UK Labour self-destructs under ‘anti-Semitism’ onslaught

Einstein’s famous quote, which most have never heard of. Now you know why.
By Stuart Littlewood | Veterans Today | August 22, 2018
The ‘anti-Semitism’ rumpus engulfing Jeremy Corbyn and tearing the Labour Party apart comes at the very moment when the country needs an alert and dynamic Opposition to May’s shambolic administration. The campaign, so obviously orchestrated by powerful pro-Israel interest groups to bring down Corbyn, threatens to derail all prospect of worthwhile change at the next election, which could be called anytime given the chaos over Brexit. This would be a calamity not just for Labour but the whole country.
The distraction is such a blot on the political landscape and so disruptive that Corbyn must neutralise it without giving ground. The question is how.
Clarity please – who are the Semites?
What is the argument about? It’s the S-word, ‘Semitism’. At least, that’s the cover-story. The real issue, as many realise, is something deeper. But let’s stick with ‘anti-Semitism’, which is the weapon. It is stupid to go to war without asking questions. So who exactly are the Semites? They may not be who they seem, or who we’re told they are. So let us first deal with the cover story, anti-Semitism, by setting up a learned panel to review the research by Shlomo Sand, Arthur Koestler, Johns Hopkins University and others, turn the S-word inside out, shake it all about, and establish (if that’s possible) who is, and who is not Semitic enough to be offended by certain remarks.
For example, DNA research by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and published by the Oxford University Press in 2012 on behalf of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, found that the Khazarian Hypothesis is scientifically correct, meaning that most Jews are Khazars.
The Khazarians were never in ancient Israel. They converted to Talmudic Judaism in the 8th Century. Even if you believe the myth that God gave the land to the Israelites, He certainly didn’t give it to the Khazarians. Russian and East European Jews like the thug Lieberman, Israel’s defence minister, and countless others who flooded into the Holy Land intending to kick the Palestinians out, have no biblical or ancestral claim to the land.
Probably no more than 2% of Jews in Israel are actually Israelites, according to the findings. So most of those living today who claim to be Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites at all. Palestinians, who are indigenous to the Holy Land, are the real Semites.
Of course, there’s no rush by Israelis or their admirers to acknowledge this.
Has the Johns Hopkins study been refuted? If they and others who came to the same conclusion have got it right, the whole anti-Semitism thing becomes an upside-down nonsense – a hoax – in which the anti-Semites are actually the racist Israeli regime and its Zionist stooges who stalk the corridors of power and have been oppressing the Palestinians for decades with impunity.
Until the topic is thoroughly aired and we have clarity, all anti-Semitism allegations ought to be withdrawn. And no organisation, let alone the Labour Party, should import any definition of anti-Semitism onto its rulebook without looking into the basics.
In the meantime, yes, Jeremy Corbyn needs to dislodge the anti-Jew morons and racist crackpots, of which there are many in all parties. He should also disband Labour Friends of Israel, an aggressive mouthpiece for a foreign terror regime that has no place in British politics.
Job done – Israel’s stooges now in control and doing the dirty work
Meanwhile the concerted fear-mongering by the Zionist Inquisition and browbeating by Jewish community leaders seems to have worked. As I write, Jeremy Corbyn is touring Scotland talking about important things like his ‘Build it in Britain’ plan to regenerate Scottish industry. But the media are gloating over a story involving a former Scottish Labour MP being suspended by his local constituency party and publicly shamed for alleged anti-Semitic remarks – on the strength of just one complaint apparently.
Furthermore the local party executive, in a statement, have already found him guilty. iNews and other media outlets report Renfrewshire North and West Constituency Labour Party Executive Committee as saying: “We fully condemn the anti-Semitic comments expressed by Jim Sheridan, and it is right that he is subject to a full investigation by the Labour Party…. The views expressed by Jim Sheridan in no way reflect the views of the members of the Labour Party in the Renfrewshire North and West constituency…. [His] comments are in direct conflict with the Labour Party’s values of anti-racism, equality and solidarity.”
That’s before he’s had a chance to defend himself.
Cllr Sheridan had tweeted: “For almost all my adult life I have had the utmost respect and empathy for the Jewish community and their historic suffering. No longer, due to what they and their Blairite plotters are doing to my party and the long suffering people of Britain who need a radical Labour government.”
