An Everyday Story Of Virtue Signalling

by Les May

I FIND it difficult to have much sympathy with Maxine Peake and Rebecca Long-Bailey.  Both seem to have been keen to be seen to be ‘on the side of the angels’ with regard to the murder of George Floyd and it has backfired spectacularly.  It must have come as an especially big surprise to Long-Bailey who in February of this year declared herself to be a ‘Zionist’

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/will-they-never-learn.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/02/tail-succeeds-in-wagging-dog.html

Peake may have had to admit that her assumptions were wrong about where Minneapolis police force learned their brutal tactics, but it interesting to pose the question of whether there would have been this much fuss had she claimed that it was the South African or Chinese police who acted as mentors.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/maxine-peake-interview-labour-corbyn-keir-starmer-black-lives-matter-a9583206.html

I think not!

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Will They Never Learn?

by Les May

SPEAKING at the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) hustings last Thursday Lisa Nandy is reported as describing anti-semitism as ‘a particular sort of racism’ and went on to say, ‘It’s a sort of racism that punches up not down, that argues that Jewish people are privileged and powerful, and because there are people on the left who believe that their job is to challenge privilege and power, therefore wrongly and disgracefully they argue that Jewish people are a legitimate target for racism’.

I doubt that Nandy can provide a single instance of what she claims. Is she saying that Labour supporter should not challenge privilege and power when it is exercised by people who happen to be Jewish?

She went on to say that if she became leader she would try to go further than accepting the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish hatred. This is some of what the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has to say about that definition;

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is increasingly being adopted or considered by western governments, is worded in such a way as to be easily adopted or considered by western governments to intentionally equate legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former.

This conflation undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.

You can find the full text at the link below.

https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/first-ever-40-jewish-groups-worldwide-oppose-equating-antisemitism-with-criticism-of-israel/#english

In fairness to Nandy it seems that, just as she did, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry also declared themselves to be Zionists, and Keir Starmer’s comments could be so construed. What is clear is that they meant that they believe that the state of Israel has a right to exist and I don’t think many Labour supporters would disagree. But whether Nandy’s pledge to go further than the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish hatred was altogether wise remains to be seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/15/we-must-define-antisemitism-to-fight-it-effectively

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/07/debunking-myth-that-anti-zionism-is-antisemitic

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Northern Zionists Score Spectacular Own Goal!

by Chris Draper

WHEN “North-West Friends of Israel” (NWFOI) and other assorted Zionists tried to provoke a city-wide boycott of an “Interfaith Conference for Palestine” they got more than they bargained for when their bigoted and abusive behaviour was exposed and denounced by Chester community leader Roderick Heather MBE.

The free entry, open-to-all conference was due to begin at St Columba’s Church, Chester on 1^st November 2019 but forty-eight hours before it convened a wolfpack spearheaded by NWFOI and led by Anthony Dennison and Raphi Bloom, bombarded Chester’s numerous church halls and community venues with telephone calls, emails and social media messaging all warning them not to host this conclave of “Anti-Semites, Holocaust Deniers and Hate-Speakers”.  Unfortunately for the bigots after they succeeded in bullying the Bishop of Shrewsbury into cancelling the church booking the Conference found an ideal alternative at Hoole Community Centre where the Chairman of the Trustees, Roderick Heather courageously withstood a barrage of intimidatory NWFOI communications.

Unlike the local Labour MP Chris Matheson who ignorantly obliged local reporters with prejudiced and ill-informed comments of the “We don’t want holocaust deniers in our town” type, Roderick Heather actually took the trouble to attend the conference as an observer and judge for himself whether this was indeed an anti-semitic event or rather, a free, open-minded conference which included criticism of Israeli State policy.

After spending a day at the Conference, Mr Heather informed those attending that he was very impressed by the content of speeches, quality of discussion and conduct of the meeting and assured everyone present that they would always be welcome to return to the Hoole Centre.  This contrasted with his conclusions about the behaviour of the NWFOI and to them he addressed the following message;

“Your intervention (and the various other coordinated extreme ones we received today) did nothing to help foster good community relations here in Chester or to improve the understanding and sympathy for the Jewish cause nationally in the UK.  The ill-informed and bigoted telephone and social media campaign that we have witnessed today is a disgrace.  It was unfounded and unnecessary and has done your cause much harm. Be aware that I am ensuring that as many people as possible (locally and nationally) are made aware of the vitriolic, verbal bullying we have been subjected to today.”

