda.

And no Jew has a problem with Loach for being “a fierce defender of Palestinian rights”. The problem Jews have with Loach is that, just like Jeremy Corbyn, he seems to want the only Jewish state finished, destroyed, dead. Most reasonable people don’t see that as a “conscientious and ethical” position.

As for Corbyn, Forward writes:

Jeremy Corbyn, was unable to respond to questions from the Forward in time for this article. Previously, Corbyn has said that he has “no recollection” of donating to Deir Yassin Remembered and that Eisen’s “position on the Holocaust is wrong and reprehensible.” As for referring to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ and Salah as a ‘very honored citizen,’ this was “diplomatic language in the context of dialogue, not an endorsement of a particular set of views.”

Such are the facts.

Posted: 15th, September 2015 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (2)


Left wing Press and biased BBC ignore rising anti-Semitic hate crime – focus only on Muslim victims

The Metropolitan Police say hate crime is up. Crimes against Muslims have risen in London by 70% on last year (816 Islamophobic compared with 478 for the previous year). Anti-Semitic crime saw the biggest year-on-year increase, rising 93 percent over the same period (499 incidents compared with 258).

How do you report the grim statistics?

According to the Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) study of data from the 2011 census, there are 1,012,800 Muslims living in London. Sixty percent of the UK’s 263,000 Jews live in London – 157,800. If we crunch the numbers, Jews have move than double the chance of being attacked for their race than a Muslim does for their belief.

So how is this reported in the mainstream news?

 

The Guardian:
Screen Shot 2015-09-10 at 07.53.03

 

 

Mention of Jews: nil.

 

The Independent:

 

Screen Shot 2015-09-10 at 08.18.01

 

Number of times Jews are mentioned: nil.

Neither the Guardian nor the Indy finds space to mention the rise in anti-Semitic attacks at all.

 

The BBC is perhaps the most shocking. A search for ‘hate crime’ reveals this result:

 

Screen Shot 2015-09-10 at 07.53.58

 

Number of time Jewish attacks are mentioned in any of the BBC’s three most recent stories on hate crimes: nil. Once might be an oversight – three times looks like an agenda.

 

It’s left to the local free press presents the full story.

Screen Shot 2015-09-10 at 08.20.41

 

 

Such are the facts.

 

Posted: 10th, September 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment


Anti-Semitism: Jewish teenager nearly beaten to death in Manchester

moshe-furstThis is a dangerous time to be a Jew in Europe. Moshe Fuerst, 17, from Prestwich, suffered a fractured skull when he and three friends were attacked at Manchester’s Bowker Vale Metrolink station. Moshe is an Orthodox Jew. So too are the three friends with whom he was travelling.

Three men set upon them.

Michael Fuerst says of his son:

“My son was knocked out with one punch to the face. He went down and then he was kicked in the head. He suffered a bleed to the brain. He was intubated at North Manchester General Hospital and then put in an ambulance and taken to the neurosurgery specialist centre at Salford Royal. A soon as he arrived there he was operated on. At Crumpsall (North Manchester General) he was already slipping into a coma. I believe these men killed my son and the NHS brought him back to life…

“Moshe and his friends are good boys. They would never go looking for trouble. They had been to the Printworks to see a film… I do not believe these lads were neo-Nazis looking for Jews to beat up. But the fact that the boys are Jewish fuelled the attack in my opinion. There is an attitude amongst some people that Jewish blood is cheap, and maybe they deserve it.”

Before and after Islamophobia and the obsessive hatred of Israel, anti-Semitism will exist. It is now acceptable for anyone across the political spectrum to hate the Jews. The most ardent racism is ingrained on the Left.

And it’s growing.

Posted: 8th, September 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment


Sajid Javid outs the growing band of liberal, middle-class, worthy and socially acceptable anti-Semites

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UK Business Secretary, Sajid Javid MP, is right. The casual drip-drip dinner table racism is rife.

The rich Jew – all Jews are rich, says the casual bigot. The clever Jew has a plan, says the liberal racist. The hypocritical Jew who supports the ‘Nazi’ Israelis, says the morally pure Left-wing racist – eyes held wide-open in innocence at how a remark designed only to criminalise the living and dishonour the dead could be seen as anything but a benign statement of fact. Jews see the codes. We grew up with them. When others see it, shout about it.

Vote Javid. He gets it.

But we also need to tackle the root of the problem, the often violent extremism that is on the rise around the world. And I’m not just talking about the butchers of ISIL or Al Qaeda, thousands of miles away in foreign lands. There’s plenty of intolerance much closer to home, intolerance that is disproportionately directed at the Jewish community. Some is explicit. The hate preachers, the extremist mosques, the far-Right groups.

