THE REAL CORBYN 'TRAGEDY' - AND 'JEWISH CURRENTS' REFUSAL TO PUBLISH AN OPPOSING VIEW

The real Corbyn ‘tragedy’ — and ‘Jewish Currents’ refusal to publish an opposing view

In a recent article on the "tragedy" of Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Currents overlooks the rightwing bigoted records of those criticizing Corbyn because of his support for Palestinian rights.

By Tony Greenstein
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at an impromptu rally alongside the Robin Hood statue at Nottingham Castle; 4 December 2019. (Photo: Wikimedia
)

At the end of November Joshua Leifer, an Associate Editor of Jewish Currents [JC], wrote an article about the “tragedy” of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not seek the opinions of any Jewish victims of the “antisemitism” witchhunt in the Labour Party. As the first Jewish member of the party to be expelled I submitted a response.

At first I was simply ignored and after a reminder, Arielle Angel, Editor-in-chief, explained that it was a lack of resources that prevented them publishing my reply. JC “simply do not have the bandwidth to publish full response articles to articles we’ve published”. So I am publishing my response here.

Who sponsored the false ‘antisemitism’ campaign against Corbyn

The first question to ask is who was behind the campaign to root out “antisemitism” in the Labour Party? Were they genuinely concerned about antisemitism or defending Israel? Were the allegations confected?

The first article exposing Corbyn as an “antisemite” came from the Tory Daily Mail. On 7 August 2015, even before Corbyn was elected, it published an ‘exclusive’ revealing that Corbyn was an associate of a Holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. It was untrue but mud sticks.

This is the same Daily Mail which, according to Professor Tony Kushner, “has been an anti-alien newspaper since the 1900s. There’s great continuity.” The Daily Mail is the paper which supported Hitler and which had an infamous front page ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Nor is this ancient history. Despite this, Leifer quoted Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail uncritically accusing Labour of being a racist party. Hodges is hardly neutral, an ex-New Labourite, right-wing and hostile.

Just three months later the Mail employed an ex-Sun columnist against Corbyn, Katie Hopkins who had previously described refugees as ‘cockroaches’. The whole of the British press, from the Sun to the neo-liberal Guardian, was mobilised in the cause of fighting ‘antisemitism’.

The Conservative Party and the Labour Right also joined hands in opposing Labour “antisemitism”. These were the same political forces that had supported the disastrous 2014 Immigration Act and the official policy of creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants that had led to hundreds if not thousands of Black British citizens being deported to the West Indies. Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the Act, including the “antisemitic” Corbyn. In fact, Labour’s Right was permeated with antisemitism. After a racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court in 2010 for election offences, which included running a campaign aimed at stirring up racial strife by “making the white folk angry” he was defended by Tom Watson, who “lost sleep” over “poor Phil.” Watson later became Corbyn’s unfriendly deputy leader and led the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt.

Historically it was the Right of the Labour Party which was antisemitic. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which claims to be the representative body of British Jewry (although in fact it represents at best 40% of British Jews), raised no objection when Sidney Webb (1859-1947), Colonial Secretary, founder of the Fabians and New Statesman, remarked that there were ‘“no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while “French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden…We, thank heaven, are free”, adding that was probably the case because there was “no money in it”. (Paul Kelemen, “The British Left and Zionism: The History of a Divorce”, Manchester University Press 2012)

Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary during World War 2, adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees. Hundreds if not thousands died as a result.

We see this today with Labour leader Keir Starmer. He has expressed his determination to “root out the poison” of antisemitism from the Labour Party. Yet Sir Keir, was unable to challenge a racist caller on the talk show station LBC, who stated that White people would be in a minority by 2066 and asked why Britain can’t be like Israel which “has a state law that they are the only people in that country to have self-determination. Well why can’t I as a white British female have that same right?” Perhaps it was the comparison with Israel that threw Keir!

Not once did Joshua Leifer ask simple questions as to why, if the Board of Deputies was concerned with Labour “antisemitism,” it had said nothing about Boris Johnson’s genuinely antisemitic and racist 2004 novel “72 Virgins” or about the fact that the Tories sat in the European Parliament in a “conservative and reformist” bloc with fascists and antisemites such as Roberts Ziles and Michal Kaminsky. When the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees Mogg, spoke last year of the “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves,” in reference to two Jewish fellow MPs, there was no comment on this patently antisemitic reference.

John Bercow, the recently retired Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, was asked in an interview if Corbyn was an antisemite. His response was that he had known Corbyn for 22 years and there wasn’t a ‘whiff’ of antisemitism about him. Bercow also recalled how he remembered an MP saying: ”If I had my way, Berkoff, people like you wouldn’t be allowed in this place.” On inquiring whether his antagonist meant being lower-class or Jewish?’ the response was ‘Both’!

The idea that the Conservative Party, the party of Empire, is opposed to racism, including antisemitism, lies in the realm of fantasy. Yet Leifer asked no questions as to the bona fides of Corbyn’s right-wing antagonists.

Almost as soon as the ‘antisemitism’ controversy raised its head I had my doubts. Was antisemitism spontaneously arising in the Labour Party because of Corbyn’s election or were we seeing the state destabilisation of Labour?

My answer came on March 18th when I was suspended. All the allegations that were put to me later were about Israel. Did I compare Israel’s marriage laws to those of Nazi Germany? My answer was yes, but so did Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany! Did I say that Israel was hoping that Holocaust survivors would die in order they could save on their welfare benefits? Yes I did but so did Ha’aretz!

It takes little imagination to guess at the reaction to Corbyn’s election – from the CIA HQ at Langley Virginia, to MI5 to Israel. Corbyn was a veteran anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear and hostile to NATO. He was now leader of the second party of government in the US’s closest ally in Europe. Al Jazeera’s The Lobby gave us a snapshot of what was happening when we saw Israeli Embassy operative Shai Masot being deeply involved in Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ crisis.

The facts can be true, yet the narrative can be false

Are there antisemites in the Labour Party? Of course there will be a few. Any party of ½ million is bound to have them. Does that mean that Labour or any other political party was overrun by them? Of course not. Yet Leifer, instead of probing beneath the surface, declares that ‘If people are exposing a valid problem, you have to deal with it’.

But there wasn’t a problem. Leifer mentioned the infamous mural, erased in 2012, that the right-wing former Director of Labour Friends of Israel Luciana Berger made an issue of before the 2018 local elections. It depicted six bankers, two of whom were Jewish. They had fat, not hooked noses. Corbyn had opposed their erasure on free speech grounds. Opinions differ as to whether the mural was antisemitic but the real issue was why this had been raised 6 years later. No one had considered the matter important in 2012.

It was clear that sections of the press and others were researching everything that Corbyn had ever said and putting the worst possible interpretation on it. This was in contrast to ignoring the openly racist record of Prime Minister Boris Johnson who in 2002 spoke about “picanninies” and Black people having “watermelon” smiles.