Roderick Heather MBE

Chairman Hoole Community Trust

The North’s Zionist lobby is demonstrably determined to intimidate anyone who sticks their head above the parapet and criticises Israel.  The tactic is to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Jews who criticise Israel (like those who attended the Chester conference) are branded “self-hating Jews” and dismissed. Archbishop Tutu describes Israel as an apartheid state but merely to agree with him is sufficient grounds for anyone to be expelled from the Labour Party.  Free speech is a precious commodity that’s found a friend in Mr Heather and sinister enemies in NWFOI.  Perhaps Mr Dennison, Mr Bloom,  Mr Matheson or the Bishop of Shrewsbury would care to reply and offer a justification for their appalling behaviour but I rather think not for they evidently fear quiet, honest, open, reasoned debate.

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Lies, Damn Lies and Irony

by Les May

IT seems that nowadays we are all thought to be too stupid to understand a definition and have to be provided with an example.  Not wishing to buck the trend I give you an example.

It appeared on the Facebook page of the Jewish Studies professor Jerry Haber.  After he examined the proper context of what Corbyn had said by going back to the text of the speech by Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority representative to the UK, which Corbyn was referencing and which led to the ludicrous outburst from Jonathan Sacks.

— Did you hear that Jeremy Corbyn, in a speech in 2013, said that British Jews weren’t really British even if they were born there?

— Really?  He said that?

— Well, he intimated that British Jews couldn’t grasp English irony and didn’t understand history.”

— Really?  He was referring to Jews?

— Well, he didn’t SAY Jews, but he said that about UK Zionists, which is a leftwing code term for British Jews.

— Hang on, he made a reference to UK Zionists as a group?

— Well, not exactly.  Actually, he was referring to some pro-Israel members of the audience who came up and started arguing with the Palestinian ambassador who had presented the history of Palestine and used irony when he said, 'You know I’m reaching the conclusion that the Jews are the children of God, the only children of God and the Promised Land is being paid by God!  I have started to believe this because nobody is stopping Israel building its messianic dream of Eretz Israel to the point I believe that maybe God is on their side. Maybe God is partial on this issue.' which apparently some of the Zionists thought he meant without irony (We do not have a transcript of what they said).  And Corbyn referred to ‘the Zionists in the audience’.

— So, you mean to say he did not refer to British Zionists as a whole, but he was saying that the Palestinian ambassador, who is Armenian Palestinian, had a greater grasp of English irony, than these Brits who had lived in England all their lives?

— Yes, that’s about it.

— So, in effect, he accused pro-Israeli members of the audience, whom he referred to as ‘Zionists’, which they are, and who argued with the Palestinian ambassador, with being humourless and misunderstanding history, compared with the Palestinian ambassador.

— Yep.

— Well, that makes the man clearly an anti-Semite, doesn’t it?

And what does HIS interpretation make Jonathan Sacks?

Read the full story at:

  https://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/sacks-vs-corbyn/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/writingfromtheedge/2018/07/the-jewish-war-against-corbyn-risks-bringing-real-antisemitism-to-britain/

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Whose Afraid of Jonathan Sacks?

by Les May

CARVED into the wall at Broadcasting House are the words of George Orwell, ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they so not want to hear’, which makes the juxtaposition of articles in the most recent copy of the Radio Times all the more interesting.

The ‘Pick of the week’ on Radio 4 is ‘Morality in the 21^st Century’ presented by ex-Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  We are told that his aim is to ‘provoke thought and discussion never to proselytise or preach’ and that ‘Morality is what lifts us above the pursuit of self interest and self esteem’.  And in case you are wondering, yes that’s the same Jonathan Sacks who are few days ago was denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and a racist because he did not like what Corbyn had said.  Or more correctly he did not like his interpretation of what Corbyn had said.  This in turn became his justification for his absurd comparison of Corbyn words with Enoch Powell’s speech.

The other article is by the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson.  In it he comments ‘People have allowed themselves to be persuaded that there’s something wrong with being given open and unbiased information from BBC journalists’.  I think that Simpson is over egging the pudding a bit here because all media outlets select what is ‘news’, who they are going to quote or interview, and how much space or air time they are to be given, so reports are never going to be quite so unbiased as he suggests.  But that does not mean it is not worth making the effort.  He goes on to say ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think any subject is too important to keep our minds closed to it’.  I agree and the fact that someone might be ‘offended’ by some subjects cuts no ice with me.  You are never going to change anyone’s mind unless you can talk to them.

