Israel Lobby

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  • Apr.03.2018: ‘I’ Newspaper Reports Open Letter by Labour Against the Witch-hunt. Labour Against the Witch-Hunt is an organisation of Labour members, who have been suspended or expelled due to false accusations of anti-Semitism, and others also keen to bring this political witch-hunt to an end. They’ve written an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn protesting against the fake allegations of anti-Semitism how they are being used by the Israel lobby, the Conservatives and the Blairite right to stifle the Labour left. And the I newspaper has covered them in an article on page 6 of today’s edition, Tuesday 3rd April 2018. The article is by Jane Corbin, and entitled "Corbyn Comrades being thrown to the wolves". ... Their real crime, however, is that they are genuine socialists, who support Jeremy Corbyn, and wish for a just settlement for the Palestinians and an end to their persecution and ethnic cleansing by Israel. This is what the anti-Semitism smears are all about. It has absolutely nothing to do with combating genuine anti-Semitism, and everything to do with trying to undermine Corbyn and his supporters. It is utterly disgraceful, and those responsible for this campaign – the Blairites, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and now the Board of Deputies of British Jews – are showing themselves through this to be utterly mendacious, cynical political manipulators with neither grace nor morals. Beastrabban\'s Weblog.
  • Mar.04.2018: Lies, Libels, Criminal and Political Manipulation Catch Up with the Israel Lobby. Jonathan 'No Morals' Newmark, as I have decided to dub him, former chair of the JLM, is now being investigated by the fuzz at the request of the organisation he once headed. No Morals has been credibly accused of stealing funds from Jewish charities when he was one of the head honchos of the Jewish Leadership Council. The JLM is the morally corrupt organisation, which the Labour party wanted Mike to go to for a ‘training day’. They're the outfit that smeared Jackie Walker as an anti-Semite for questioning the exclusive concentration on the Jewish Holocaust during WWII at their workshop on Holocaust Remembrance Day. She also committed the unforgivable sin in their eyes of rejecting their tortured attempts to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel. As Israel is a racist apartheid state, she was right to do so. The Israel lobby are more concerned with defending Israel than really battling genuine anti-Semitism. Then Mike posted this 2016 article, pointing out that JLM’s new director, Ella Rose, was an official at the Israeli Embassy during Shai Masot's interference with our politics at the highest level. Mike also put up a piece showing that Labour Against Anti-Semitism have also been libelling Jennie Formby, the new left-wing candidate for the post of General Secretary of the Labour Party. They claim that in 2016 she was forced to leave her post as Political Director of Unite the Union, because she questioned the impartiality of Baroness Royall to head an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitism amongst Labour students at Oxford University (not true). This is supposedly because Baroness Royall had made several trips to Israel. Mike makes clear that this is based on the tortured definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the Zionist organisations, which states "it is antisemitic to accuse 'Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations'". Mike’s article ends with this statement "LAAS is fronted by Euan Philipps, chair of Tonbridge and Malling Constituency Labour Party. He wrote a libellous blog article about This Writer on the Huffington Post website, so it is clear that he enjoys a questionable relationship with factual accuracy." Beastrabban\'s Weblog.