Nearly half of Conservative Party members oppose having a Muslim Prime Minister. Yet these bigoted attitudes were never problematic. Why? Because it was not antisemitism that was the real issue in Labour, but defence of Israel.

What antisemitism there is in the Labour Party is confined to social media; and much of that, such as Rothschild/banker conspiracy theories, are a way in which people try to explain what they see as the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby to bend politicians to their will. This is a power that Israeli politicians like Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert have openly boasted of. Israel calls itself a Jewish state and it’s unsurprising that lacking an understanding of how imperialism works, people can ascribe American responsiveness to Israel’s demands as the bowing to Jewish power rather than the interplay between an imperialist power and its watchdog in the region. In my own experience, people who talk of the Rothschilds don’t even realise that they are Jewish.

Antisemitism is not what some idiot writes on social media bearing in mind that one person can post a million tweets. Antisemitism is what people do to Jewish people not what they tweet about. No one died from a tweet.

Who were the victims of the antisemitism witchhunt?

Leifer failed to ask basic questions such as, who were the targets of the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt? Not only was I was expelled but so was Jackie Walker, a Black Jewish women who was utterly demonised. Jackie was active in the fight against the National Front and the far-Right UKIP.

Another person expelled was Marc Wadsworth, who criticised former Israel lobbyist Ruth Smeeth for her assisting the Tory Daily Telegraph. Wadsworth didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish when he criticised her at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 into racism in the Labour Party. In the campaign against Police racism over the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Government MacPherson Inquiry that found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist, Wadsworth introduced the Lawrence family to Nelson Mandela and put the campaign on the map. Then Marc was expelled because of the lies of an Israel lobbyist turned MP. Yet in Jewish Currents, Leifer stayed silent or oblivious of this context.

I spent most of my youth involved in anti-fascist work as first Secretary of the Anti-Nazi League in Brighton and then served on the Executive of Anti-Fascist Action. The Board of Deputies spent most of their time attacking us, not the fascists, because we were anti-Zionist!

The Board of Deputies has never opposed antisemitism

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle, which led the ‘antisemitism’ attacks on Corbyn, have never campaigned against genuine antisemitism. In 1936 when Moseley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the East End of London the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle told Jews to keep away. Thousands of Jews and non-Jews ignored them in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street. After the war the 43 Group of Jewish ex-serviceman took the battle to the resurgent Union Movement and literally smashed them off the streets. The Board vehemently opposed them. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the same story.

As the Editor of the Searchlight anti-fascist magazine, Maurice Ludmer wrote: “In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerunof the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. ” (Issue 41, November 1978)

The first time that the Board held an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration was against Corbyn outside Parliament in March 2018. Who took part? Arch Tory racist Norman Tebbit, proponent of the racist ‘cricket test’ (the idea that immigrants who support the Indian/Pakistani cricket teams weren’t really British) and sectarian bigot, Ulster Unionist MP Ian Paisley! Even the Zionist placards were antisemitic!

Antisemitism was weaponised

‘Antisemitism’ was the chosen weapon of attack on the Labour left. It played to their weak spot, identity politics. It was easier to attack Corbyn over ‘antisemitism’ than austerity or his anti-nuclear politics. The fact that so many Jews are being suspended today over supposed antisemitism attitudes because of their criticism of Israel proves that this is not about antisemitism. According to Jewish Voices for Labour, at least 25 Jewish members were investigated for ‘antisemitism’, and many of them suspended, in recent years, with no coverage of the purge in the mainstream media.

The British Jewish Community is not the American Jewish Community

Leifer operated under the belief that the Jewish community in Britain and the United States are comparable. They are not. American Jewry is not centrally directed by Zionist bodies like in Britain. I am the son of an Orthodox Rabbi. I knew the Jewish community and modern Orthodoxy pretty well. Former Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz visited my house. It is a deeply conservative and racist community (anti-Arab/Muslim). There is no comparison with the American Jewish community which is largely Reform/Conservative. The British Jewish community is far more insular. It is a community which has for the last 50 years voted Tory by overwhelming majorities. Even under Labour’s first Jewish leader Ed Miliband, it voted by more than 3-1 for the Tories. The days of the Jewish workers in the East End joining and voting Communist are long gone.

Leifer mentions a letter from 60 rabbis attacking Corbyn. What he doesn’t mention is the letter signed by 29 Ultra Orthodox rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board’s attacks saying they did not represent the Ultra Orthodox community, which is the fastest growing part of the British Jewish community.

Would Jewish groups like If Not Now or JVP have helped?

Leifer argues that if there had been similar Jewish groups in Britain to America’s If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace then things might have been different. I don’t believe so. American Jewry is more liberal. This was why Jewish Voices for Labour was formed in Britain. But they were ignored during the antisemitism controversy because the campaign was not about either Jews or antisemitism. The proof of this lies in the fact that the Board of the Deputies and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement focused on the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It is the same IHRA that the antisemitic Trump and the equally antisemitic Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken to heart. The EHRC report on Labour ‘Antisemitism’

Leifer quotes uncritically the recent report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that concluded that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible” and identified “serious failings in leadership and an inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints.”

The EHRC is hardly a reliable source. The EHRC is a state-appointed, state-funded body that has refused to investigate Tory Party Islamophobia. It has an abysmal record on racism and has recently come in for criticism by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. Until recently it didn’t have a single Black or Muslim Commissioner. Leifer might have mentioned the author of the report. The Anti-Semitism Report on Labour was produced by Alasdair Henderson, a supporter of fascist Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray, whose book “The Strange Death of Europe” articulates the White Replacement Theory. The EHRC is held in contempt by Black people yet Leifer said nothing about this miserable record.

Leifer quotes Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis who issued a statement attacking Corbyn during the General Election over Labour ‘antisemitism’. Leifer failed to tell his readers that Mirvis trained at a yeshivah on a West Bank settlement, Alon Shvut. Mirvis joined in and encouraged others to march, in Jerusalem’s annual March of the Flags, when thousands of settler youth parade through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. Mirvis marched despite appeals in the Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.

Leifer gives as examples of Labour ‘antisemitism’ former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s assertion that the Nazis supported Zionism in the 1930’s. Even were this untrue it wouldn’t be antisemitic. But a Zionist historian, Professor Francis Nicosia, has spoken of the ‘illusory assumption’ of German Zionism that Zionism “must have been well served by a Nazi victory.” Another Zionist historian, David Cesarani wrote in his book “Final Solution” that “The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.” It may be inconvenient today to remember Zionism’s record during the Nazi period, but to tell the truth is never antisemitic.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism

It should be obvious that the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ is about Zionism not antisemitism. What has comparing Israel to pre-war Germany got to do with antisemitism? Was the late Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Holocaust, also antisemitic for making such a comparison? Was Knesset member and former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan antisemitic when he made the same comparison?

