Month: May 2016

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See also Walthamstow Labour Party fundraiser suspended – who had it in for David Watson?

Please read the article in full on Electronic Intifada

by Michael Deas, 25 May 2016

The Netherlands has affirmed that activism calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel is a form of free speech. In response to parliamentary questions from Green Left MP Rik Grashoff, Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders said that

statements or meetings concerning BDS are protected by freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, as enshrined in the Dutch constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Koenders also said that the Dutch government regularly discusses BDS with Israel and makes clear to Israel that it “opposes a boycott of Israel, but that endorsing BDS falls under freedom of expression.”

The Dutch foreign minister’s comments are a serious blow to Israel’s relentless efforts to criminalize BDS and silence supporters of Palestinian rights. At Israel’s urging, governments in the US, UK, France, Canada and elsewhere are introducing anti-democratic legislation and taking other repressive measures to undermine the BDS movement.

[…]  The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is inviting supporters of free speech and Palestinian rights to co-sign an appeal to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein urging him to take action to protect the rights of Palestinian, Israeli and international BDS activists.

Continue reading here

A Response to Didi Herman’s ‘Zionisms’

By Tony Greenstein

In an article ‘Zionisms’ in Critical Thinking of 29th April 2016 Didi Herman argues that the left should drop the use of the term ‘Zionism’. I disagree. The term Zionism is as relevant now as it has ever been.

This argument is not taking place in a vacuum but in the context of a concerted attempt to depict the anti-Zionist left, including Black and ethnic minority members of the Labour Party, as anti-Semites. Part of the narrative of the defamers is that Zionism has become a dirty word, a term of abuse. There are those on the left who have been seduced by this special pleading. Not only Didi Herman but Jon Lansman of Momentum. [Why the Left must stop talking about ‘Zionism’]

There is, as always, when dealing with the Zionist hasbara [propaganda] a certain amount of disingenuousness. On the one hand we have the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis asserting that ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’ and then Didi writes that ‘scholars replace Jews and Judiasm with Zionists and Zionism, and label Zionism ‘racist’ or part of a ‘racial contract’ or ‘apartheid’.]  I’m sorry Didi, but it’s not left-wing scholars but right-wing Zionists who conflate Zionism and being Jewish. It hardly takes a logician to work out that if Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, then Jews must indeed be responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. Continue reading “Why Zionism is as relevant now as it ever was”

Today, Hull University voted to disaffiliate from the NUS, citing largely financial reasons. That did not stop Jewish News and Guido Fawkes linking the decision to the election of the NUS’s first female, black Muslim president Malia Bouattia – an outspoken anti-Zionist. In her column for the Jewish Chronicle on Cambridge University’s own referendum, entitled ‘No one should have to compromise religion for politics – but the NUS elections made me doubt myself,‘ Noa Gendler makes no explicit reference to Bouattia, but is otherwise extraordinarily frank:

there’s no way I can decide whether or not [Cambridge University Students Union] should disaffiliate from the NUS without my Judaism coming into play. I’ve had to ask myself whether the NUS can offer me, as a Jewish student, representation and equality, and I’ve had to ask myself if its support for other minority students is more important than its support for me, as a Jewish student. Essentially, I’ve been forced to choose between two fundamental aspects of my life and values: being Jewish, versus liberation and equal opportunities for all minorities.

The final-year student at the University of Cambridge adds,

I’m ashamed to be part of a community which has asked me to make such a painful and irrational decision. No one should ever have to compromise their religion for their politics, or vice versa.

The clear inference is that the rights and needs of Jewish students do not accord with those of other minority student communities, and are incompatible with the struggle against oppression. She claims that choosing in favour of the latter would entail a compromise of her religious beliefs. It’s a dangerous attempt to blur the boundary between religion and political ideology. Gendler also attempts to make ‘her [Jewish] community’ complicit in this cynical calculation. Continue reading “Cambridge student says she is forced to choose between being Jewish and equal opportunities for all minorities”

Unlike liberal Zionist groups such as the Jewish Labour Movement, the Zionist right-wing have nothing further to gain from Naz Shah‘s public apology, suspension for alleged antisemitism and willingness to be ‘re-educated;’ they want to ensure she is branded an unreformable extremist – not just ‘anti-Israel,’ but a Muslim extremist that shouts Allahu Akbar.

