(1) Corbyn likened Israel's West Bank actions to the Nazi occupation of Europe (2) The Economist (= Lord Rothschild) berates Corbyn for Anti-Semitism (3) Ken Livingstone: beware Media lies about Russia, Ukraine, Skirpal (4) George Galloway: Brexit challenge to the UK Ruling Class
(1) Corbyn likened Israel's West Bank actions to the Nazi occupation of Europe http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=174580 The Labour leader, as a backbench MP, said many would recognise the state of affairs Palestinians were under in the West Bank as being similar to those “who suffered occupation during the Second World War” The Labour leader, as a backbench MP, said many would recognise thestate of affairs Palestinians were under in the West Bank as being similar to those “who suffered occupation during the Second World War” Kate McCann, senior political correspondent 10 AUGUST 2018 • 10:58PM Jeremy Corbyn has likened Israel’s actions in the West Bank to the Second World War Nazi occupation of Europe, a comparison that breaches the international definition of anti-Semitism. Speaking at the Palestinian Return Centre in 2013, the Labour leader, then a backbench MP, said many would recognise the state of affairsPalestinians were under in the West Bank as being similar to those “who suffered occupation during the Second World War”. His comments represent a breach of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] definition of anti-Semitism that states that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is racist. It is the section that the Labour Party hasrefused to adopt. Labour Friends of Israel, which campaigns for a two-state solution, called his comments “appalling”. But Labour insisted Mr Corbyn was not comparing the Israeli state with the Nazis. The emergence of the video, posted on Twitter yesterday by an anonymous account called The Golem, came as Dave Prentis, the Unison general secretary, called for the party to urgently adopt the official IHRA definition. EXCLUSIVE – In 2013 @JeremyCorbyn spoke at an event hosted by the Palestinian Return Centre in which he made a direct comparison between Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Nazi occupation of Europe during WW2. Watch until the end… pic.twitter.com/POMfsX5APq — The Golem (@TheGolem_) August 10, 2018 He directed thinly veiled criticism of the leader’s failure to act, writing in the New Statesman: “This should never have become such a divisive issue, an unnecessary schism in a party that on so manyissues is genuinely united.” It came as photos emerged of Mr Corbyn in Tunisia in 2014 holding a wreath by memorials to Palestinian terrorist group Black September, who carried out the 1972 Munich massacre where 11 Israeli athletes were killed. However, sources close to Mr Corbyn insisted he was at a service there to commemorate 47 Palestinians killed in an Israeli air strike in Tunisia in 1985. Jim Murphy, the former Scottish Labour leader, also took out a full page advert in the Jewish Telegraph to apologise for the behaviour of the party’s senior team. In it he wrote that Labour “appears to have turned its back on the British Jewry”, accusing Mr Corbyn of failing to stop anti-Semitic slurs. It follows weeks of anger and frustration in the party over the leader’s refusal to adopt the full internationally recognised definition despite pleas from a large number of Labour MPs. In the video, Mr Corbyn said the conflict between Israel and Palestine was portrayed as one between equal powers when it was not, adding: “The Palestinian people are generally very poor and in the case of Gaza, virtually imprisoned within that very small area… And in the West Bank, under occupation of the very sort that would be recognised by many people in Europe who suffered occupation during the Second World War, with the endless roadblocks, imprisonment, irrational behaviour by the military and the police.” A Labour spokesman said: “Jeremy was describing conditions ofoccupations in World War Two in Europe, of which there are multiple examples, not comparing the Israeli state to Nazis.”