Leifer quotes uncritically the assertion of the Zionist Board of Deputies that ‘Jeremy Corbyn, simply had no right to argue with Jewish organizations over the definition of antisemitism’. Why not? No one has a monopoly on the definition of racism.

Not once did Leifer ask why British Jews and Zionist groups had the right to define antisemitism in terms that rule out the Palestinian expression of their experience of racism.

Nor did Leifer ask, Why the need for a definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines antisemitism as ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ Why the need for a 500+ WORD definition? My dad took part in the Battle of Cable Street. He didn’t need a definition of antisemitism! Even the principal drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, has condemned the definition’s weaponisation and chilling of free speech, yet Leifer was seemingly oblivious to the motives behind the Zionist demands to accept the IHRA. Should Corbyn have ‘apologised’ to the Jewish community?

Quite amazingly Leifer suggests that during the election Corbyn should have apologised for Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ to the Jewish community when asked to do so by BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. The proper response would have been ‘Apologise? What for?’ However, by that time Corbyn too had accepted the false narrative of ‘antisemitism’ and the more people he expelled the more ‘proof’ there was that Labour had an ‘antisemitism’ problem.

That was the real tragedy of Corbyn, not that he put up some resistance to the narrative.

Corbyn’s failure was to refuse to go on to the offensive. When Neil, a former editor of the Murdoch Sunday Times, asked Corbyn to apologise Corbyn should have asked Neil why he was so concerned by antisemitism when he had employed a Holocaust denier, David Irving, to interpret the Goebbels Diaries! Neil as Chairman of the Spectator also agreed to keeping the openly antisemitic Taki Theodoracopulos on as a columnist. (Taki openly praised the Greek Nazi party Golden Dawn and described himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite”.) Corbyn had an easy response but he was incapable of punching a paper bag. His reformist politics were the problem, not his inability to apologise.

Leifer correctly criticises Corbyn for having ‘no real strategy for pursuing a boldly anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine politics or skillfully parrying the inevitable attacks from his opponents” but the criticism is rich coming from him. His only suggestion for how Corbyn should have parried is to ask ‘What if, instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish communal institutions’

He can’t be serious. The answer to his suggestion lies in section 3(d) of the Board of Deputies Constitution which states that the Board shall ‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.’ The Board of Deputies is an Israel, right or wrong, group. An organisation that tweets its support of the Israeli military when its snipers are mowing down children, is hardly likely to be won over to pro-Palestinian politics!

Appeasement is not a useful strategy. Labour’s Leaked Report makes it clear that Corbyn sincerely believed that if he offered Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and myself up as sacrificial lambs, the Board would be appeased. On page 306 it tells how

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to [the Governance and Legal Unit] that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO [Leader of the Opposition] 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 but was trust reestablished? Of course not. They simply demanded more victims like the one honourable MP Chris Williamson. You have to fight a wild animal and Corbyn was not prepared to do that. That was the problem which the ever clever Leifer wasn’t able to discern.

Corbyn’s period as leadership and his demise was indeed a tragedy, one which is now resulting in mass expulsions from the Labour Party. It is or should be crystal clear that the ‘antisemitism’ campaign was never about antisemitism and always about the threat that a party led by a socialist represented.

In 20-30 years some enterprising young journalist will no doubt use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the names and details of who was at the centre of the anti-Corbyn campaign, orchestrating the different parts.

As for Jewish Currents, it describes itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.’ I was left wondering what it means to say that you stand in the tradition of the Jewish left? It seems for many on the passive left this comprises a mixture of romantic kitsch and schmaltzy memories.

The traditions of the Jewish left – the Bund, the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists –can be summed up in one word – solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all. It was in solidarity with the murdered millions of Jews of Poland that Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund representative in the Polish Government-in-exile, committed suicide in London in 1943. This was at the same time as his Zionist counterpart Ignacy Schwarzbart, was playing down the extent of the Holocaust.

The state-sponsored attack against Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that he led is a litmus test of whether or not you are a socialist. Joshua Leifer’s article was an attack on all those who have been victims of the Right’s heresy hunt, not least the Palestinians. I therefore wrote back to the editor suggesting that if Arielle Angel was going to refuse a reply to Leifer’s article then it would be more honest for JC to declare that it represented the non-socialist and non-Marxist left. It seems that to JC being on the ‘left’ is a lifestyle statement.

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SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE

HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES

Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )

Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?

Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.

Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.

He  wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.

A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.

One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.

The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.

Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble -  and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.

I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.

Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.

Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment.   This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.

What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.

Some of those of us who have experienced the "joys" of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!

At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.

Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.

Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other  similar religious states.

.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.

From CounterPunch 26 December  2019

Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism: A Category Mistake

by Lawrence Davidson

Photograph Source: Master Steve Rapport – CC BY 2.0

Trump and the Constitution

It is a pretty sure thing that President Donald Trump is ignorant of what is in the U.S. Constitution and, in any case, does not care much about what the document says. Take the idea of freedom of speech as set down in the First Amendment. Does he understand the importance of this amendment? Actually, it would seem that the only freedom of speech he finds sacrosanct is his own, expressed almost daily in angry, often rambling “tweets.” Those frequent missives hardly make the man a model of critical thinking and, as it turns out, for the price of some special interest’s political support, President Trump is willing to tell us all that we must believe the opposite of what is true. If we don’t, he will take away some federal benefit. Trump is by nature both authoritarian and simple-minded—not an unusual combination.

Confusing Categories

It was in this simplistic frame of mind that, on 12 December, President Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government to deny funds to universities and colleges that allow alleged anti-Semitic speech on campus. Well, the reader might respond, such an order is understandable because we know that anti-Semitism is a particularly vicious form of racism. And so it is. The mistake here is to assume that President Trump actually knows how to recognize genuine anti-Semitism, so as not to confuse this expression of bigotry with its opposite: the support of human, civil and political rights—in this case, those of the Palestinians. Now, the reader might ask, how could anyone confuse these two categories: on the one hand, the support of an oppressed people’s rights and, on the other, racist anti-Semitism? It helps if you are ignorant, amoral and opportunistic.

And so, with the encouragement of the Zionist lobby, a particularly powerful lobby dedicated solely to the interests of the Israeli state, President Trump, who is in fact ignorant, amoral and opportunistic, based this executive order on a logical fallacy—a category mistake. He identified protests against Israeli state behavior with anti-Semitic racism and declared that any university or college that allows the former (say, by permitting criticism of Israel for its violent suppression of Palestinian rights) is to be found guilty of the latter (anti-Semitism), and therefore is not to receive federal funds.

A Zionist Project

Working for the purposeful confusion of anti-Semitism and the support for Palestinian rights is a Zionist project. It should be emphasized that the Zionists who carry this project forward are not, like the president, ignorant or confused. They know what they are doing. And that is why this effort constitutes a tragedy of the highest order not only for the Palestinians, but for the Jewish people as well.