2017

  • Jan.17.2017: ‘Constructed crisis for political ends’: anti-Semitism claims are prime weapon for UK Israel lobby, Al Jazeera shows. While an Israeli operative’s efforts to “take down” Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, may appear to be the biggest scandal to arise out of Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary The Lobby, what became clear to me throughout the four-part series was that the primary function of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and other pro Israel groups in the UK working with the Israeli embassy was smearing Palestinians and their supporters with charges of anti Semitism and other nefarious ad hominem claims. Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, the leftwing of the Labour party, called this “a constructed crisis for political ends”. Evidence of this runs throughout the four-part series. Mark Regev, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, at a private meeting held during the annual Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last September, advises key activist leaders of Labour’s pro-Israel contingent on strategy and talking points: "Why are people who consider themselves progressive in Britain, supporting reactionaries like Hamas and Hezbollah? We’ve gotta say in the language of social democracy, I think, these people are misogynistic, they are homophobic, they are racist, they are anti-Semitic, they are reactionary. I think that’s what we need to say, it’s an important message". (...) Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel, is captured saying in conversation at Labour’s annual conference that anti-Semitism is “the defining narrative actually now”. Defining narrative of what? Gerber then explains how it was a “difficult moment” when a woman made the assertion that anti Semitism was being “concocted to crush Jeremy Corbyn” and then asks, “Is that [assertion] anti-Semitic guys, I don’t know, like?” Michael Rubin, parliamentarian and pro Israel activist (who works closely with ex-Israeli Embassy diplomat/spy Shai Masot), replies, “I don’t know where the line is anymore”. Alex Richardson, parliamentary aide to MP Joan Ryan, the Chairperson of LFI, was also present during the exchange. He offered: “I think if it makes you feel uncomfortable that’s the point in which you call it out and report it.” Linkback: Joan Ryan. Annie Robbins, MondoWeiss.