Bearing in mind that the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies claim to represent the Jewish community in the UK and have been instrumental in the damaging anti-Semitism campaign against Labour and Corbyn, it is difficult to see anything objectionable in Cllr Sheridan’s remark. But it amounts to a flogging offence, it seems, in the minds of some Labour officials.
Cllr Sheridan said he was restricted from making comment at this stage but told me, as a matter of fact: “I haven’t had a hearing yet or a date for that to happen. You may wish to know that I visited Auschwitz along with a group of schoolchildren and fellow MPs and saw at first hand the horrors and felt the pain and anguish the Jewish prisoners must have felt. Also, in all the years as an MP I signed the annual Holocaust remembrance book in the House of Commons.”
Does that sound like an ‘anti-Semite’ speaking?
In Renfrewshire they seem hell-bent on destroying the Labour Party’s credibility without any further help from the Israel lobby. It is a vivid example of self-harm by brainwashed twits from within. If the press story is to be believed, somebody makes an allegation, the accused is immediately suspended, publicly shamed and possibly has his reputation damaged irreparably without being heard and before the allegation is substantiated. The accused is gagged from making public comment while the local party executive committee feel free to pass judgement and prejudice the whole matter by declaring to the world that the accused is guilty and stating that nobody else in the local party shares his views. ‘Due process’ is conspicuously absent from the proceedings and party officials in Renfrewshire seem to think it’s OK to issue a statement condemning the accused when he hasn’t been told when his side of the story will be heard and by whom.
It’s medieval.
And last month another Scottish Labour councillor, Mary Bain Lockhart of West Fife, was suspended voicing suspicion that Israeli spies might be plotting to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after three Jewish newspapers published a joint front page warning that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.
She wrote on social media: “If the purpose is to generate opposition to anti-semitism, it has backfired spectacularly. If it is to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader, it is unlikely to succeed, and is a shameless piece of cynical opportunism. And if it is a Mossad assisted campaign to prevent the election of a Labour Government pledged to recognise Palestine as a State, it is unacceptable interference in the democracy of Britain.”
She added: “Israel is a racist State. And since the Palestinians are also Semites, it is an anti-Semitic State.”
Those paying attention will remember, back in January 2017, revelations that a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy in London, Shai Masot, had been plotting with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan. It should have resulted in the ambassador himself, Mark Regev, a vile propagandist, a master of disinformation and a former personal spokesman for the Zionist regime’s prime minister Netanyahu, also being kicked out. But he was let off the hook. Regev is still here exercising his shifty talents and oiling his links to Mossad.
Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, as one would have wished, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government. The Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, who is Jewish, also declined to investigate.
So Cllr Lockhart is entitled to be suspicious. Nevertheless a complaint about her remarks was lodged by former Labour MP Thomas Docherty. It was Docherty who wrote to the Culture Secretary in 2015 urging a debate to ban Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a best seller on Amazon, arguing that it was “too offensive to be made available”.
And Paul Masterton, the Tory MP for East Renfrewshire, complained that, given how “offensive” Cllr Lockhart’s comments were, the Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard had been too slow to act and should have spoken out against her behaviour immediately. “Instead we have continued silence from him and a failure to prove to the Jewish community that he and his party are taking this issue seriously. It’s clear to the vast majority of people that Mary Lockhart is no longer fit to hold office, and Scottish Labour must understand that a suspension doesn’t go far enough.”
What the media didn’t tell us is that Mr Masterton is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews which is funded, supported and administered by The Board of Deputies of British Jews which, along with the Jewish Leadership Council and others is heavily implicated in picking a fight with Corbyn and trying to ram the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, unedited, down Labour’s throat.
The IHRA definition, which has been allowed to consume Labour when the Party has better things to do, seems to be having its intended effect. It is obvious that many members still haven’t read the two caveats proposed by the Home Office Select Committee and the legal criticism by Hugh Tomlinson QC and Sir Stephen Sedley. Had they done so, more would insist on it being drastically modified or rejected altogether.
Detained Journalist Released Under Strict Conditions
IMEMC | August 22, 2018
Israeli Authorities released a Palestinian journalist from the central West Bank city of Ramallah on Tuesday evening after forcing him to pay a fine, in addition to preventing him for working in his profession for two months.
The journalist, Ala’ Rimawi, was abducted, along with three other reporters, on July 30th, 2018, for working for the Palestinian Al-Quds Satellite News Agency, after the military and the Israeli political leadership, decided to classify it as a “terrorist agency.”