After World War II every sane individual knew that racism, particularly racism expressed through state power, was bad news. The consequences of such empowered bigotry was there to see across the world: Japanese behavior in China, Korea and Southeast Asia generally, along with German behavior throughout occupied Europe, constituted the worst examples. They resulted in the deaths of tens of millions—among them six million Jews. That is why as early as the late 1940s, an expansion of international law and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought to make such behavior criminal, particularly when carried out as the policy of governments.

As it turned out, those resolutions constituted direct obstacles to the Zionist goal of a “Jewish state” in Palestine. The Zionist conquest of Palestine in the military campaigns of   1948 and 1967, was followed by the systematic narrowing or outright denial of the human, civil and political rights for Palestinians. In the case of Palestinians residing in Israel proper, the racist policies and practices were often obscured behind a facade of benign-sounding declarations that, more often than not, had little impact on minority rights. No such facade was adopted within the Occupied Territories. In this way racism became an essential tool for achieving Zionism’s goal of ethnic exclusivity.

So how do you rationalize this behavior? Even though Ashkenasi (that is, European) Jews have been one of the most persecuted groups in Western history, it was not hard for the Zionists to see their own racist behavior as necessary. Founding a state first and foremost for one group, in a territory already occupied by hundreds of thousands of “others,” easily led to discriminatory policies and practices. It also led to indoctrination of Israeli Jews and their diaspora supporters through the distortion of the history of conquest and colonial occupation. The inevitable resistance of the Palestinians, even when non-violent, became labeled as lawlessness at best and terrorism at worst. In this sense, Israeli society has mimicked not only the apartheid sentiments of South Africa, but also the culture that prevailed in the United States before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Exporting the Fallacy

Yet it was not enough for the Israelis to convince their own Jewish citizens that Zionist racism was righteous self-defense and support of Palestinian rights the equivalent of anti-Semitism. This logical fallacy had to be pushed on Israel’s primary ally, the United States. And, at least in the halls of power, this effort has been remarkably successful, probably because the Zionist lobby has a lot of money to help or hinder ambitious American politicians.

However, outside of those halls, the effort has been exposed for what it is: a dangerous reversal of categories that threatens to turn the clock back on much of the post-World War II progress in political, civil and human rights. As the growing popularity of the boycott Israel movement (BDS) has shown, American citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have an increasing ability to see the reality of the situation. A survey released in mid June 2017 by an organization known as the Brand Israel Group, “a coalition of volunteer advertising and marketing specialists” who consult for pro-Israel organizations, indicated that “approval of Israel among American college students dropped 27% between the group’s 2010 and 2016 surveys” while “Israel’s approval among all Americans dropped 14 points.” Brand Israel’s conclusion: in the future, the U.S. may “no longer believe that Israel shares their values.” This is the case not because of any big increase in anti-Semitism, but due to ever-growing evidence of Israeli racism.

One reaction to this increasing popular clarity of vision is President Trump’s executive order. If, in this case, colleges and universities do not enforce the Zionist logical fallacy, they loose federal money.

Conclusion

Governments do not have a very good reputation for telling their citizens the truth. For instance, just this month it was made known that the U.S. government and military misled the American people about the ability to achieve victory in the Afghan war—a conflict that has been going on for 18 years. The same thing occurred during the Vietnam War. However, it is one thing to withhold information, or downright lie about a situation, and another to urge a population to swallow the category contradictions Trump and the Zionists are peddling. There is something Orwellian about that. It is no mistake that it is the brightest of college students, those who are actually overcoming ignorance and practicing the art of thinking straight, who are most put off by this propagandistic tactic.

As for those Zionist students who claim that protests against Israeli policy and behavior on their campus make them feel uncomfortable, or even unsafe, they might try to learn something from those feelings. After all, it’s the closest they will ever come to the much more profound feelings of anxiety and danger that Palestinians feel every day, in their own homes, neighborhoods and campuses as well. So which category do all of us want to defend—the category of state-sponsored racism or the category of human, civil and political rights? Just be sure not to confuse one for the other.

More articles by:Lawrence Davidson

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

CORBYN TRAGEDY - THE UK LABOUR PARTY IS ITS OWN WORST ENEMY

Before starting on the problems confronted by Jeremy Corbyn, it may be a good idea to start with what is wrong with much of most countries around the world.

After the second world war and after the Nazis and the USSR decimated the Jewish populations of Europe, the zionists fought to build a so-called Jewish state in Palestine and with their so-called success the Zionists occupied much of Palestine and have decimated the Palestinians with a slow genocide which has continued from the late 1940s to today when we are about to enter 2020.

As a consequence of Israeli apartheid and police state actions, they have brutally suppressed the Palestinins living in the Gaza strip and West Bank of Palestine and the Israelis are occupying more and more of Palestinian territory until they will eventually occupy the whole of Palestine.

There are many of us around the world who are Jewish and are ant-zionists.

One of the international ploys used by the Israeli government is to equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism, and there has been a marked increase everywhere with actions perpetrated by ultra right wing groups who are fascists or semi-fascists and whose actions are not very different from groups around Europe and elsewhere, such as South Africa 70 or 80 years ago. They are using the worst possible ploys to spread anti-semitic actions everywhere.

Now we come back to the UK and the recent election which saw Jeremy Corbyn defeated and Boris Johnson elected.

It has been a well-known fact that ever since Corbyn was elected to head the Labour Party in the UK, forces have been at play to paint him as an anti-semite and to paint much of the Labour Party as anti-semitic.

There are groups within the Labour Party who have sub-groups which are supporters of zionist Israel and have stated that Corbyn, because he has supported the Palestinians, is therefore anti-semitic and will make difficulties for the Jews of the UK.

The reality of course is that most of the Tory Party and many in the Labour Party are anti-semitic and were doing everything in their power to destroy Corbyn, whose policies in general were being too left-wing for the conservatives throughout the UK.

As a consequence of the above, the Labour Party destroyed itself back to Blairism and decimated Labour in the UK parliament.

From Al Jazeera, 7 JULY 2019

Nelson Mandela's grandson slams 'Israeli apartheid'

Zwelivelile Mandela says Israeli apartheid is the worst form of apartheid ever witnessed.

by Gavin O'Toole

3 hours ago

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Mandela sketched out a damning picture of the discrimination experienced by the Palestinian people [File: Leon Neal/Getty Images]

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London, United Kingdom - The grandson of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela has delivered a damning condemnation of "Israeli apartheid", in a high-profile expression of solidarity between South Africans and Palestinians.

Zwelivelile Mandela, an MP of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), made the comments on Saturday at the Palestine Expo, an annual event in London aimed at showcasing Palestinian history, heritage and culture. Last year, it attracted 15,000 visitors.