(2) The Economist (= Lord Rothschild) berates Corbyn for Anti-Semitism https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/03/31/jeremy-Corbyns-anti-Semitism-problem Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem Labour’s leader will not rid his party of the scourge until he understands what it means Mar 31st 2018 JEREMY CORBYN has spent a remarkable proportion of his life on “demos”—indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that protesting is hiscore competence. This week, however, the Labour leader found himself on the receiving end of a demonstration. Two Jewish groups, the Boardof Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, organised a protest in Parliament Square to draw attention to Mr Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem. The demonstration was only about a thousand strong. The organisers forgot to bring a PA system so it was impossible to hear what was being said. Only a handful of people joined in with the chant of“Mural, mural on the wall, who is the biggest racist of them all—Corbyn!” But this was nevertheless a significant moment: a group of Jews standing outside Parliament, protesting about the prevalence of anti-Semitism not on the fascist extreme but at the heart of one of Britain’s two biggest parties. The immediate cause of the protest was a recently unearthed comment that Mr Corbyn posted online in 2012 in response to a piece of London street art. The mural in question is a blatantly anti-Semitic portrait of a group of capitalists, most of them with hook-noses, playing Monopoly on a table resting on the backs of naked workers. The local authority ordered the mural be painted over. Mr Corbyn leapt to the artist’s defence, writing on his Facebook page: “Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [Rivera’s] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.” The discovery of the post proved too much for many leading British Jews, who have written to Mr Corbyn with three complaints: that the Labour Party contains pockets of anti-Semitism; that Mr Corbyn has repeatedly turned a blind eye to such noxious attitudes; and that previous attempts to deal with it have proved inadequate. They are right on all three counts. Jewish Labour MPs such as Luciana Berger have been subjected to anti-Semitic rants and intimidation from supporters of the hard left. Jewish students have abandoned Labour groups because they feel threatened and vilified. One source of the anti-Semitic infection is the hard left, which is almost defined by its hostility to Israel and capitalism. There is nothing necessarily anti-Semitic about either position. But in the heat of political debate, distinctions can blur and ancient hatreds flame. Hard-leftists habitually refer to Jews as “Zios”. The artist behind the London mural said it was not an attack on Jews but on capitalists such asRockefeller and Warburg. Another source of Labour’s anti-Semitism is British Muslims. A poll last September found that 55% of Muslims held anti-Semitic attitudes, with 27% believing that “Jews get rich at the expense of others”, compared with 12% of the general population. Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim writer, says that “weird and wacky anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are the default explanation for a range of national and internationalevents.” For all their disagreements on issues like gay rights, hard-leftists and Muslims forged a lasting alliance in the Stop the War movement against the invasion of Iraq. Mr Corbyn has done more than turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism. He hashad tea in Parliament with Islamist radicals such as Sheikh Raed Salah, who has claimed that “a suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work[ed] every day in the Twin Towers” to stay at home on September 11th 2001. He has appeared on Iranian national television, despite the fact that the regime issues wild threats to destroy Israel. One of his old friends, Ken Livingstone, has repeatedly asserted that Hitler supported Zionism in the early 1930s. This week’s row was proof in itself that previous attempts to tackle the problem have failed. Several Labour MPs joined the protests in a public rebuke to the party leadership. But is there also a chance that it marks a turning-point? Mr Corbyn has issued a statement recognising that “anti-Semitism has surfaced within the Labour Party”, apologised for his misjudgment over the mural and offered to meet Jewish leaders. His aides are reportedly “rattled” by the fallout from the row, which represents more of a threat to his reputation for sanctity than his links to IRA activists. Speak no evil But there are powerful reasons for believing that the problem will not be tackled. One is biographical. Mr Corbyn has spent his life moving in far-left circles since arriving in London in the early 1970s. His instinct is that there are no enemies to the left—that fellowprotesters in the Socialist Workers Party or International Marxist Group should be forgiven their peccadillos (such as believing in armedrevolution) because they believe in social justice. Mr Corbyn’s supporters have the same attitude. This week they rallied to his defence, claiming that the establishment was conjuring up the anti-Semitism row to discredit their champion. Another reason is strategic. British Jews—particularly those who support Israel—are being marginalised in the Labour Party. There are 3m Muslims in Britain compared with about 284,000 Jews, and they are concentrated in areas vital for Labour’s future, such as Birmingham and Manchester. The philo-Semitic tradition in the Labour Party, exemplified by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, is dying. The most important reason is philosophical. Mr Corbyn has devoted much of his life to protesting against racism. But for him, racism islinked to class and exploitation. It is about privileged people doing down the marginalised, and saintly activists like Mr Corbyn riding to their rescue. But the Jews are perhaps the world’s most successfulethnic minority. They have almost always succeeded by the sweat of their brow rather than the largesse of activists or government programmes. They are often hated precisely because they have succeeded where other marginalised groups have failed. The danger is not that Mr Corbyn will continue to ignore anti-Semitism after this week’s protests. It’s that he doesn’t understand what anti-Semitism is. This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Nothing