Simon Kelner, who writes ‘think pieces’ for the ‘i’ newspaper, i.e. he’s a columnist not a journalist in the mould of Simpson, wrote last week that Sack’s used his Instagram account to tell the world that he was ‘a religious leader, philosopher, award-winning author and a respected moral voice’.   Clearly Sack’s is not a man over endowed with modesty or self doubt.  Kelner says that he is ‘definably, a Zionist’, which suggests to me that he, Kelner, has not actually spent much time trying to figure out what a Zionist is.  Seeking enlightenment I found that the explanation on Wikipedia runs to some 11,000 words which is 28 A4 pages.   Here is the link, I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

In a remarkable bit of inventiveness Kelner writes, ‘Not all Jews are Zionists, but (mostly) all Zionists are Jews, and I, as a liberal-minded British Jew (rather than a Zionist) am offended by Mr Corbyn’s pronouncements’. The flaw in this bit of twisted logic is that one chooses to be a Zionist, you are born a Jew.   To my mind that means that you can criticise a Jew for being a Zionist, but not for being a Jew.   (I would add that I feel uncomfortable using Kelner’s form of wording because in my own speech I prefer to say someone is ‘a Jewish person’ rather than ‘a Jew’, and ‘Jewish people’ rather than ‘the Jews’).

As for Kelner’s complaint that he is ‘offended’ by what Corbyn said, all I can say is ‘So what’?   Since when did Kelner, or indeed anyone else, have a right never to be offended?  No one seems to be too concerned about not offending me in matters just as close to my heart as Sack’s and Kelner’s hobby horse.

(Andrea Dworkin was once quoted in the The Observer as saying ‘All men are Nazis’.  After it was published there was no rush to defend men or censure Dworkin, so I am unlikely to feel I have to avoid making comparisons between some of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and the behaviour of the Nazis.)

One of the curious things about the claims that Corbyn is presiding over a Labour party riddled with antisemitism is that I have not yet met anyone who has actually witnessed it.  And it’s not just my Labour friends who say this.  A friend who never misses an opportunity to denigrate Labour has made exactly the same point on more than one occasion.   Nor is antisemitic crime running riot in this country. About 15,000 prosecutions for ‘hate crime’ are launched annually.  Annual prosecutions for anti-semitism have yet to top two dozen. In spite of Margaret Hodge’s silly musings no one is being threatened by a new Holocaust.

So I think we can reasonably ask who is behind the repeated complaints against Corbyn.  On the photographic evidence published in the newspapers there seem to be two culprits, the Jewish Chronicle and the Campaign Against Antisemitism.   We also know from the films on the Al Jazeera TV channel which were shown in 2017 that the state of Israel has been interfering in UK politics and has tried to destabilise the Labour party.

Why? That’s easy. Corbyn is unashamedly on the side of the Palestinians.  It is to discredit any charges he makes against the state of Israel by claiming that he is an anti-Semite.  It's to turn Jewish people into victims, and by implication, Israel into a nation of victims.   It's no longer Israel that needs to leave the Occupied Territories; it's Corbyn and the rest of us who need to free ourselves of antisemitism.

I’m sure Corbyn has plenty of advisers and does not need my advice, but I’m going to give it all the same.  Fight these people on the basis of freedom of speech. Put them on the defensive for a change.  Remind people what Orwell said.   Remind them that the first thing the Nazis did was to suppress dissent, so remind people about how many British lives were lost in defence of that liberty. 

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ALLEGATIONS: Being left wing or anti-Semitic?

Attacks on Ken Livingston point to sad confusion

 by Martin Gilbert

LIKE a number of British Jews I’m an anti-Zionist. In the heat around this issue the Board of Deputies of British Jews have suggested that they speak for our entire community.  They may speak for all paid up members of

synagogues, presuming that they all support Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  It suggests that all Christians are paid up at their local parish church.  That Board do not represent the much larger number who identify as being Jewish and are entirely secular.

Contributing to an attack on the left is a confusion that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.  Corbyn’s Labour party are trying to deal with this smear. In resigning from that party Ken Livingstone described it all as

'a distraction'.  After meeting with the Board, trying to show some balance Corby attended a Passover service organised by some left wing Jews. Passover services are very jolly affairs with much singing and wine-drinking.  It is a festival of liberation but the radical, left wing theme is 'we cannot celebrate our liberation while we oppress others'.