The three other journalists have been identified as Hosni Anjass, Mohammad Alwan and Qoteiba Hamdan.
It is worth mentioning that Rimawi launched a hunger strike on the first day of his imprisonment on July 30th, 2018.
The ruling to release Rimawi was made by the military court in Ofer prison, built on Palestinian lands in Betunia city, west of Ramallah; the Israeli prosecutor’s office filed three appeals demanding keeping the journalist in prison.
The court ordered the detainee to pay a 10.000 Israeli Shekels fine, in addition to preventing him from resuming his journalism profession, and forcing him under house arrest, for two months.
Elizabeth Warren’s Anti Corruption Specificity Evaporates When Foreign Policy is Raised
By Sam Husseini | August 22, 2018
On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren addressed the National Press Club, outlining with great specificity a host of proposals on issues including eliminating financial conflicts, close the revolving door between business and government and, perhaps most notably, reforming corporate structures.
Warren gave a blistering attack on corporate power run amok, giving example after example, like Congressman Billy Tauzin doing the pharmaceutical lobby’s bidding by preventing a bill for expanded Medicare coverage from allowing the program to negotiate lower drug prices. Noted Warren: “In December of 2003, the very same month the bill was signed into law, PhRMA — the drug companies’ biggest lobbying group — dangled the possibility that Billy could be their next CEO.”In February of 2004, Congressman Tauzin announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election. Ten months later, he became CEO of PhRMA — at an annual salary of $2 million. Big Pharma certainly knows how to say ‘thank you for your service.'”
But I found that Warren’s tenacity when ripping things like corporate lobbyists’ “pre-bribes” suddenly evaporated when dealing with issues like the enormous military budget and Israeli assaults on Palestinian children.
The Press Club moderator, Angela Greiling Keane, early in the news conference asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s keeping press out of town hall meetings, pairing that with Trump’s outright attacks on media.
Husseini: Sam Husseini with The Nation and the Institute for Public Accuracy. Cortez, who was mentioned earlier, and other likely incoming congressional members next year propose slashing the military budget to help pay for human and environmental needs. Do you agree? And if I could, a second question: would you consider introducing and sponsoring [a version of] Betty McCollum’s bill on Palestinians children’s rights in the Senate?
Warren: I now sit on Armed Services and I have been in the middle of the sausage making factory on that one. And that has pushed me even more strongly in the direction of systemic reforms. I want to be able to have those debates. I want to be able to get them out in the open and talk about these poor issues that affect our government, affect our people. I want to be able to debate them on the floor of the senate. I want to be able to do amendments on them. Right now the whole of big money over our government stops much of that. It chokes off much of the debate we should have. So I am going to give you a system-wide answer because I think that’s what matters here. This is not about one particular proposal, this is all the way across. How is it that we get the voices of the people heard in government instead of over and over the voices of the wealthy and the well connected. The voices of those with higher armies of lobbyists. So for me that’s what this is about.
But part of the power that the wealthy and well connected have is getting direct responses to their specific concerns. Political funders are unlikely impressed with broad “system-wide answers”.
In a sense, her non-response to very direct questions rather highlighted the problem she is presumably addressing.
And we’ve been here before.
Bernie Sanders, in his 2016 presidential run, was remarkably vague or even outright repressive regarding foreign policy, especially early on. This reached almost comical proportions when during a debate on CBS just after the November 2015 bombing in Paris, he tried to avoid substantially addressing the issue, wanting instead to fall back on income inequality. Certainly, Sanders was arguably treated very unfairly by the Democratic Party and media establishment, but he was greatly diminished by not having serious foreign policy answers.
Warren and other “progressive” candidates may be set to repeat that. Sanders did address foreign policy more at the end of the campaign and since, but his answers are still problematic at times and at best it was all too little too late.
One question is, realistically, what are Warren’s goals here? It could well be a good faith effort by someone committed to changing the world for the better. But then, why the selectivity?
If it was enactment of these policies, then the strongest way to do that might have been to find a rogue Republican to pair up with on at least some aspects of her proposals so as to avoid charges being purely politically motivated. When questioned by a New York Post reporter at the news conference, Warren couldn’t name a Republican whom she might work with. This would especially be the case since Trump — like Obama before him — ran against the establishment.