Conservative Friends of Israel today uploaded a post to their website, ‘NAZ SHAH MP REVEALED TO HAVE ATTENDED SERIES OF ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS,’ based on a Daily Mail article, ‘Proof that Labour MP’s anti-Israel outburst was anything but a one off.’

In a tone more suited to a high-profile exposé, the Daily Mail tells its readers that Shah,

Playing dead with her children on the floor of a fast-food restaurant […] it can be revealed… mother-of-three Miss Shah was part of a group that mounted a string of protests against Israel.[…] Miss Shah also co-ordinated protests at Sainsbury’s and Tesco, and carried a coffin at a pro-Palestine rally where she was filmed chanting: ‘Shame on you.’

The group stormed the Bradford restaurant, chanting: ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They staged a number of protests at the branch and smeared ketchup across the premises, according to activists. Footage shows activists chanting: ‘Free, free Palestine.’ It is not known whether Miss Shah joined in the chanting or smeared ketchup. The previous day – August 3 – the group had staged a protest at a Tesco store over its stocking of Israeli produce.

There are some wonderful, inspiring images of Shah showing her solidarity with Palestinians. They date from summer 2014, when Israel killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.

The latest attack on Naz Shah makes two things abundantly clear: in the eyes of pro-Israel lobby groups and press, her crime is an outspoken support for Palestinian human rights, including direct action. And while the Labour Israel lobby will be appeased once she publicly disavows her principled opposition to Israel, she is not likely to ever shake off her reputation in the mainstream media as a Muslim antisemite calling for the destruction of Israel.

A Board of Deputies of British Jews spokesman told the DM that Naz Shah was,

clearly involved in a lot of unacceptable activities’ but had shown ‘a significant amount of remorse, which, if proven to be genuine, must count in her favour.

The strategy of appeasing Zionists is always doomed: most of the accused begin by protesting their innocence while simultaneously accepting the premise that antisemitism is rife – in their Party or community – and vowing to confront and stamp it out. But as Shah quickly discovered that isn’t enough, and under pressure she appeared to confess to having been antisemitic; she is now undertaking a ‘journey‘ that will only be complete in the eyes of her new Zionist defenders once she has disavowed her wholehearted solidarity with Palestinians.

Shah’s case is an instructive one. Public figures known for their support of the Palestinian cause have one option if they are not willing to be publicly humiliated: insist that they are committed to combatting all forms of racism, of which Israeli apartheid is an egregious example, and express sadness that their words have been misinterpreted, providing the context for their remarks missing from hostile media reports. Zionist lobbies across the political spectrum will be outraged and never cease in their attempts to smear the target of their witch-hunt, but at least the hunted will retain their integrity, and win the respect – not pity – of genuine anti-racists.

Elly Fryksos

This is what the co-Vice Chair of the Chakrabarti inquiry, Professor David Feldman, said about the Macpherson principle, in his January 2015 sub-report to the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, chaired by John Mann:

Perceptions.

It is sometimes suggested that when Jews perceive an utterance or action to be anti-Semitic that this is how it should be described. In the UK this claim looks for support to the 1999 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, written by Lord Macpherson of Cluny. There Macpherson wrote that ‘a racist incident’ is ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ If we look at the context in which this quotation appears, it is unambiguously clear that Macpherson intended to propose that such racist incidents require investigation. He did not mean to imply that such incidents are necessarily racist. However, Macpherson’s report has been misinterpreted and misapplied in precisely this way. Its authority has been thrown behind the view that such incidents should, by definition, be regarded as racist. In short, a definition of antisemitism which takes Jews’ feelings and perceptions as its starting point and which looks to the Macpherson report for authority is built on weak foundations.

Last year, former National Union of Students President, Megan Dunn, launched an independent review into whether the NUS is institutionally racist. The audit was ordered in response to claims that were made at a meeting of the national executive committee by Malia Bouattia, then NUS Black Students’ Officer. Times Higher Education reported on 5 October that Bouattia was not the only member of the union’s top team to make allegations of institutional racism:

Shelly Asquith, the vice-president (welfare), tweeted that the “student movement [and] its institutions are institutionally racist”. “People need to properly accept that before we can begin to overcome it,” she said. […] Earlier this summer, Sorana Vieru, the vice-president (higher education), criticised universities’ “white, male and stale” environment, and the fact that they employ so few black female professors, in an interview with Times Higher Education.