to see here" (3) Ken Livingstone: beware Media lies about Russia, Ukraine, Skirpal http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50083.htm 'Be Careful About What You Believe' - US, UK Media Bias & Lies By Ken Livingstone August 20, 2018 Information Clearing House Today it seems like we are in another Cold War. It was breathtaking to watch our PM Theresa May immediately blaming Russia for the poisoning of the Skripals before the police had conducted their investigation into the evidence. Growing up after the Second World War our news was dominated by the threat from the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 I don't think anyone could have guessed that just over two decades later we would be once again talking about the threat from Russia. Anyone who only gets their news from the British or American media is kept in ignorance of the truth; the endless accusations about the Skirpal poisoning or the conflict over Crimea is presented in a completely biased way in which most of the facts are ignored. But there is nothing new about this: dishonest reporting and lies dominated the whole of the Cold War in the days of the Soviet Union. The lies about Russia's military predominance are being echoed again today over issues like the Crimea. I have never seen anything in the British media that reports the fact that over ninety percent of the people living in the Crimea are Russian. Nor have I ever seen it reported in the media that the Crimea was never a part of Ukraine until 1954 when the Soviet Union's then leader Nikita Khrushchev switched the boundaries to include the Crimea inside Ukraine. Although Britain and America have imposed sanctions on Russia for incorporating the Crimea the history of what happened is of course very different. The centre and west of Ukraine is dominated by Ukrainians and during the Second World War many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi regime after it invaded Ukraine on its way to Moscow and a couple of years later as the Soviet army pushed back the Nazis many Ukrainians fought with the Nazis against the Soviet army. So no-one should be surprised that the people of the Crimea and the Russian dominated Eastern part of Ukraine had worries and doubts about the Ukrainian government and its attitude towards them after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. What triggered this crisis was not a Russian invasion but the overthrow of the then moderate Ukrainian government under President Viktor Yanukovych. Back in November 2013 Yanukovych announced he was delaying the signing of an economic treaty with the European Union because it would have terminated the Ukraine's trading and economic relations with its main economic partner Russia. Why the EU was demanding this change which would clearly damage the economy of Ukraine has never been revealed. Following Yanukovych's announcement demonstrators occupied the Ukrainian capital's central square, Maidan, protesting against his decision but the protests and rallies became violent and led to the overthrow of the president on February 22, 2014. The protests were led by extreme Ukrainian nationalists and paramilitary groups whose policies echoed much of the fascist ideology including the use of Nazi symbols and racist slogans, calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Russians living in Ukraine. Britain, the USA and the EU supported the coup that overthrew President Yanukovych. There is now a considerable degree of evidence that western intelligence agencies were involved in encouraging these far-right groups over many decades following the end of the Second World War. The new Ukrainian government claimed that the number of people shot dead had been killed by the government's security forces and Russians posing as Ukrainians. Those allegations were blown away when the Italian TV website Eyes Of War showed a documentary interviewing three ex-military snipers from Georgia who admitted they had been hired by the insurgents and had been partly responsible for the shootings. No western government has talked about sanctions against Georgia. Clearly the overthrow of the government and its replacement by a far-right anti-Russian regime spurred the fear of ethnic cleansing and led to the Russian majority in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine deciding they would not remain under the new Ukrainian regime and so they fought to defend themselves. Russians living in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine should have the same right to self-determination as should be the case around the whole of the world. None of this is new, just a few years earlier in 2014 a Malaysian aeroplane was shot down as it passed over Ukraine in July. Immediately Western media said that this had been done by a Russian missile. But nowhere in the Western media was it revealed that the missile used was so old that they had been taken out of service by the Russian government years before. Following the chaotic break up of the old Soviet Union its wholly possible that several of these old missiles were retained, perhaps even by far-right groups in the Ukraine. It takes decades for the truth to come out. We now know that when Tony Blair told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could reach Britain within 45 minutes and President Bush claimed Iraq had amassed a huge stockpile of uranium that this was completely untrue, but it led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. As a young man I remember back in 1964 the American government announcing that one of their battleships has been attacked by North Vietnam and this led to their mass bombing and full-scale war leading to the deaths of over three and a half million people. Twenty years later the truth came out that there had never been an attack on that American ship. The earliest lie I remember was when I was just eleven years old and Britain and France announced they were invading Egypt to stop the war between Egypt and Israel. All the politicians behind that lie were dead long before the truth emerged that Britain and France had asked Israel to invade Egypt so that this would give Britain and France the chance to overthrow Nasser's Egyptian government and take back control of the Suez Canal. Always be careful about what you believe. Ken Livingstone is an English politician, he served as the Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008. He is also a former MP and a former member of the Labour Party.