Is it to make her a leading contender for the Democratic nomination? If so, the hope would be that she’s not simply playing the role of what Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report calls “sheepdogging” — that is, the presidential run or promise of a run by a Sanders or Warren as simply a tool the Democratic Party establishment uses to keep enough of the public “on the reservation”.
Said Warren of her own financial reform proposals: “Inside Washington, some of these proposals will be very unpopular, even with some of my friends. Outside Washington, I expect that most people will see these ideas as no-brainers and be shocked they’re not already the law.”
Why doesn’t the same principle apply to funding perpetual wars and massive human rights abuses against children?
Imprisoned Palestinian journalist reiterates call for solidarity
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | August 19, 2018
Imprisoned Palestinian journalist and director of Al-Quds TV Alaa Rimawi said on Sunday, 19 August that the arrests carried out by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinian media and journalists are part of a comprehensive attack on Palestinian media, preventing it from doing its work and minimizing its role in publicizing Palestinian realities.
In a statement released by his family and lawyer, Rimawi said that this agenda was clear during the interrogation sessions he was subjected to personally in the past two days. He also noted the cases of journalist Ali Dar Ali, arrested by occupation forces, and the administrative detention of journalist Mohammed Muna, saying that these attacks reflected the same purpose.
Rimawi said in his statement that the occupation considers terms like “martyr,” “occupation,” “steadfastness,” “confrontation” and “resistance” to be “inciting” content. He also noted that the arrests of journalists is meant to keep the situation in Palestine from being covered in the media. “The occupation is carrying out a policy of intimidation with its police and intelligence services. This is clear and obvious, bringing forward the names of journalists to continue these detentions, a threat against every free Palestinian journalists.”
He called for a unified position in support of Palestinian journalists from the International Federation of Journalists, Arab Press Union and other concerned bodies around the world to come together with a unified goal of protecting Palestinian journalists under occupation.
Occupation arrests of Palestinian journalists like Dar Ali, Muna, Lama Khater and others, and the forcible closure of media institutions by military bodies have escalated recently, under various pretexts and charges.
Is Israel planning for something world is unaware of?
PressTV – August 18, 2018
It’s one thing for a military budget to increase for the coming year, but for every year through the next two decades? Such is the case with Israel’s military budget. One obvious question: why does Israel want to increase its military budget so dramatically?
Corbyn’s Labour Party is Being Made to Fail: by Design
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | August 17, 2018
The Labour party, relentlessly battered by an organised campaign of smears of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn – first for being anti-semitic, and now for honouring Palestinian terrorists – is reportedly about to adopt the four additional working “examples” of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Labour initially rejected these examples – stoking yet more condemnation from Israel’s lobbyists and the British corporate media – because it justifiably feared, as have prominent legal experts, that accepting them would severely curb the freedom to criticise Israel.
The media’s ever-more outlandish slurs against Corbyn and the Labour party’s imminent capitulation on the IHRA’s full definition of anti-semitism are not unrelated events. The former was designed to bring about the latter.
According to a report in the Guardian this week, senior party figures are agitating for the rapid adoption of the full IHRA definition, ideally before the party conference next month, and say Corbyn has effectively surrendered to the pressure. An MP who supports Corbyn told the paper Corbyn would “just have to take one for the team”.
In a strong indication of the way the wind is now blowing, the Guardian added:
“The party said it would consult the main [Jewish] communal bodies as well as experts and academics, but groups such as the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour have not been asked to give their views.”
No stomach for battle
The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a major victory both for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to silence all meaningful criticism of Israel, and for the British corporate media, which would dearly love to see the back of an old-school socialist Labour leader whose programme threatens to loosen the 40-year stranglehold of neoliberalism on British society.
Besieged for four years, Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination. As the stakes have been constantly upped by the media and the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy, the inevitable has happened. Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians with career ambitions or a public profile want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-semite.
This is why the supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in a Corbyn-led Labour party has been so much more effective than berating him for his clothes or his patriotism. Natural selection – survival of the smear fittest for the job – meant that a weaponised anti-semitism would eventually identify Corbyn as its prime target and not just his supporters – especially after his unexpectedly strong showing at the polls in last year’s election.
Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.
And as he has lost all sense of how to respond in good faith to allegations made in bad faith, he has begun committing the cardinal sin of sounding and looking evasive – just as those who deployed the anti-semitism charge hoped. It was his honesty, plain-speaking and compassion that won him the leadership and the love of ordinary members. Unless he can regain the political and spiritual confidence that underpinned those qualities, he risks haemorrhaging support.
