Day: 19 June 2016

In his ‘Farewell to the student world‘ blog in Jewish News, outgoing campaigns director of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), Russell Langer, takes a parting shot at the Malia Bouattia-led NUS. He criticises her rhetoric that included “hinting that having a large J-Soc was problematic, and repeated references to the influence of Zionist lobbies.” In the lead up to her election in April, an open letter signed by over 50 JSoc presidents accused her of antisemitism. Langer adds that,

The 2014/15 NUS National Executive Council (NEC) were so obsessed with hating Israel that it passed two boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) policies within a year and their successors even attempted to boycott Coca Cola. When these incidents happened in the past, Jewish student activists could rely on the leadership to properly condemn it but the Jewish students who were with me at this year’s conference watched the majority of delegates vote for a president who still hadn’t fully addressed the concerns of Jewish students.

[…] When those on NEC choose to play the politics of division by importing foreign conflicts onto our campuses and blaming what they see as anti-Muslim policies on ‘Zionist lobbies’, NUS is failing all students.

The ex-UJS campaigns director complains about the importation of “foreign conflicts onto our campuses,” but UK Jewish Societies make major efforts to promote Israel on those same campuses, working closely with the Israeli state.

On Tuesday, Jewish News reported that “in the wake of a Jewish society campaign led by high-profile groups and individuals including the Israeli embassy and Jonathan Turner, the chair of UK Lawyers for Israel,” the UCL Board of Trustees decided that the resolutions and mandates of its BDS motion passed on 8 March “cannot be legally implemented.”

Speaking to the Jewish News, Adam Schapira, the former President of UCL Jewish Society, said that he ‘expects to see this motion entirely removed from UCLU’s record’. He blasted UCLU’s actions in passing the motion as a ‘serious failure’ – but billed their latest announcement part of a ‘significant wave of success’ in overturning BDS legislation.

STATEMENT REGARDING BDS AT UCLU:

We are delighted that the Board of Trustees have overturned this insidious BDS… https://t.co/hiRRHonHXK

— UCL Jewish Society (@UCL_JSoc) June 13, 2016

In the updated motion the inoperable parts have been crossed out. They include the resolution to “raise awareness of the Palestinian suffering amongst our students explaining the union stance,” and “to work with students to publish a report on academic, corporate and economic links between the university and companies or institutions that participate in or are complicit in Israeli violations of international law.”

With the departure of Langer, Liron Velleman is the new Campaigns Officer of UJS. Velleman is also Youth & Students Officer of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), and recently referred to non-Zionist Jews as “contrary” imposters. JLM is an affiliate both of the Israeli 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. As veteran human rights campaigner Diana Neslen noted last month, some Labour MPs that are members of JLM “are not only dissatisfied with the witch hunt that they have unleashed in the Labour party, but are also in league with a foreign political party whose ethos is distinctly racist.” Continue reading “Student Israel apologist sees divisiveness – but only when on the losing side”

Read the article in full here.

Tony Greenstein replies to Paul Bogdanor’s ‘An Antisemitic Hoax: Lenni Brenner on Zionist ‘Collaboration’ With the Nazis’.

Fathom is the on-line journal of BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.  Its editorial advisory board is a who’s who of Zionist academics, journalists and ex-military personnel.  It is a good example of how Zionist academics seamlessly intertwine with Israel’s military industrial complex.  Fathom’s editor is the right-wing British academic Professor Alan Johnson

When Ken Livingstone stated, during the course of defending Naz Shah MP against accusations of anti-Semitism, that ‘when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.’ , the Zionists and their sycophants were outraged.  How could anyone make such an accusation?  Livingstone’s statement focused attention on the murky history of Zionist relations with Nazi Germany.

The hypocrisy of  Zionism’s defenders is breathtaking.  Zionists never tire of wheeling out the holocaust whenever it suits them.  It was Abba Eban, the Labour Zionist Foreign Secretary who called the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank the ‘Auschwitz borders’.  Netanyahu compared the Boycott of Israeli Goods to the holocaust:

‘We have a historical recollection of what happens when Jewish products are marked’

Nor is it just the Israeli Right.  Veteran Israeli holocaust historian, Saul Friedlander, who no longer calls himself a Zionist because of the way Zionism has been captured by people like Paul Bogdanor, stated that he ‘regrets that his colleagues in the Israeli left prefer not to base their arguments more on the lessons of the Holocaust.

“It’s a mistake of the left to keep clear from such a major part of our history. They are afraid of dragging the Holocaust into the political game but we can turn around the way the right uses it.”’  

Cardboard cutouts of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister used to be dressed up in Nazi uniform by his opponents.

In short those western Zionists who pretend that the holocaust has no lessons for today are not merely mistaken but hypocritical too, since the holocaust is almost the standard metaphor in debate in Israel.

The holocaust has served as the primary justification for Israel ideologically.  It has been the alibi for every atrocity of a state based on ethno-religious supremacy.  When Israel lay siege to Beirut and bombed it, Israeli Prime Minister Begin justified it by comparing Yasir Arafat to Hitler in his bunker.  Israel’s enemies, such as Nasser and Ahmedinajad were the new Hitler.  The Palestinians have been transformed into the new Nazis.  We even had the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu, at the 2015 World Zionist Congress, seeking to exculpate Hitler for the extermination of European Jewry.  According to this revisionist version of history, it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was responsible for the Nazis adopting extermination rather than expulsion as the solution to the Jewish Question.

Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the assumptions of the anti-Semites, viz. that Jews did not belong in other peoples’ territories – they were strangers.  Zionism understood anti-Semitism and saw it as a perfectly justifiable and understandable movement.  As the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl noted:  ‘In Paris…, I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’

It is equally a surprise to people that the Zionists had no principled objection to the Nazis Nuremberg laws, “the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history”  Who would believe that the Zionist movement was in agreement with the Nazis over the need to for racial separation?  As the Introduction to the Nuremberg Laws of 15th September stated:  

‘If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too.’

It was because of their ideological congruity that collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis came easily.  The Zionists were focussed on building their state, not saving Jews.   Continue reading “Why Ken Livingstone Got It Right Over Nazi Support for Zionism”