Addressing a large audience, Mandela said that the Nation-State Law passed in 2018 declaring Israel to be the historical homeland of the Jewish people "confirmed what we have always known to be the true character and reality of Israel: Israel is an apartheid state".

He also outlined what had constituted apartheid for black South Africans - from the creation of bantustan reservations to land expropriation and the daily assault on dignity.

"All these characteristics were present in apartheid Israel since its inception but have now been codified and given a constitutional status and expression by the Nation-State Law.

"Apartheid Israel perpetuates statutory discrimination through the very definition by the law as a Jewish state; by doing so it renders non-Jews as second-class citizens, alternately as foreigners in the land of their birth."

Anti-Semitism allegations

Also speaking at the event was Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who criticised efforts by the United States to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through investment.

He told the London audience that not only could the deal not be taken seriously, but if it were pursued it would put an end to "all Palestinian rights and aspirations", and added that, as a result, a global intervention was now required to put pressure on Israel.

"We need the world because Israel will not change by itself - as long as Israel and Israelis are not punished and don't pay for the occupation, for the crimes, don't expect any change. It will not come from within Israel."

Levy was also scathing about how Western politicians and media have succumbed to a "very efficient" campaign by Israel to label any criticism of the country's activities as anti-Semitic.

"Here we face now a new stage in which criticising Israel becomes not only impossible but almost criminal. I have never seen such a phenomenon in which struggling for justice becomes criminalised - this is unheard of.

"The formula is very formalised and very efficient, and we shouldn't let it be so efficient: you dare to criticise the occupation? You dare to criticise Israel? You dare to have some sympathy with the Palestinians, the victims? You dare to speak about justice? You know what you are: you are an anti-Semite. This paralyses everybody."

OPINION

Why aren't Europeans calling Israel an apartheid state?

by John Dugard

 

Ilan Pappe, a professor at the University of Exeter and director of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies, also blasted the mainstream media's coverage of Israeli activities and how these have been concealed behind the "fabrication of institutional anti-Semitism".

Pappe said it was important to acknowledge the historical context in which the treatment of Palestinians in areas such as Gaza had taken place.

"Unfortunately, the world doesn't know what goes on in Gaza. In this country, the mainstream media, whether it is Sky News or the BBC, or the main newspapers, don't mention the Gaza Strip.

"They mention every word that they think attests to institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party but they would not mention what happened yesterday when 49 young Palestinians were shot by Israeli snipers. Neither did they mention the 52 who were shot last week."

Home demolitions

Human rights activist Issa Amro, who is based in Hebron - which is at the sharp end of Israeli settler appropriation of Palestinian land - told attendees that the city had become the "micro-centre of apartheid, discrimination and segregation".

Amro described his activism trying to resist the growing scale at which Palestinian homes were being demolished by the Israeli authorities in order for settlers to take their land and resources.

READ MORE

Israel opens 'apartheid road' in occupied West Bank

He said demolitions had increased significantly since Donald Trump became the US president in early 2017, and current Israeli policy was to now even require some Palestinians to demolish their own homes.

"Don't be afraid of 'anti-Semitism' because the message of this conference should be that criticising Israeli human rights violations is not anti-Semitism," he said.

Daphna Baram, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions UK, outlined the scale of demolitions, pointing out that 201 Palestinian structures were demolished in June alone - bringing those destroyed since 1967 to 49,336.

"This is the daily grind of the occupation that is turning the life of the Palestinians impossible," she said. "This is not by accident, this is making the lives of the Palestinians impossible by design.

"This has been the design of the Israeli government for generations to get rid of the Palestinians and make them go away in various ways, shapes and forms, and one of the main ways to do this is by house demolitions."

Global south 'neglect'

OPINION

Love in times of Israeli apartheid

by Yara Hawari 

 

Palestinian journalist and author Ramzy Baroud - who had just returned from a 10-day solidarity tour to Kenya - told the event in the UK capital that a new front in Palestinian activity should be aimed at the developing world.

Palestinian activism had neglected the "global south" because of the Oslo peace process and a changing discourse that had convinced people that their fate lay in the capitals of the developed world.

"But Israel has rediscovered the global south and they have penetrated Africa and South America and other places," Baroud said. "We need to go back there and we need to resurrect their solidarity.

"One thing about Africa that I noticed is that we don't have to contend with the tiny little bits of the discourse - nobody accuses you of anti-Semitism, it is not even on the agenda of African audiences: what they talk about there is national liberation."

SOURCE: Al Jazeera News

THE ANC, SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH BOARD OF DEPUTIES,LINDIWE SISULU, ANTI-SEMITISM

It is disingenuous for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to single out a leader of the ANC, as if the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, was not implementing and promoting ANC policy.

A story is told of how two ladies, one day, spotted Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo. One wondered who the white man was with Madiba, the other responded: “That’s not a white man, that’s Joe Slovo.”

May 23 this year marks the 93rd birth of Yossel Mashel Slovo better known to us as Joe Slovo or JS. As his name suggests, he was born in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family and came with his family, aged eight, to South Africa in 1934. While his father was a truck driver and fruit vendor in Johannesburg, Slovo left school at the age of 15 to start working as a dispatch clerk later becoming a shop steward for the National Union of Distributive Workers. 

A year after leaving school, he would join the Communist Party of South Africa, which would later become the SACP, and volunteered to fight against the Nazis during the World War ll. Eventually, as we all know, JS would become the General Secretary of the SACP while having been the first white person to be elected to the National Executive Committee of the ANC at Kabwe in 1985. He would be a sworn enemy of the apartheid regime.

Up to the talks about talks at Groote Schuur, Joe Slovo was an item on the agenda for the Nationalist Party. FW de Klerk and his colleagues hated Slovo so much that they demanded that he not be included in the ANC’s delegation. Madiba would hear none of it. Yet one wonders why they hated him so much. 
Was it because he was a Communist or Chief of Staff of umKhonto weSizwe? Was it because he was a white man and therefore seen as a betrayer of white people in South Africa? Or was it because he was a Jew? Even though JS was an atheist, he would remain faithful to Jewish culture. He would later marry another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First.  Yet the story of JS and Madiba sums up the view that the ANC has had not only of white people but also Jews. On the one hand, the story illustrates that non-racialism which has been the foundation of the ANC, more specifically from the days of the Freedom Charter. On the other hand, it tells of an ANC that is simply not anti-Semitic.
In fact, the expulsion of the Gang of Eight, after the Morogoro Conference in 1969, a conference JS played an instrumental role in, exemplifies the intolerance that the ANC, whose membership was opened to all races by this time, had of those Africanist members within its number that criticised the organisation for being “hijacked by minorities”. Like those who left the ANC in the late Fifties to form the Pan Africanist Congress, the Gang of Eight were dissatisfied with the role and prominence played by people such as Joe Slovo in the ANC’s leadership.
Fundamental to the understanding of the ANC, based on the universal principles of the Freedom Charter, was that despite the fact that oppression under apartheid was being led by and favoured white people, it could by no means condemn or in fact judge all White people. Similar to the notion of “an injury to one is an injury to all”, the ANC believed that, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu would put it, freedom would free not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well. White people themselves needed liberation from the chains of apartheid.  The condemnation of the human rights atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid Israeli regime is therefore not a condemnation of all Jewish people. Far from it. In fact, the ANC believes that just as white people needed liberation from the chains of apartheid, so too Israelis need liberation from the atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid state of Israel. The ANC will never hold all Jews responsible nor even condemn them for the atrocities of Israel just as it never held white people, as a group, responsible for the atrocities of the apartheid regime in South Africa. 
The ANC has a long history of the involvement of Jews in its membership and its fight for freedom. It would be anathema for it and its members, and especially its leaders, to be anti-Semitic and in fact one could be disciplined for “sowing racism, sexism, tribal chauvinism, religious and political intolerance, regionalism or any other form of discrimination”. (Rule 25.17.6 of the Constitution of the ANC.)