Critical juncture
But beyond Corbyn’s personal fate, the Labour party has now reached a critical juncture in its response to the smear campaign. In adopting the full IHRA definition, the party will jettison the principle of free speech and curtail critical debate about an entire country, Israel – as well as a key foreign policy issue for those concerned about the direction the Middle East is taking.
Discussion of what kind of state Israel is, what its policy goals are, and whether they are compatible with a peace process are about to be taken off the table by Britain’s largest, supposedly progressive party.
That thought spurred me to cast an eye over my back-catalogue of journalism. I have been based in Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee, since 2001. In that time I have written – according to my website – more than 900 articles (plus another few hundred blog posts) on Israel, as well as three peer-reviewed books and a clutch of chapters in edited collections. That’s a lot of writing. Many more than a million words about Israel over nearly two decades.
What shocked me, however, as I started to pore over these articles was that almost all of them – except for a handful dealing with internal Palestinian politics – would fall foul of at least one of these four additional IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt.
After 17 years of writing about Israel, after winning a respected journalism prize for being “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East”, the Labour party is about to declare that I, and many others like me, are irredeemable anti-semites.
Not that I am unused to such slurs. I am intimately familiar with a community of online stalkers who happily throw around the insults “Nazi” and “anti-semite” at anyone who doesn’t cheerlead the settlements of the Greater Israel project. But far more troubling is that this will be my designation not by bullying Israel partisans but by the official party of the British left.
Of course, I will not be alone. Much of my journalism has been about documenting and reporting the careful work of scholars, human rights groups, lawyers and civil society organisations – Palestinian, Israeli and international alike – that have charted the structural racism in Israel’s legal and administrative system, explaining often in exasperating detail its ethnocractic character and its apartheid policies. All of us are going to be effectively cast out, denied any chance to inform or contribute to the debates and policies of Britain’s only leftwing party with a credible shot at power.
That is a shocking realisation. The Labour party is about to slam the door shut in the faces of the Palestinian people, as well as progressive Jews and others who stand in solidarity with them.
Betrayal of Palestinians
The article in the Guardian, the newspaper that has done more to damage Corbyn than any other (by undermining him from within his own camp), described the incorporation of the full IHRA anti-semitism definition into Labour’s code of conduct as a “compromise”, as though the betrayal of an oppressed people was something over which middle ground could be found.
Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.
How these new examples will be misused by Corbyn’s opponents should already be clear. He made his most egregious mistake in the handling of the party’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a violation of one of the IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
He apologised for attending an anti-racism event and distanced himself from a friend, the late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, who used his speech to compare Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians to early Nazi laws that vilified and oppressed Jews.
It was a Judas-like act for which it is not necessary to berate Corbyn. He is doubtless already torturing himself over what he did. But that is the point: the adoption of the full IHRA definition will demand the constant vilification and rooting out of progressive and humane voices like Meyer’s. It will turn the Labour party into the modern equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Labour activists will find themselves, like Corbyn, either outed or required to out others as supposed anti-semites. They will have to denounce reasonable criticisms of Israel and dissociate themselves from supporters of the Palestinian cause, even Holocaust survivors.
The patent absurdity of Labour including this new anti-semitism “example” should be obvious the moment we consider that it will recast not only Meyer and other Holocaust survivors as anti-semites but leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars – even Israeli army generals.
Two years ago Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, went public with such a comparison. Addressing an audience in Israel on Holocaust Day, he spoke of where Israel was heading:
“If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”
Is it not a paradox that, were Golan a member of the Labour party, that statement – a rare moment of self-reflection by a senior Israeli figure – will soon justify his being vilified and hounded out of the Labour party?
Evidence of Israeli apartheid
Looking at my own work, it is clear that almost all of it falls foul of two further “examples” of anti-semitism cited in the full IHRA definition that Labour is preparing to adopt:
“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
and:
“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
One hardly needs to point out how preposterous it is that the Labour party is about to outlaw from internal discussion or review any research, scholarship or journalism that violates these two “examples” weeks after Israel passed its Nation-State Basic Law. That law, which has constitutional weight, makes explicit what was always implicit in Israel as a Jewish state:
- that Israel privileges the rights and status of Jews around the world, including those who have never even visited Israel, above the rights of the fifth of the country’s citizens who are non-Jews (the remnants of the native Palestinian population who survived the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948).