A possible source of anti-Jewish feeling has been neglected.  If there is confusion generally about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, some of it may be found in immigrants with personal experience of Israeli oppression.  If that were my background it would be very hard for me to be liberal and internationalist.

Martin Gilbert, 25.5.’18.

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Jeremy’s Promised Land!

by Christopher Draper

I’ve just come back from a day-school on the Balfour declaration where no-one mentioned the elephant in the room.  Speakers gave Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George and Lord Rothschild a well deserved kicking but ignored those ultimately responsible for handing Palestine over to the gang of Zionist thugs who concocted the apartheid State of Israel.

The Spirit of ‘45

On 26th July 1945 a British Labour government took office with an overwhelming majority, a popular mandate for Socialism and legal responsibility for the administration of Palestine.  Despite Jews being a in minority, owning just 6% of the land, Zionist terrorists launched a murderous campaign to drive the Arab population from their homeland and transform Palestine into an ethnically-cleansed State of Israel.
As well as attacks on Palestinians, Clement Attlee and his Labour chums were left in no doubt of the Zionist’s systematic savagery after 91 people were murdered at the King David Hotel, the British Embassy in Rome was blown up, a bomb was planted in the Colonial Office and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin himself received a letter bomb but instead of defending the Palestinians from colonisation Labour opted for expediency. In 1947, even before the government’s mandate had expired, this most left-wing of Labour Governments announced its intention to walk away, leaving Palestine to the Zionists.

Ignorance is Bliss

This utter betrayal characterises the record of the 1945-51 Labour regime so revered by activists who imagine Jeremy might lead us back to that Garden of Eden. This is a fiction apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the real record of that government though many lazily prefer the myth. I don’t want to bludgeon readers with endless argument but instead offer a few pointers you can investigate and decide upon for yourself.

Conscription

Post-war Labour was expected to rapidly demilitarise but instead Attlee established permanent peace-time conscription that continued throughout Labour’s reign until it was finally abolished in 1960 by a Tory administration. It soon became apparent that Labour required a conscript army to carry out its industrial and colonial policies.

Labouring Under Labour

· July 1945, within a week of taking office Labour sent strikebreaking troops into London’s Surrey Docks. The strike was defeated and 900 dockers suspended.
· October 1945 - 21,000 conscript troops broke national port strike
· Aug 1947 - 40 Grimethorpe miners taken to court for striking
· Jan 1948 - 191 Durham miners summonsed for striking
· March 1948 - 2 Neath miners prosecuted for stay-down strike
· May 1949 - troops defeated Avonmouth strike
· Sep 1950 - 10 members of gasworkers strike committee charged with conspiracy
· February 1951 – 7 London and Mersey dockers charged with conspiracy
Between 1945 and 1951 Labour ordered troops across picket lines 18 times. It retained Wartime Order 1305 to make strikes illegal and twice invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Labour even revived the secret Supply & Transport Organisation the Tories had used to break the 1926 General Strike. Ever ready to act against workers Labour never once invoked the 1305 clause that prohibited employers from imposing “lock-outs”. Printworkers locked-out by the London Master Printers Federation in August 1950 got no support from Attlee’s government but successfully defended their jobs and conditions through their own collective action.

Pacifying the Natives

Pacifying the Natives
In 1924 J H Thomas, foreign minister of Britain’s first Labour government reassuringly declared; “I am here to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire”.  On the day of Labour’s 1945 election victory his successor, Ernest Bevin announced, “British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government”. In practice this meant;
· 1945 September Vietnam – bloody suppression of popular uprising
· 1945 October Java - Seaforth Highlanders crush popular uprising
· 1945 December Greece - 5-year military campaign against socialists
· 1946 Albania - naval action and confiscation of gold reserves
· 1946 January Cyprus – 18 trade unionists imprisoned
· 1947 Kenya - troops shoot “uncooperative” Kenyans
· 1947 Aden – brutal suppression of “civil disturbances”
· 1947 August India – abandoned to partition and violence
· 1948 Malaya – brutal colonial war against insurgency
· 1948 February Ghana - Nkrumah jailed and 29 killed
· 1949 April Uganda - 8 demonstrators killed many arrested
· 1949 November Nigeria – 21 strikers shot dead at Enugu Colliery
· 1950 Korea – troops sent to support US intervention
· 1950 March Botswana – exiled Seretse Khama for marrying a white woman
· 1951 June Persia – “Gunboat diplomacy” of cruiser Mauritius

In Bed With Fascists

Whilst continuing to wield the big stick in the colonies Labour kow-towed to its new best friend, the United States. Bevin created NATO as an anti-communist alliance to facilitate American hegemony in Europe.  Alliances with fascists proved preferable to friendship with socialists soft on communism. After the war Labour kept interned at Chorley concentration camp 226 Spanish anti-fascists who’d fought against both Franco and the Nazis.  An even worse fate awaited their 136 comrades who Labour deported back to Franco’s torture chambers.  Attlee’s government then proceeded to grant Franco’s fascist regime official recognition as it did to Fascist Portugal, a fellow member of NATO, an organisation supposedly founded to defend freedom!