It is therefore disingenuous and somewhat dangerous for the national vice-president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies firstly to single out a leader of the ANC, as if Lindiwe Sisulu was not simply implementing and promoting ANC policy and, secondly to thereby suggest that the ANC is anti-Semitic because it condemns the atrocious abuses of human rights in the Occupied Territories and the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians globally.

Even more so, it is questionable for the SJBD to speak on behalf of South Africa’s Jewry, as if there are not Jews who do not currently support the State of Israel and even worst to suggest that they are lesser Jews because they do not support Israel.

If Israel wishes to recall its ambassador to Pretoria, as a sovereign state it has all the right to do so. The ANC and, in particular South Africa as a sovereign state, should beg no country to keep its ambassador in place where it does not wish to be represented. In fact, the remarks made by the vice-president of the SAJBD are sectarian and radical in themselves because it serves to cause anxiety and apprehension about the ANC administration under President Cyril Ramaphosa by suggesting that South Africa’s Jewry has an enemy.

As in the last 25 years of democracy, South Africa’s Jewry have nothing to fear and have no enemies. What is well within the government of South Africa, they would find, are enemies of discrimination, enemies of human rights atrocities and enemies of violence.
The words of Nelson Mandela, who was seen with Comrade Joe Slovo by those two ladies in that story, continue to reverberate across our country and the ANC continues to listen to them. “As long as the Palestinian people are not free, South Africa will not be free.” As long as Palestinian people are not free even South Africa’s Jewry will not be free. DM
 
Jessie Duarte is Deputy Secretary General of ANC

April 5, 2019

The Anti-Semitic Con

by Paul Edwards

With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an honest airing.

Since American politics is mortally corrupt, one might wonder why bother to expose one prime cause of its ethical degeneracy.  If the beast is dead, what use is determining what killed it?  Well, it isn’t quite dead and we have to live with it.  If the public knew one country has done more to subvert our government than all others combined it might raise enough hell to stop it.

In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on America.  Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby is legitimate per our toothless  protocol.  Israel’s is not so registered, but… details, details.  So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily insult a sitting President in a joint session of Congress, that’s influence, not interference.  When, besides financing most Senators and Representatives elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets to Tel Aviv, that’s influence, not interference.

Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and Putin–without proof and against expert technical evidence–that’s not influence, it’s Russki interference.  More absurdly, when–again, without proof–the same Dem CFOs howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change worth of dingy ads on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s… but you get the picture.

What is obvious and has long been so–and has been emphasized by two years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion–is that influence is what your friends have; interference is what your enemies do.

Why, when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique brazenly and continually interferes in American government in the most aggressive and offensive way, universally denied?  You want flagrant foreign collusion with high officials in U.S. government?  Open your eyes.  And your mind…

The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional whores know that not to do so violates their deal.  Not to back Israel unquestioningly  terminates it, and the loss of that money means loss of office… to say nothing of the beating they’d take in the press and on their reputations.

The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help but know because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold honesty.  They are equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same source: the massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx of militant American Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for Jews only.

The Israel Lobby–financed by vast American Zionist wealth–potent as it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed, and it knows it.   History gives it the key that makes rational assessment of Israel’s policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true anti-Semitism that was its cause.

Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government to be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify argument.  The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic shamelessly to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain examination of Israeli state behavior.

What then is Anti-Semitism?  By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people as a whole.  An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice, and Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto.  In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but not directed at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not Anti-Semitic, just as it’s possible to hate a Catholic or Muslim without hating their religion or their people.

It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is false on its face.  To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as a people since Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no means defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of beliefs, practices, and principles.

To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate than to say that condemnation of the American State’s vicious imperialist wars makes one anti-American.

This disingenuous con needs to named and refuted around the world.

Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic?  Of course, there is!  Plenty of it.  Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil because it does not apply to all critiques of Israel or all insults to Jews or Jewish entities.  Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so vile and toxic a disease, and because it will continue to live in its odious carriers, it is critically important not to vitiate the ubiquitous contempt it arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.

The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government of Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible, deeply counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world opinion.  Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as a cover for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties cannot prevent the world from seeing them for the corrupt and unjust power they are and fiercely, adamantly opposing them.

Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself, a more critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done and is doing to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled and floundering country.  The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus trope of  Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its agents and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and local offices.

Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President, but neither would Obama.  Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our country hated by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East, crippled and hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted with such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath, John Bolton.

Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our fate can be broken.  So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our security is in jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters in charge.

The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind.  When the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death, asks how the scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do so, it replies, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”  It was all too clear what Israel was in 1947.

More articles by:Paul Edwards

 

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

YIDDISH, HEBREW, JEWISH, PALESTINE, ISRAEL, ANTI-SEMITISM, BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS

This whole series of topics has no beginning, no middle, and certainly no end, largely due to the antics of the USA, the UK, France, and many other countries around the world.

Let's start with Yiddish, because that is something I have had a lifelong (92 and counting) involvement with and still think it is one of the most interesting languages to know something about.

My biggest regret is that those around me who spoke Yiddish, were involved with it and were interested in it are all long dead.

The following article appeared in the Saturday Age supplement "Spectrum" on 1 March 2019:

Yiddish concert embraces 'the lost language in all of us'

As the Jewish language awakens, a group of local musicians is putting poetry to song.

By Rachelle Unreich

March 1, 2019 — 11.00am

You could say Yiddish is having its moment, which is odd for a language that originated among Ashkenazi Jews some time in the 11th century.

In Shtisel, an award-winning TV show about the ultra-religious Jewish community in Israel, characters speak a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish, which is largely old Germanic dialect. An all-Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing off-Broadway, and later this year, Carnegie Hall will put on From Shtetl to Stage, celebrating old and new Yiddish culture.