“Some is more oblique. A search on Google produces more than half a million hits for ‘Holocaust Hoax’. Thousands more pages will tell you that a greedy Otto Frank forged his daughter’s diary in a cunning scheme to make money. Then there are the ‘dinner party anti-Semites’. Respectable, middle-class people who would recoil in horror if you accused them of racism, but are quite happy to repeat modern takes on age-old myths and slanders about Jews. Who can’t condemn the murder of Jewish children in France without a caveat criticising the Israeli government. Who demand that a Jewish American artist sign a declaration of support for Palestine if he wants to perform at a festival in Spain.

“I can’t remember the last time I spoke to a Jewish friend or colleague who hasn’t, at some point, found themselves sitting awkwardly at a dinner party while a fellow guest railed against the international ‘Kosher Conspiracy’.

“Together, these attitudes create a climate in which anti-Semitism is seen as ‘less bad’ than other forms of discrimination. And in that climate, the most violent extremism can take root and it can thrive. It happened, therefore it can happen again.”

Anti-semitism is now the only acceptable racism. The knowing and educated spout it in the confidence that no-one will ridicule them and reach across the dinner table and smack them in the face.

 

Posted: 8th, September 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment


Watch: Jewish American singer Matisyahu takes down the BDS bigots

Jewish American singer Matisyahu did appear at Spain’s Rototom SunSplash music festival on Saturday. He sang his hit Jerusalem. Pro-Palestinian groups had called for him to be boycotted.

Monoculists with the local Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement accused the 36-year-old of being a “Zionist” (filthy, filthy word) who supports the practice of “apartheid and ethnic cleansing”.

What craven and cowardly balls.

The show’s organisors t first conceded to the bigots. Then they saw the light.

Posted: 23rd, August 2015 | In: Music, Reviews | Comment


Blame the Jews: Greeks says Jews not Germans control their finances

The Jewish quarter, Smyrna, Greece, 1900s.

The Jewish quarter, Smyrna, Greece, 1900s.

 

In today’s edition of ‘I blame the Jews?’ the Free Beacon reports: “85% of Greeks Believe the Jews Have Too Much Power Over Global Finance“:

Are Greeks turning into Germans?

A new poll by the Anti-Defamation League found that the majority of Greeks continue to hold anti-Semitic views about Jewish control over finance and the global economy, despite a recent drop in anti-Jewish attitudes in other parts of Europe.

Nothing’s changed, then. Although it’s encouraging to nhear that the Fernch, Austrian and even the Swiss are less racist than they have been.

Greece—which faces the prospect of economic default at midnight on Wednesday—surpasses Iran and trails just slightly behind Turkey in the percentage of its residents who hold anti-Semitic views.

Can they push for the coveted Number 1 spot?

According to the ADL poll, 90 percent of Greeks agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power in the business world” and 85 percent agreed “Jews have too much power in international finance markets.” 

In addition, 70 percent said that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust” and 51 percent said “Jews don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.” 

They still talk about teh Holocaust? Maybe after the all surivors are dead the Jews will shut up, already. And its good to see that Mel Gibson still has a European fanbase:

One-third said Jews are “responsible for most of the world’s wars” and 41 percent agreed that “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.” 

And 59% said people hate Jews for the way they don’t behave. There is much in how the question if asked.

Of course, these days it’s easy to disguise your anti-Semitism as anti-Israel.

 

Posted: 2nd, July 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment


Anti-Semitism: Greek town erases Star of David from Holocaust memorial

Kavala Jews Holocaust

 

Officials at the Greek port of Kavala were scheduled to unveil a memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust – 1,484 Jews in the city were murdered by the invading Germans and their Bulgarian allies.  

But the burgers won’t show the tribute to the dead because the monument features a Star of David. That same symbol appears on the flag of Israel, and because the local leaders don’t like that country the Jews must go without their ancient symbol or else find a new one, perhaps of a teddy bear, say, a broken plate or an unmarked pit?

It’s not anti-Semitism, of course. It’s just anti-Israel. And if Jews can bury their dead without any Star of David showing, the Greeks and all decent folk would be appreciative.

 

Posted: 18th, May 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment


Media bias: anti-Semitic attack on London synangogue was just a ‘break-in’

 

So. What do we know about the attack on a synagogue in London’s Stamford Hill, a building and a place with notable Jewish populations?

The BBC says police have made six arrests following the attack.  The BBC says the attack is “what police have described as an ‘anti-Semitic’ incident.”

We don’t get to know what the BBC describes it as – maybe it was ‘an interrupted stroll in the world’s most vibrant city’, ‘football-related violence’ or ‘an incident linked to Israel’s actions in the Middle East’?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted: 22nd, March 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment