Day: 1 June 2016

By Rachel Lever

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” The Ninth Commandment. The word of God.

In English law, perjury is a crime too. But what happens when the accused neighbour is the Labour Party, now reeling under a barrage of accusations that it is “mired in antisemitism”?

Jan Royall’s report into supposedly “antisemitic” incidents and “a problem with Jews” at Oxford Labour Club famously found that there was nothing to be found. She also famously advertised her frustration and disappointment at finding nothing, maybe indicating that if she had any bias it was to make a tasty meal out of it all.

These supposed incidents were further discredited when it turned out that at least one of the complainants was secretly connected to a rival political party. Yet, for all their implausibility, they were the first shoots that grew into the choking weed of Labour’s alleged “antisemitism crisis.” And despite the myth being totally dispelled, it is still working its merry way through the system.

Copies of Royall’s report were handed out to members of Labour’s Executive Committee at its meeting on 17 May, and then collected back in, apparently after a substantial discussion. They concluded that it was completely unacceptable to use antisemitism/racism as a factional political tool.

Yet no-one seems to have asked the obvious question: why were these complaints made in the first place, who stood to benefit from the factional political tool of smearing the Labour Party with such falsehoods, and how should the bearers of false witness, and all their accomplices and co-complainants, be pilloried and punished?

Far from it: some of those who screamed and shouted may soon be given the franchise to tutor office holders in the party on antisemitism. Might we hope that this includes the Ten Commandments?

Read the article in full on Alternet

By Eli Aminov
translated by Ronnie Barkan
May 28, 2016

When Netanyahu enlisted Adolf Hitler in October last year to claim that the responsibility for the Holocaust and the extermination of European Jewry lies with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, and with the Palestinian people, he also stated that the Fuhrer wanted at the beginning of his rule to only expel the Jews and it was theMufti who persuaded him to exterminate them. This rehabilitation of Hitler, as was carried out by Netanyahu, may not have made Hitler into a Zionist but had indeed given him the status of pro-Zionist, like many other anti-Semites besides him.

While Netanyahu was unsuccessful at linking the Palestinian struggle with the Holocaust, this recurring wave of accusations had prompted a surge of attacks which were aimed at purging the critics of Zionism within the British Labour Party. This was all carried out under the pretext of anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism” is a derogatory term which the Zionist movement had associated with anyone who opposes it or its crimes against the Palestinian people. But history shows that Zionism and anti-Semitism are in fact like Siamese twins. Anti-Semitism today is mainly expressed through the hatred of Muslims—the vast majority of whom are Arabs —in Europe, and in that respect Israel is by far the world’s most anti-Semitic country. Along with the expressed opposition to Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, the more traditional anti-Semitism which focuses on the hatred of Jews, is also rearing its head. It is fed by both the Israeli propaganda which claims to represent world Jewry and by the fact that more and more people around the world understand that Israel is an apartheid state, which was built on the basis of a continuous act of ethnic cleansing and the denial of human and civil rights from its non-Jewish subjects. Continue reading “The Mutual Dependency of Zionism and Anti-Semitism”