From left, Evelyn Krape, Simon Starr and Galit Klas in the library at Kadimah Yiddish Theatre. Credit:CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS

Melbourne is no slacker in the Yiddish arena, boasting the largest number of Yiddish speakers in Australia. It's also home to Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, the team behind the production Play Me A Poem. At the National Theatre for one night, it will feature well-known musicians and composers such as Deborah Conway, Lior, Willy Zygier and Josh Abrahams creating original songs on stage to Yiddish poetry.

Kadimah's co-artistic director, Evelyn Krape, is on a mission to re-energise interest in Yiddish, which is sometimes referred to as a dying language, mainly because of its dwindling numbers: it was once spoken by more than 10 million Jews around the world but after the Holocaust, this fell to an estimated 1.5 million. Krape's aim is "to establish Yiddish as a thriving and dynamic cultural source," and she recalls being validated by non-Jewish actor Rob Menzies when their paths crossed at a play reading. "He said, 'Yiddish is the lost language in all of us'."

It's true that audiences around the world have been responding to Yiddish performances. A Yiddish-language production of Waiting for Godot opened up a Samuel Beckett festival in Ireland in 2014, and appeared in New York again recently. Composer Josh Abrahams (Addicted to Bass) performed Yiddish songs with the band Yid! at WOMADelaide last year. "The heat was incredible," he recalls, "yet thousands of people were giving the horah [an Israeli group dance] a red hot go. It was amazing."

In Play Me A Poem, musicians will put Yiddish poetry to unlikely tunes. Abrahams' song is reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, while reggae, jazz and Afro-Brazilian vibes will also be in the line-up. Simon Starr, musician and founder of the band Yid!, is expecting "an emotional response". He believes people who think of Yiddish as an old-fashioned language will be unprepared for how avant-garde some of the chosen poetry and lyrics are, despite some being written early last century.

"It is still pretty radical for today," Starr says. "Even if someone isn't connected to it ethnically, it's still deep and passionate and provocative. There are audacious commentaries on the Bible and current affairs, and also heartfelt, harrowing tales of suffering and longing and separation that mirror the migration patterns that were both a result of persecution and economic aspirations. It's a very rich source of material."

For this show there will be surtitles, so that audiences aren't merely listening to an orchestral piece but will have an understanding of the lyrics. "What's really fascinating is to see these amazingly modern responses to what are largely pre-Holocaust poems," says Krape, who co-directs. "We want to say to the audience: Listen – you'll hopefully be knocked off your feet. You might think this is old, but it's not old-fashioned."

Although many in the audience won't be familiar with Yiddish, others will have heard it spoken by an older generation at home. "I don't know what's going on in the ether," says Krape, "but it feels like people are searching for connections to community and heritage, in a way that is heymish [the Yiddish word for warm/ homey], but is [also] dynamic, innovative and contemporary." Krape's parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish, but she only came to it as an adult, and now attends classes in Brunswick.

In Melbourne, there's a thriving community of Yiddish learning: preschool and primary school Sholem Aleichem teaches Yiddish as a second language (and also as a VCE subject), while Monash University offers it at tertiary level.

Kadimah's artistic director, Galit Klas (who is also the show's initiator and co-director), was a Monash student, and was so inspired that she ultimately performed in and directed several Yiddish productions (singing in Yiddish Divas and writing The Ghetto Cabaret). "It really sparks something in their insides for the Jewish audience; it's like this lost missing piece," she says.

And it's also fulfilling for those who find modern music lacking. "Popular music has become horrendously manufactured," says Starr. "There's barely any trace of humanity in there, because instruments and voices have been so treated electronically. There's little human feeling left; it's music by algorithm.

"I think people still respond to well-played, live music that is played with the right intention. It's just people sharing real stories, and I can't imagine that ever going out of fashion. People will respond to that heartfelt live performance, and the next level is when the content has another layer or resonance for them."

That layer might not just come from being Jewish. Yiddish, it seems, has taken on a new life in modern times; TV viewers incorporate some of the vernacular from watching shows such as Girls or Seinfeld, as words like schmooze, shvitz and kvetch make their way into everyday language.

Starr says the thing he finds fascinating about Yiddish poetry is that "the themes are quite universal and humanist". In New York, he says, Yiddish "has become the hipster language of lesbians, because it's an outsider language and it's their little secret."

Non-Jews, such as US actor Shane Baker, have made a living out of mastering Yiddish. Although raised as an Episcopalian in Kansas City, Baker was hooked after seeing a Marx Brothers film, and is now a poster boy for Yiddish theatre.

Klas says Yiddish "doesn't feel dead to me at all".

"There's a challenge for all of us [in Play Me A Poem] in that we're working in a language that we don't know very well. But it also gives you an extra lens with which to see the world and to create art. I don't know if it's given me a huge insight into my Jewish identity, but it's made me more proud."

Play Me A Poem is at The National Theatre on March 3. nationaltheatre.org.au

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The above article from Spectrum does not give the historical perspective on why Yiddish has diminished over the years.

There is only one main reason - the zionists who wanted to develop a "homeland" for Jews in Palestine wanted to remove themselves from the reminders of their origins in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world where Yiddish was the spoken language. The zionists who managed to steal the country from the Palestinians made a conscious decision to say that Hebrew was the biblical language of the Jews and therefore it needed to be the language of the "new" country being established in Palestine to be called Israel.

And so Hebrew was born as the language of the zionists who established this "new" country and Yiddish spoken there was frowned upon to the extent that it has gradually died out.

Yiddish remained a spoken language amongst Jews in the United States of America, particularly in the ghettos of New York and was also very much a language Jews spoke in Buenos Aires in Argentina. South African Jews were, in the main from Eastern Europe and their language was Yiddish.

The following is an extract from Pakn Treger, magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, and is written by Aaron Lansky for the Fall 2018 issue, part of issue number 77. Their address is:1021 West Street, Amherst, MA01002, USA

The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978. He was a Yiddish writer.

This is what he said when he went to Stockholm to accept his prize:

"The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language," he said in Yiddish. And he concluded with words that can be read now as prophecy:

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. And neither,  I suspect, has Isaac Bashevis Singer.


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This next article is from the same Saturday Age Spectrum as the previous article on Yiddish - 1 March 2019:

Antisemitism review: Deborah Lipstadt offers a guide for the perplexed

By Geoffrey Brahm Levey

February 21, 2019 — 3.06pm

SOCIETY
Antisemitism: Here and Now
​Deborah Lipstadt
​
Every serious discussion of antisemitism includes this joke: an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary. Attributed to British political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin, the joke is wise as well as witty. Given the Jews' calamitous history, an ideological or pathological form of Jew-hatred can't simply be about not liking Jews or even treating them harshly. It must be a prejudice with no rational basis. Although often applied to any occurrence of hostility or discrimination against Jews, antisemitism originally entailed a conviction that the Jews are inherently evil. The word "anti-Semitism" was coined only in the late-19th century but has since been applied to Jew-hatred throughout history.