- that Israel, as defined in the Basic Law, is not a state bounded by internationally recognised borders but rather the “Land of Israel” – a Biblical conception of Israel whose borders encompass the occupied Palestinian territories and parts of many neighbouring states.
How, one might reasonably wonder, is such a state – defined this way in the Basic Law – a normal “democratic” state? How is it not structurally racist and inherently acquisitive of other people’s territory?
Contrary to the demands of these two extra IHRA “examples”, the Basic Law alone shows that Israel is a “racist endeavour” and that we cannot judge it by the same standards we would a normal western-style democracy. Not least, it has a double “border” problem: it forces Jews everywhere to be included in its self-definition of the “nation”, whether they want to be or not; and it lays claim to the title deeds of other territories without any intention to confer on their non-Jewish inhabitants the rights it accords Jews.
Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.
Unaccountable politics
The Labour party has become the largest in Europe as Corbyn has attracted huge numbers of newcomers into the membership, inspired by a new kind of politics. That is a terrifying development for the old politics, which preferred tiny political cliques accountable chiefly to corporate donors, leaving a slightly wider circle of activists largely powerless.
That is why the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy are quite content to use any pretext not only to root out genuine progressive activists drawn to a Corbyn-led party, including anti-Zionist Jewish activists, but to alienate tens of thousands more members that had begun to transform Labour into a grassroots movement.
A party endlessly obsessing about anti-semitism, a party that has abandoned the Palestinians, a party that has begun throwing out key progressive principles, a party that has renounced free speech, and a party that no longer puts the interests of the poor and vulnerable at the centre of its concerns is a party that will fail.
That is where the anti-semitism “crisis” is leading Labour – precisely as it was designed to do.
Netanyahu has dug himself into a hole in a graveyard full of untruths
By Yvonne Tidley | MEMO | August 15, 2018
Benjamin Netanyahu has dived headlong into the furore engulfing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, revealing the most blatant meddling to-date by Israel in British politics. What’s more, he’s done it armed with lies and distortions.
The Israeli Prime Minister blasted Corbyn for apparently paying tribute to those behind the 1972 Munich massacre in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were killed. The allegations were thrown at Corbyn after photographs emerged in the right-wing media of him attending a wreath-laying ceremony in 2014 at a cemetery in Tunisia.
Incorrect reports suggested that Corbyn had joined a ceremony eulogising the Palestinians who took part in the Munich atrocity. Their bodies, though, are buried in Libya, where they were flown after being killed by German security forces in an ill-fated attempt to rescue the Israeli athletes. A funeral procession was held from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to Sidi Munaidess Cemetery back in 1972.
While Corbyn protested that the Israeli leader’s “claims about my action and words are false,” Netanyahu himself had already taken to the social networks. “The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorists who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone – left, right and everything in between,” he wrote on Twitter.
The wreath laying in question was actually marking the 1985 air strike by Israel on the Tunisian capital which was condemned around the globe at the time. Details of exactly what took place at the memorial ceremony have been confirmed by Dr Mohammed Shtayyeh, a minister from the Palestinian Authority who stood next to Corbyn in 2014.
Despite the Labour leader’s efforts to clear his name, a tsunami of condemnation has been raised on the social networks by supporters of Israel and British politicians, including some within Labour ranks who want to oust Corbyn. The direct involvement of both Israel and Netanyahu in the plot to remove Jeremy Corbyn is now apparent following the Prime Minister’s inaccurate contribution to the Twitter storm which has been concocted with a plethora of fake details.
Corbyn was in Tunisia in 2014 for a conference aimed at solidifying relations between the Palestinian factions Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas, which has effectively formed the government in the Gaza Strip since it won the 2006 Palestinian elections. During the conference, delegates went to the Palestinian cemetery at Hammam Chott to pay tribute to those killed in the 1985 Israeli air strike on what was then the PLO headquarters.
Eight fighter jets of the Israeli Air Force took part in the raid on 1 October 1985; the operation was codenamed Wooden Leg. The F-15s took off from Tel Nor airbase near Tel Aviv and flew low over the Mediterranean Sea to avoid detection by Egyptian, Libyan and US radar. The six-minute attack on the PLO HQ in the seaside town killed 47 people, including 15 Tunisian civilians, and injured another 65.
