Corbyn: The anti-semitism row
May 9th, 2016
Yesterday Martin Rowson published a cartoon about the London Mayoral elections under which “Press the red button” wrote this comment, later deleted by the Guardian. I agree with the sentiments expressed and believe the entire “anti-semitism” row was an attack cooked up by the Bitterites (so called moderate wing of the Labour party) against Jeremy Corbyn and assisted by Tory Jews in postions of influence. So I’m publishing it here because the Guardian won’t.
Abusive comments will be deleted.
I feel we are living in a dangerous moment regarding race and its myriad interpretations. In London, we have witnessed the fetid right in full cry, and it is unedifying. The dog whistle politics to undermine Sadiq Khan’s mayoral candidacy has been gruesome, but it pales into comparison with the hysterical furore over accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.
We have the Chief Rabbi castigating Labour, university students, anybody who dares to see Zionism for what it is; a racist ideology that demands acknowledgement of the right of Jews to occupy land that has been populated by non-Jews for centuries. Unfortunately, this rather perverse viewpoint has become an inarguable absolute in the Guardian, and objections to it are becoming increasingly shouted down.
And what a shout down!
Ken Livingstone expresses historical truths, clumsily perhaps, and suddenly he is the devil incarnate. Naz Shah tweets a Norman Finkelstein posting that ruefully expresses the view that, because Israel receives so much financial and military support from the USA, it may as well be moved to the USA, and she immediately becomes a frothing antisemite. Not that one would know the facts behind the stories if the Guardian was the sole resource for information.
The sorrow is that the Guardian has become a regurgitation of Zionist propaganda. Little surprise that Norman Finkelstein, son of Holocaust survivors, inmates of Auschwitz and Majdanek, describes the Guardian political editor, Jonathan Freedland, as an arch-Zionist who repeatedly plays the antisemitism card. Not a great endorsement.
So where, now, are we with respect to the last few weeks? The Tories lost. Badly. We have a Muslim mayor of London, Londoners having rejected the smears against Khan. We have Labour advancing, taking Tory jewel Wandsworth. And we have a public who, slowly but surely, are recognising that these accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party are crass propaganda, peddled by those with an agenda, pro-Israeli, that is not advantageous for any British citizens.
There will be a backlash.
My take on it, not having read the bible, not having been to either Israel or Palestine, having had a passing aquaintence with a few Jews and worked for six months on an Israeli ship, is that yes the Jews were entitled to a homeland in Palestine following the Holocaust but not almost entirely at the expense of the then residents which would appear to have been the case ever since, and more especially not in an ongoing land grab made clear by the maps
That map, one of many similar series, was not difficult to find and shows clearly the alarming land grab (what would you call it?) by the Israelis of Palestinian land.
To have been so badly treated by history but then to continue the process by proxy on another nation? I’ll leave you to work out the answer to that question of morality.
The Soviet Union lost somewhere between 15 – 25 million people during World War II. Sources vary.
Letter from the Daily Mail May 11th 2016
The real victims
The contrived frenzy over anti-Semitism has lasted for days while the regular criminal acts by the Israeli state against the Palestinians go unreported. It’s the Palestinians who are being imprisoned, tortured murdered and ethnically cleansed from their land. Even the Gaza fishermen are regularly shot at by the Israeli Navy.
One of the most horrific scenes from the Holocaust was the piles of personal items taken from the Jews imprisoned in the death camps.
The Israelis also had piles of personal Palestinian property, left behind when they were driven out of their villages.
A vacuous statement often made about the area is that ‘when Jews started returning in the 19th century to their historic homeland, there were hardly any Arabs living in Palestine’ (Letters). This is rubbish.
American Rev Richard Newton who visited Palestine in the 1870s, was impressed by the fertility of the land:
“The town (Jaffa) is surrounded by beautiful orchards and groves of olive trees, oranges, lemons, citrons and apricots, which make the country around look like one great garden…
On setting out to visit Jerusalem, he wrote: ‘Jaffa is famous for its oranges. They are the finest raised anywhere in this part of the world, and the extent to which they are cultivated surprised me greatly. For a long time after leaving the town, we rode through a constant succession of vast groves of orchards or orange trees. I never saw such a profusion of this delightful fruit.’
This was 1870 when there were no Zionists there, no militant European or American Jewish ‘settlers’, just Palestinian farmers peacefully tilling their land as they had done for more than 1,000 years.
No immigrant Jewish person who returned to the ‘historic homeland’ in Palestine had any specific idea where his ancestors had lived.
The Palestinians meanwhile, know the exact properties from which they were driven by the Israelis. Some even visit them, sometimes talking to the Israeli occupants.
Barry M. Watson