Vandalized tombs with tagged swastikas are pictured in the Jewish cemetery of Quatzenheim, in eastern France, on Tuesday, February 19, 2019.Credit:Jean-Francois Badias

Berlin's definition of an antisemite appears on page 14 of Deborah Lipstadt's new book, Antisemitism: Here and Now. A Holocaust historian at Emory University in Atlanta, Lipstadt attained prominence after David Irving sued her in a British court in 1996 for describing him as a "Holocaust denier". She and her publisher famously won that case, as portrayed in the 2016 film, Denial. The present book is not a history but a reckoning with antisemitism in its current guises and contortions. (Lipstadt rejects the old spelling of "anti-Semitism" as it wrongly implies that the opposition is to "Semitism" rather than to the Jews, as was always intended).

Alas, more than 70 years after the Nazis' quest to exterminate the Jews of Europe, cases still abound in which Jews are variously slain, vilified, excluded, or threatened because they are Jews. In October last year, for example, a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue claimed the lives of 11 congregants and wounded seven others. There have been murderous attacks on Jews also in France and Brussels in recent years. In Britain, graffiti with messages such "Adolf Hitler was right" and "death to all Jews" has appeared in its cities.




Antisemitism. By Deborah Lipstadt.

Closer to home, Jews have been targeted and intimidated on Sydney public transport and while walking in Bondi. Earlier this month, more than 20 swastika symbols were daubed overnight around the Bondi area. Security guards are standard at Jewish schools and synagogues in Western societies. As Lipstadt observes, if anything, the bigots are growing more confident.

The current situation is complicated by two factors. First, Western Jews (in general) now enjoy a privileged status. Highly educated, socioeconomically successful, and politically influential, they are perceived by some less fortunate and marginalised as part of the dominant white majority. Second, there are the vexed issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict and of controversial Israeli government policies. Much of Antisemitism: Here and Now is devoted to discussing cases thrown up by these twin associations.

The book is written as an exchange of letters between Lipstadt and a whip-smart Jewish student, Abigail, and a non-Jewish law colleague, Joe, at her university. The format allows these fictional interlocutors to variously voice their confusion, outrage, and internal conflicts about episodes of apparent antisemitism on campus and in the wider world. Lipstadt responds sagely as a kind of guide to the perplexed.

The discussion begins by distinguishing different types of antisemite. There is the extremist who is upfront about his or her thirst for the Jews' demise. There is the "dinner party antisemite" who wouldn't dream of physically harming Jews but wants to exclude them from their golf or country club. There is the "clueless antisemite" who remarks to her Jewish friend that she, of all people, should be able to spot a bargain. And then there are the "antisemitic enablers", who, while not antisemites themselves, encourage the antisemitism of others.

Here, Lipstadt points her finger at both President Donald Trump, on the right, and British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on the left. Trump has cultivated not only nationalist but also nativist sentiment. He defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, for example, even after one of them drove a truck through the counter-protesters. During his presidential campaign he retweeted an image of Hilary Clinton alongside a Jewish star embossed with the accusation of monied corruption. One of his ads showed three prominent American Jews with commentary about "global special interests" that "control the levers of power in Washington".
Corbyn has a history of arch criticism of Israel but also of supporting blatant antisemites. Last year, video emerged of him speaking at a Palestinian Return Centre event in 2013 in which he suggested that "Zionists" do not understand English irony despite living in the country all their lives, a comment that has not helped him shake the accusation that he himself is an antisemite. Lipstadt marshals compelling cases against both politicians as "enablers", while noting that Corbyn's disposition appears to be sincere whereas Trump's appears to be cynically directed at energising his electoral base.

The book further explores such issues as the difference between antisemitism and racism, antisemitism within the Islamic world, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the "toxification of Israel", and the new hostility towards Jews within progressive movements and on campus. Lipstadt wisely cautions against an attitude of Jewish victimhood. She also criticises Jewish organisations that respond to the BDS by seeking to "boycott the boycotters" or which, like canarymission.org, seek to intimidate Pro-Palestinian professors and activists by compiling public dossiers on them.

Antisemitism is antisemitism regardless of the status of its targets. The Pittsburgh synagogue victims are no less murdered for having been visibly white and comfortably middle class. And the lazy equation of "wealthy and white" with domination overlooks the prominent involvement of Jews in progressive movements including the civil rights movement and feminism.

Less satisfactory is Lipstadt's treatment of the Israel factor. She is wrong to claim that questioning Israel's right to exist is axiomatically antisemitic. To demand only Israel's disestablishment among the family of nations, many of which are guilty of systematic abuses, is clearly discriminatory. However, one can hold that it was a mistake for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine without remotely being antisemitic. Even the founding father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, initially campaigned to place the Jewish homeland in East Africa.

Criticism of Israel as a Jewish state is dismissed too quickly. Lipstadt counters that other democracies have official state religions. True, but the issue is whether and how the state religion is used in the distribution of individuals' rights, opportunities and overall treatment. It should be of concern that national fronts in Europe and alt-right figures in the United States laud Israel as an ethno-democracy while peddling antisemitism at home.
The 2018 Global Anti-Semitism Report found that "70 per cent of anti-Jewish attacks were anti-Israel in nature". Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians provokes brutal and intemperate politics elsewhere in reaction. It is also the case that Israel-bashing attracts and provides cover for genuine antisemites. The attempt to call this out has been hampered by the legacy of Israeli politicians and Jewish leaders responding to any criticism of Israel with the charge of antisemitism.

Often, non-Jews who are concerned about the Palestinians' situation invoke traditional antisemitic tropes without realising it or intending to do so. A current example is the controversy that has ensnared US Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who suggested in tweets that American support for Israel is "all about the Benjamins" (referring to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 note) and the Israel lobby bribing politicians. The tweets sparked an uproar, a rebuke from House Leader Nancy Pelosi, and ultimately Omar's contrite apology. But as Peter Beinhart noted in The Forward, those who are quick to condemn this clumsy verbal bigotry are deathly silent about the tangible bigotry that Palestinians in the West Bank face daily courtesy of Israeli law and policy.

Although most diasporic Jews do not hold Israeli citizenship, a central plank of Zionism is the unity of the Jewish people. Many Jews in and outside of Israel have protested "not in our name" regarding Israeli government policies. Many more believe that this has nothing to do with them, not unlike ordinary Muslims who believe they shouldn't have to answer for the actions of Islamic militants. And many support or defer to Israeli government actions.

The book closes with Lipstadt counselling Joe not to be afraid, as a non-Jew, to call Israel out when he believes it has crossed a line. Sage advice for Jews as well.

Geoffrey Brahm Levey is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New South Wales.