(4) George Galloway: Brexit challenge to the UK Ruling Class https://www.rt.com/op-ed/436500-brexit-uk-ruling-class/ Brexit now holds Britain in a headlock George Galloway Published time: 21 Aug, 2018 16:02 Brexit brew hasn't stopped simmering and will flavour British politics for many years to come. The defeat for the British establishment in the Brexit referendum was as unexpected (by them) as it was momentous. A rag-bag army of Brexit campaigners with a distinctly unusual Officer class triumphed over the sleek Rolls Royce Brigade of Guards commanded by the entire spectrum of the great and the good. I was one of the rag-bag army, but more as a guerrilla fighter, often behind enemy lines. I had to be allowed freedom of action because nobody expected me to take orders from the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Liam Fox – and though in touch throughout with thelikes of Nigel Farage and his group, we each knew we were better not together. Our view of a post-Brexit Britain was just too different. All the living ex-Prime Ministers posing for the Remain sidephotographers was the moment I knew we would win. With a remarkable lack of self-awareness, the British ruling class didn't realise that the referendum was as much about them as it was about the EU. Or that the people hated the political class with a vengeance, and thatrevenge was at hand. It was a revolt against austerity, years of falling living standards for the workers and the unemployed and under-employed. Post-industrial dereliction in huge swathes of the country, alienation in the towns and coastal communities, a suspicion hardening into certainty that those moving for the EU did so not out of love but out of interest. An interest necessarily unshared. The decades of EU subversion of institutions like the media, the universities, even the trade unions through the copious carriages of the gravy train was more than sufficient to manufacture the consent of the elite and their comprador in times less stressful. But in the great stress-test of a referendum, it was bound to derail, hit the buffers. There just wasn't enough gravy to go round. Adding injury to insult, the so-called freedom of movement of often cheap Eastern European labour into a depressed British labour market – deregulated, scantily organised, de-skilled, insecure, atomized – was being hailed by the very elite who benefitted from it as some kind of"progressive internationalism" and that those crying foul over it were just "racist". This despite the fact EU immigration was overwhelmingly white and the first and worst affected by it were disproportionately black British people with origins in the Commonwealth. This stretched as far as me, by the way! After a whole life in the anti-imperialist cause and as the father of two Arab and two Indonesian children, I too had apparently become a racist by backing Leave. But all this backfired as we now know. The rulers, the experts, the rich, and the powerful were undone by the peasants' revolt of 2016. And they can scarcely conceal their rage, which hasn't cooled but heated up as the departure hour heaves into clear view. Read more(L) Sir Jim Ratcliffe, CEO of INEOS poses with British Olympic sailor (R) Ben Ainslie, during a news conference in London, Britain, April26, 2018. © Toby Melville Britain’s richest person & Brexiteer quitting UK for Monaco to save tax on £21bn fortune Brexit now holds Britain in a headlock. The ruling elite can't count on their own party, the Conservatives, to serve their interests and scupper Brexit altogether or at least blunt its impact by cobbling together a compromise solution. This because upwards of a hundred Tory MPs cannot or will not defy the Tory rank and file which remains bristlingly anti-EU. Neither can the rulers seek solace as once they would in ahouse-trained Labour Party. Under new management, Labour will not save their bacon. Apart from their decades of Euro-skepticism, the Labour leaders are not stupid. Millions of Labour voters – perhaps 5 million – voted for Brexit. Nearly 70 percent of Labour-held parliamentary seats votedBrexit. And though upwards of a hundred Labour MPs are itching for a variety of reasons to betray their leadership, their numbers so match Brexit hardliners on the other side as to render their own rebellion otiose. And their own careers, too. Thus the richest people in Britain, all of finance capital, most of what remains of industrial capital, big farming interests, the civil service, the BBC, most of the media class, the deep state, are in a state of stasis. And all they can do is fume. Stew. Their plan for a second referendum has foundered on jagged rocks. They would more likely than not lose it again. Even if they somehow rigged up a narrow reversal, they would face as Barry Gardiner, a weather-vane member of the Labour shadow cabinet, this week warned, "within weeks" the largest surge in right-wing strength ever seen in Britain. Social peace in the country would be atgreater risk than for centuries. The system itself could be existentially challenged. Labour will not support a second referendum and neither will a huge section of the Tory Party. They cannot go forward, they daren't go back. The British ruling class is up the creek without a paddle. This is their Darkest Hour. -- Peter Myerswebsite: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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