2016

  • Sept.30.2016: Sam Seder Takes Apart Conservative Rabbi Who Confuses Zionism with Judaism. Jackie Walker was accused of being anti-Semitic again because she asked the organisers of a Holocaust Memorial training day why the commemoration of this most terrible crime couldn't also include others, who have similarly suffered persecution and genocide. She also complained that the organisers did not give her a definition of anti-Semitism she could work with. See VoxPolitical article. The Jewish Labour Group, who organised the event, aren’t the only people who confuse {{{2}}} with {{{2}}}. There are right-wing individuals and groups who insist on an exclusively Jewish emphasis on the memorialisation of the Holocaust, and bitterly resent those Jews who universalise their suffering into a commemoration of all, who have suffered genocide. What Mrs Walker objected to was that it did not commemorate the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred before 1945. In his article, Mike noted that point of David Schneider’s definition of anti-Semitism, which states that Jews should not be automatically confused with the state of Israel and its crimes, would make many Zionists anti-Semites. This is also true. Netanyahu made a speech equating the Jewish people with the state of Israel, in order to render criticism of the state of Israel unacceptable as a form of anti-Semitism. A few weeks ago, an American Conservative rabbi, Rabbi Jon Hausman, also declared that Judaism was identical to the state of Israel. ...There is no single figure in Judaism, who has the power to make binding definitions of the faith. I also understand that he is entirely correct about the traditional Jewish that the state of Israel could and should only be founded with the arrival of the Messiah. Judaism and Zionism are not automatically the same, and people are not anti-Semites, nor Jews self-hating, if they reject Zionism or criticise the ethnic policies of the Israeli government. This, however, is Mrs Walker’s real crime in the eyes of her accusers. Beastrabban's Weblog.
  • Sept.16.2016: Vox Political on Yet Another Anti-Semitism Smear against Jackie Walker. The Blairite Labour party hierarchy don’t seem to have got the message that Momentum and its members aren't anti-Semites, and that the real threat is showing itself quite openly in the shape of National ActionWikipedia-W.svg and the National Socialist Party. According to The Guardian, Jackie Walker, vice-chair of Momentum, has faced calls to resign after she made "insensitive" comments at a Labour party training day on anti-Semitism. She "incorrectly" criticised Holocaust Memorial Day for commemorating only Jews, and is quoted as saying "In terms of Holocaust day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust day was open to all people who experienced holocaust?" She also took issue with the definition of anti-Semitism used at the training day, and is also accused of questioning the need for Jewish organisations, including schools to have so much security to protect them from attack. Walker has made a statement denying she said this, and apologising for any offence she might have given. ... The real Nazi anti-Semites are all about keeping Jews as far away from power as possible. If you want a short definition of anti-Semitism, try the one from the person who first coined the term in the 19th century, Wilhelm Marr; he defined anti-Semitism as the hatred of Jews simply for being Jews, regardless of Judaism as a religion. Mrs Walker's accusers have also shown their insensitivity in not considering the harm they’re doing. It seems to me that this is yet another attempt to smear Mrs Walker as an anti-Semite, which is itself part of a wider campaign to purge politically liberal Jews from positions of leadership as part of a Neocon agenda. Mrs Walker was accused of anti-Semitism previously, because she had dared to criticise Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and state, quite correctly, that other peoples had also experienced their own holocausts. Both of these statements are exactly true. One of Prof. Norman Finkelstein’s most controversial works is his The Holocaust Industry. Prof. Finkestein wrote it a few years ago, tracing the emergence of an industry exploiting the memory of this most heinous crime from Israel’s victories over the Arabs at the end of the 1960s. He makes the case that the Holocaust has been deliberately exploited by Zionist organisations as a way of creating public support for Israel. There was an example of the kind of political exploiting Prof. Finkelstein describes about a week ago. Counterpunch wrote an article criticising Binyamin Netanyahu, after he made a speech declaring that he would not halt or recall the colonisation of the West Bank by Israeli settlers, because this would violate their civil rights. And he, or one of his cabinet, invoked the Holocaust once again to justify Israel’s colonisation of the Occupied Territories. This is what makes me suspicious that there is more behind this latest smear against Jackie Walker. Despite the Groan’s protestations, there are Zionists, who would like the Shoah seen as an exclusively Jewish tragedy and resent its extension to cover the victims of other, similar crimes against humanity. It looks to me that Mrs Walker has been censured, precisely because she did universalise it and has criticised its political use by the Israel lobby. As for Walker’s own ‘insensitivity’, from the sound of it, she asked a reasonable question at a time when at least some Zionists are trying to deny the universalisation of the Holocaust, and manipulate its memory to support their own ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It wasn’t just Jews who perished in the Nazi camps. The Roma – the Gypsies, who are even now persecuted in central and eastern Europe, were also targeted for extermination by the Nazis as untermenschen, subhumans. As also were the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe – the Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Czechs and Slovaks, who were to be reduced to illiterate peasants supplying the Reich with agricultural goods, when not forced off their homelands for German colonisation and worked to death as slave labourers. I was taught at school that altogether 11.5m people died in the Nazi camps. The majority of these – 6m – were Jews, but in addition to these victims there were 5.5m others, who included not just the aforementioned peoples, but also political prisoners – Socialists, trade unionists, Communists, anti-Nazi Conservatives, such as Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first president after the War. It certainly should not be out of the question why these victims are also not given their due commemoration along with the Jews, with whom they were enslaved and perished. Beastrabban\'s Weblog.
  • Sept.13.2016: The Human Rights of the Settler. Just a few weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that he cares about the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza more than the Palestinian leadership does, he posted a new video message on his Facebook wall, arguing that any future dismantlement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank would amount to "ethnic cleansing". He went on to intimate that insofar as the US and other western countries support the uprooting of Israeli settlements as part of an agreement with the Palestinians, they were, in effect, supporting the cleansing of Jews. Unwilling to acknowledge that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967, and that they continue to live under the constant threat of displacement as a direct result of his own government’s policies, Netanyahu depicts Israeli and thus Jewish settlers’ disengagement from the occupied West Bank, which constitutes a mere 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine, as an egregious violation of the rights of Jewish settlers. Moreover, by invoking the phrase ethnic cleansing of Jews, Netanyahu is clearly mobilizing a concept that is deeply ingrained in Jewish collective memory and comprises a red line not only for the Israeli State but also for the international community. Through the metaphor of “the memory of Auschwitz,” Abba Eban suggested that a withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 would correspond to another genocide of the Jewish people, this time in the temporal and spatial setting of Palestine. In sharp contrast to the racial discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color in the United States, Israeli settlers are an inordinately privileged group. They are not a minority in the Jewish state, and despite Netanyahu’s attempts to revise history, it is crucial to remember that state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing and ongoing human rights violations is what enabled the Jewish settlers to occupy the lands on which they live in the first place. Neve Gordon, Nicola Perugini, Counterpunch.