The rogue action was condemned worldwide; even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined in by criticising the Israelis, something else that Netanyahu has chosen to forget in his rush to attack Corbyn. The UN Security Council also registered its anger and “condemned vigorously the act of armed aggression” by Israel in Resolution 573 on 4 October. Although the US abstained from the 14-0 vote, it did not use its veto to block the resolution, which branded the deed as an “act of armed aggression perpetrated by Israel against Tunisian territory in flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, international law, and norms of conduct.” US President Ronald Reagan changed his original position, and instead of calling the bombing a “legitimate response,” he said that it “cannot be condoned.”
In their desire not to let the facts spoil a good story, anti-Corbyn individuals and groups have been posturing and gesturing since the Tunisian photographs were published, and calling on Corbyn to resign. Among them has been Home Secretary Sajid Javid, whose Conservative Party has sought to exploit the controversy by choosing — conveniently some might say — to forget Thatcher’s words at the time of the Israeli air strike on Tunisia. The late Prime Minister’s speech was made on the 40th anniversary of the UN, where she contested the assertion of the then Israeli leader Shimon Peres that the attack was justified.
Archives reveal that at a meeting with Peres, held at the UN Plaza Hotel on 23 October, Thatcher is reported (by Charles Powell) to have said that she had “recoiled” from Israel’s attack on Tunis with the killing of many civilians. “There was no legal or historical justification for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Nor was it right that Israel should now deny the Palestinians the rights which Israel had sought for herself for more than 2,000 years,” she added.
For those left in any doubt at her feelings about the issue, the so-called Iron Lady went on to condemn the Israeli air strike during a meeting in the House of Commons on 29 October when — according to Hansard, the official parliamentary record — she was asked during Prime Minister’s Questions to comment on the Israeli bombing of Tunis. “We have in fact condemned the attack on Tunis,” she told the House.
In conclusion, it is clear that Corbyn did not lay a wreath at the Tunisian graveyard, nor was the event held to commemorate those from the Black September group who carried out the terror attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Their graves are in Libya.
For Corbyn to travel to Tripoli to lay a wreath at the graves of those responsible for the Munich massacre would be regarded as offensive as, for example, Israeli terrorists and their supporters from Irgun gathering annually at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to celebrate the killing of 91 people, including 28 Britons, in a bomb attack on 22 July, 1946. Oh, but hang on a minute… that’s exactly what has been done in Jerusalem for decades.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) meets with British Prime Minister Theresa May (R) during his official visit in London, UK on 2 November 2017 [UK Prime Ministry/Anadolu Agency]
While most of the perpetrators were not around for the 70th anniversary of the terrorist atrocity in 2016, a plaque was unveiled by former Irgun terror gang members and right-wing politicians at the King David Hotel ten years earlier on the 60th anniversary. It reads: “The hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.”
To kill 91 innocent people and then blame the victims for not acting on the warning is deplorable. But to then go on to hold annual gatherings to commemorate the event and even unveil a plaque on the 60th anniversary is even more disturbing. Netanyahu and Britain’s anti-Corbyn Lobby should tweet about that.
They won’t, of course, because they are fully at ease with Israel acting with impunity. Even, it must be said, to the extent that its Prime Minister commemorates the killing of British citizens by “Jewish terrorists” in 1946, and interferes blatantly in the affairs of an independent sovereign state as part of the efforts to have the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition discredited and thus less likely to win the next General Election. Such interference in British democracy is totally unacceptable; Netanyahu has dug himself into a hole in a graveyard full of untruths, but Britain, as all Members of Parliament must make clear to Israel’s lobbyists, is not the United States of America. His words just won’t wash here.
READ:
Israelis leaving and not returning to Israel
MEMO | August 15, 2018
The number of Israelis leaving the country is higher than the number of those who are immigrating, Arab48 reported data from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) showing.
Data from 2016 showed that 6,300 more Israelis left Israel than those who moved back to the country.
The CBS statistics also showed that between 560,000 and 596,000 Israelis remained abroad at the end of 2016. This number does not include children born outside the country.
According to the data, 53 per cent of the people who left were accompanied by their wives, but only 38 per cent of those who returned brought their wives back with them.
At least 26 per cent of those who left in 2016 emigrated to Israel during the last decade.
The data showed that the average age of those who left Israel in 2016 was 28.3 and 53 per cent of them were male.
In 2016, 8,900 Israelis, from those who remained abroad more than a year, returned to Israel, compared to 8,500 in 2015, including 6,700 Jews and 2,200 non-Jews with an age average of 29.1.