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Following Attlee’s agreement on the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he insisted that Britain must now have its own nuclear bomb.  Bevin agreed, with obscene enthusiasm, “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs…We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.

MP’s & Pensioners

With wages averaging around £5 a week Labour raised the Old Age Pension to just a quarter of this amount, 26 shillings, but they managed more for themselves, increasing MP’s salaries from £600 a year to £1000 with £5,000 for the Postmaster General.

Ethel’s Prescience

Despite this shameful record Labour loyalists cling to the legacy of the NHS, but this was a Liberal scheme and would have been introduced by them if they’d been elected in 1945.  After all it was Lloyd George who started the Welfare State by introducing Old Age Pensions in 1908 and Liberals Beveridge and Keynes who drafted the welfare measures Labour carried out (Labour’s education system was devised by a Tory, Rab Butler).   As the Guardian noted, even “the Tory manifesto pledges were not all that different from Labour’s”.   Labour’s NHS used the same top-down, hierarchical model as in its other Nationalisations. Just before Labour government took office, in 1944, the writer Ethel Mannin presciently identified “ersatz socialism”, “Socialism without tears, an attempt at pacifying the capitalist with compensation for his confiscated property – a sort of social appeasement, which will leave a class system of society, and which offers no new
approach to life and no recognition of “the soul of man”… “Coarse comfort, like petted animals” is exactly the aim of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan.
What sort of fool imagines the rich would simply relinquish their power and wealth on the vote of a Parliamentary majority?  Only by organising and educating ourselves at work and in our own communities could we ever hope to wrest control from the powerful and manipulative. Jeremy might well lead us down the Parliamentary road but it won’t, never did and never could, lead us into the Garden of Eden.

CD November 2017 

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Onward Christian-Zionists Marching as to War!

by Chris Draper

A FEW  weeks ago I attended a local Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) and got more than I bargained for. Advertised as an opportunity to hear a Holocaust survivor talk about his Auschwitz experience it turned out to be an artfully organised attempt to rally political support for the State of Israel.

We were directed to stand and sing Hatikvah, rallying cry of the Zionist movement sung at the first World Congress in 1897 and recently adopted as the National Anthem of Israel. We were also treated to an oratorical adulation of Israel delivered by a Member of the Welsh Assembly (AM) who had just returned from a free holiday in the Promised Land. Half-way through his political paean to Israel I walked out, shouting, “What about the Palestinians?!”

Determined to discover how this cynical perversion of an humanitarian event had been orchestrated I did a bit of digging and soon discovered;

1) The organiser was a Mr Roy Thurley, North Wales representative and past UK Director of an International Zionist organisation known as Christian Friends of Israel (CFI) with its HQ in Jerusalem.

2) This event was advertised by CFI as an “Official Civic” event attended by the local MP, two local AM’s, the Mayor, Chair of the County Council and various other bigwigs.

3) The MP, Guto Bebb is a member of Friends of Israel who has enjoyed thousands of pounds worth of free Israeli hospitality whilst Darren Millar AM recently hosted the launch of Wales Friends of Israel at the Senedd in Cardiff with the support of the Israeli Embassy.

4) Llandudno Town Council granted CFI £860 to organise this event.

So the upshot is that CFI misused Council Tax to elicit support for Israel, which Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes as “An Apartheid State” to be boycotted by Christians and all other right-thinking people. It seems fair to assume that Tutu knows a bit about both Apartheid and Christianity but Mr Thurley and CFI think not. Neither do they think much of fellow Christians for a couple of years ago CFI pulled out of Llandudno CYTUN (“Churches Together”) that includes all the other main Christian congregations (Methodist, Anglican, Baptist, Coptic etc) as Mr Thurley insists only his CFI sect correctly interprets the Bible.