At the time, the organisation’s chief executive, Simon Blake expected the review to be completed by January. In a letter to NUS staff he said the appointees,

will be asked to explore and understand whether there is evidence of direct or indirect racism within [the] NUS’s culture, systems, policies, processes and structures and make recommendations about any changes we can make to ensure we fulfil our commitment to being an organisation that is truly fair, open, accessible and representative of all.

Six months later, Malia Bouattia was elected as NUS President, in spite of a vicious campaign led by JSocs to paint her as an anti-Semite and ISIS sympathiser. Aliya Yule described the reaction:

her election has sparked an array of attacks against her in the media based on racist lies. […] Calls to disaffiliate from NUS have largely been mobilised on the back of these attacks, alongside attempts to belittle and deride the work that NUS does.[…] Some students have argued that we should disaffiliate from NUS because of accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at Malia, many of which were derived from comments taken out of context. Articles reporting these accusations have taken recourse to Islamophobic stereotypes, suggesting they go hand in hand with her being Muslim.

Student campaigns to disaffiliate with NUS have been launched at several universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. JC reports that JSocs at both universities are officially supporting disaffiliation.

Lincoln and Newcastle have already disaffiliated. It has become a battleground between those who feel they should stay in order to force through change (see poster above), and those who seek to paint NUS as unreformable, or in the words of pro-Israel MP and former NUS president, Wes Streeting, “NUS is lost I’m afraid. It’s had good leadership from Megan Dunn, but it no longer represents students well.”

It is in this febrile atmosphere, that the internal review into institutional racism is being invoked by those in the ‘Yes to NUS’ campaign to win over Zionists.

In Cherwell yesterday, Rivka Micklethwaite made a heartfelt plea: expressing her strong support for Bouattia, she writes that “as a Jewish student at Oxford,” she believed leaving would be “damaging to the fight against anti-Semitism”: Continue reading “The battle for the soul of the NUS and a hijacked review into institutional racism”

In a further sign that the Palestinian civil society campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is considered by Israel’s allies to be a threat to the impunity it has long enjoyed, the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls, invited Israeli students to study in France by denouncing BDS as motivated by antisemitism:

This invitation is…the most sincere response to those who talk of nothing but boycott. Behind this boycott we know well what there is: not only an opposition, but also a loathing of the State of Israel, the loathing of a Jewish home, and therefore of Jews as a whole.

Valls was addressing an audience during a ceremony on Sunday at Tel Aviv University in which the George Wise Medal was conferred on him. The medal commemorates Tel Aviv University’s founding President and is awarded to long-standing Israel advocates.

The Prime Minister said that it was France’s ‘role and duty’ to never give way before those that want to ‘hinder a democracy;’ that it was the ‘fight of a lifetime’ against antisemitism, ‘a battle of civilisation.’ To applause, Valls said,

When one attacks Jews, one of course attacks France and attacks civilisation.

Before receiving the medal, university officials praised Valls as ‘a friend of Israel.’ François Heilbronn, president of French Friends of Tel Aviv University, told Valls:

You are not one of those ministers that once appointed instantly forget that they are friends of Israel.

France has introduced anti-democratic legislation and taken other repressive measures to undermine the BDS movement. One activist was arrested simply for wearing a BDS t-shirt.

Tel Aviv University (TAU) is linked to an array of services to the Israeli state including in its most oppressive modes. TAU has particularly intense connections with the Israeli military. The cover story of its Winter Review 2008/9  is an account of the 64 projects for the military that were then ongoing. Continue reading “French Prime Minister tells audience in Tel Aviv that behind the boycott is a ‘loathing’ of all Jews”

This is a policy motion for organisations to define their stance and mandate their delegates; local branches of organisations might forward this resolution to their regional and national bodies. Another issue that organisations can cite as “not antisemitic” is the critique of Zionist ideology.

This (organisation) deplores antisemitism. But we believe the press outcry on alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party was designed, in league with Israel’s apologists and censors, to damage the party and its leadership. This does no service to a genuine fight against this hate crime.

We deplore the proposal to task Jewish Labour Movement with training Labour Party branches and organisations in recognising and defining antisemitism. JLM is an affiliate both of the Israel Labour Party which in office has promoted the building of settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territories and the World Zionist Organization, which has channelled funds to the illegal settlements.

We oppose censorship of legitimate and valid political action such as Palestine solidarity. We assert our right to speak and organise against the State of Israel’s systemic, historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and violations of human rights and international law, and to support Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against those complicit in these injustices.

This (organisation) therefore, urges the Labour Party to: Continue reading “Model motion for labour movement on antisemitism allegations”