Mr Thurley reveals the apartheid creed of Christian Friends of Israel in a booklet available online called “Chosen Race, Chosen Place” but the title is enough to get the drift. God chose the Jews and gave them Israel, not just in some mysterious way but in the ever-lasting here-and-now and anyone who criticises the expansionist State-building of Israel is an agent of the devil!

After discovering all this I thought I’d ask the Council whether it considered Mr Thurley’s HMD constituted a proper use of Council Tax. I also talked to local Christians, Conwy Peace Group and many others about their opinions and to cut a long story short, Rev Mike Harrison, Chair of CYTUN offered to organise a less divisive, more inclusive HMD next year. On 3rd March 2017 Llandudno Councillors accepted my analysis of CFI’s abuse of Llandudno HMD and endorsed CYTUN as organiser of our 2018 HMD. To top it off, with utter consistency Councillors decided that as CFI hadn’t fulfilled their side of the bargain the Council wouldn’t hand over the £860 grant!

No-one imagines Israel is now quaking in its boots but the political advance of Christian-Zionism across the UK has been slowed. Mr Thurley is something of a “Mr Big” and through CFI’s glossy magazines, books, DVD’s, Christian television and radio, conferences and trips to Israel his initiatives are widely anticipated and copied. This sort of Christian fundamentalist politicking is big in the States but still in its infancy here. In the light of my recent experience I would urge all fair-minded folk to get involved in your local HMD as I’ve identified several more already targeted by Christian Zionists.

Shalom, Christopher Draper

Is Freedland's claim of antisemitism on the left, aimed at undermining Jeremy Corbyn?

Guardian Journalist - Jonathan Freedland

Labour MP's on the right of the Labour Party, are continuing with their relentless campaign to discredit and undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party, in spite of him being elected twice by a massive majority of Labour Party members in all three categories. Under his leadership, there have been accusations of bullying, misogyny, homophobia, sexism and anti-Semitism. The latter charge led to the Labour Party setting up an inquiry into anti-Semitism chaired by former Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, who was given a peerage and elevated to the shadow cabinet.

Many people remain dubious about these claims which they see as tendentious and aimed at smearing Corbyn's  leadership of the Labour Party. Among those who have been most vocal against Corbyn's leadership have been the virulent anti -Corbyn' hater and Guardian journalist, Nick Cohen, who speaks of Corbyn's 'gun club', which he insists, his targeting Jews, lesbians and homosexual's for de-selection. Fellow Guardian journalist, Jonathan Freedland, has also claimed that anti-Semitism is rife on the English left. However, a recent cross-party home affairs select committee report, stated that there was no reliable evidence to suggests that anti-Semitism was greater in the Labour Party than other parties.

Although many Jewish people oppose the racist policies of the Israeli government  vis-a-vis the Palestinian people and Zionism in general, there is a subtext which lies behind many of these accusations of anti-Semitism by the pro-Israeli lobby.  What it seems to say to many, is that if you oppose what the Israeli state is doing to the Palestinian people, then you are an anti-semite and pro-Palestinian activism, is anti-Semitic. Or anti-Semitism is whatever we want it to mean! As Noam Chomsky says: "Whoever captures the language captures the argument."

Many people may have objected to Ken Livingstone's remark that Hitler supported Zionism in the early 1930's,  but did this automatically make him an anti-semite ? Jewish representatives from the Board of Deputies, certainly thought so and called for his expulsion from the Labour Party. Jim Allen's play 'Perdition', also alleged collaboration between Zionist leaders and the Nazis. Just 36-hours before the opening night, the play directed by Ken Loach, was cancelled at the Royal Court theatre. By the late 1980's, Loach couldn't get anything commissioned or shown.

Over the years, there have been accusations that the English writer George Orwell, was anti-Semitic, because in April 1945, he wrote in the 'Contemporary Jewish Record' the following:

"Many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites  turned upside-down."

Likewise, in his 'The Lion and the Unicorn', Orwell also wrote:

"Sir Oswald Mosley, a man barren of ideas- hollow as a jug. He (Mosley) started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers."

Although a staunch anti-Fascist, this hasn't stopped the accusations against Orwell that he was antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic. Now-a-days, with no-platforming, safe-spaces and trigger-alerts, it is doubtful Orwell would have got published or even Evelyn Waugh.

We are publishing an article by local Tameside health campaigner and Labour Party member, Rod McCord, which is a response to the article written by Jonathan Freedland and which deals with some of these matters in more detail. To read the full article click on the link - READ MORE.