Letters

Racist EHRC

In response to the recent articles in relation to the Al Jazeera documentaries, the Forde report and Chris Williamson’s book, the part played by the Equality and Human Rights Commission might be of interest to your readers.

If the Forde report, Al Jazeera, etc show that there is a hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party, that Labour had a problem with the bullying and abuse of black female Labour MPs and Islamophobia (a polite way of saying ‘racist’), that the party effectively sided with Labour Friends of Israel and against Jewish Voice for Labour, then how does the same not apply to the EHRC?

They didn’t investigate Labour based on the actual level of anti-Semitism. They did it because the Israel lobby flooded the party with false accusations and in response to a complaint from a Zionist organisation with an agenda. Why didn’t they investigate the Labour Party for other forms of racism - or the Conservative Party even more so?

Roger Day
email

Personal bile

Paul Demarty writes on one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals, Frank Furedi - emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent (‘Original takester’, September 29). As Demarty mentions, Furedi was also known as ‘Richards’ during his political activist days.

Does Demarty discuss any of Frank’s books or his ideas regarding the politics of fear? Of course not - in typical Weekly Worker style he is solely concerned with issuing personal abuse. In Where have all the intellectuals gone? Furedi is concerned to contrast those who used to be considered intellectuals - Russell, Williams, Arendt - with the facile pundits and conmen who prevail now. People such as Demarty, for example. Jurgen Habermas bemoans the type of people now speaking publicly who know nothing and care even less. There may be a tinge of elitism in this critique, but there is also a massive amount of validity.

The tone of Demarty’s ‘critique’ is set from the beginning: “It may not be fair to call his career a downward spiral - for all intents and purposes, he reached the bottom long ago and has merely been whirling around in the muck ever since.” A very profound comment. In fact Furedi himself mentions that he long ago rejected Marxism for “classical liberalism”. Instead of honestly discussing this transformation Demarty simply throws personal abuse around. If people honestly wish to know about Furedi and his intellectual journey, a recent interview on Trigonometry would provide a starting point and not this scurrilous nonsense.

In truth Frank can do nothing right, Demarty says: “more defensibly, they [the Revolutionary Communist Tendency] were vigorous in their support of the Irish national struggle; but frequently lapsed into uncouth provocations on that front.” Possibly Demarty means the RCT pamphlet, Ireland’s victory means England’s defeat, which certainly upset the ‘respectable’ left, as it explicitly put forward the case against British imperialism. Unlike the rest of the ‘left’, who liked to endlessly write about Ireland as the ‘acid test’ of revolutionary honour, the RCT actually used to regularly be outside of shitholes, such as Gartree or Long Lartin, in forsaken winter weather supporting the Republican prisoners.

Douglas Murray is another target, before we even get to Furedi. In his books, The strange death of Europe and War on the west, Murray destroys dogmas beloved of the CPGB, such as open borders and cultural relativity. But, unable to argue with this, Demarty sneers that Murray is “late of your least favourite uncle’s bookshelf”.

Wisely after an initial discussion Demarty leaves Jordan Petersen out of it. I say ‘wisely’, because, as the world’s leading public intellectual Petersen, would mince up an outfit like the CPGB, which is bereft of any real ideas and is essentially a (not very successful) Labour Party ginger group.

All the CPGB’s sneering at the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party (very low bars indeed) indicate that the group has an intellectual inferiority complex, where opponents of their nonsense must be ‘smashed’ through ad hominem attacks. In fact the group looks every week even more of a group of petty bourgeois poseurs who will never attract any working class cadre, because such potential cadre will be instinctively repelled by it.

I certainly do not see Furedi’s political journey as one to emulate - goodness knows what he is doing with all the substack nutters. But he deserves a better political obituary than this personal bile.

Ted Talbot
email

Genetic politics

The success of Zionists in muzzling the left over the past few years, combined with Israeli progress in ‘normalising’ its ties with Arab neighbours, shows we are losing the battle for Palestine. We need a new tack. This is not to be defeatist: it is to adopt a new strategy that strikes at the very heart of ‘Jewish nationalism’.

The Zionists say the land is theirs and has always been theirs, because they are the only true inheritors. They even see the Palestinians as invaders. Our campaigning needs to be different from previous anti-apartheid struggles. With South Africa, it was easy to establish who needed to cede power, as the whites there were clearly from elsewhere. For the past 70 years we have largely accepted that Zionists are descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel and therefore that they have a right to emigrate there. We have therefore lost the argument - allowing them to use the holocaust as a pretext for drawing more and more Zionists into Palestine. Until we convince the world that Israel is not the Jewish state, we will continue to lose. It is only by clarifying the genetic element that we can prove - without argument - that this is a colonial project.

The definition of ‘Jew’ - from the Oxford English Dictionary - is “a member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who come from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel; a person who believes in and practises Judaism”. Zionists fail to meet these criteria on both counts. The Torah declares Jews cannot migrate en masse to Palestine until the Messiah comes and so Zionists do not follow the Torah - whatever they practice, it’s not Judaism. So, when a Zionist moves to Israel - or believes they have rights to that land - we need to note they ignore the Torah and can no longer call themselves Jewish. They are, at best, ex-Jews.

It’s for this reason that up until 1940 most Jews refused to move to Israel on religious grounds. These were the people that Hitler gassed. With Zionist support. Proof? Over the period 1942-44, rabbi Weissmandl of Hungary made a deal with Eichmann, whereby the Germans would ‘sell’ the Jews to him - with the upshot that the Nazis would not have killed any Jews in Hungary, along with a third of the Jews in Slovakia that were still alive. Those with the necessary funds were the Zionists - and so rabbi Weissmandl approached them and sought their help.

Help was refused: the Zionists declared that “only through the bloodshed of Jews will we get the land, because when the victors will divide the land after the war, then they will give us [the Zionists] the land in return for Jewish bloodshed, and that is what we want.” At the 2006 Holocaust Review conference in Tehran, US rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss noted: “They were sacrificing human beings on the altar of Zionism. Because they were the antithesis to Judaism, against god, human lives were sacrificed to reach their goal.”

The Zionists survived the war, safe in Palestine - and through relentless holocaust promotion raised their colony through the deaths of those who had denied their right to be there in the first place.

And what of the Zionist claim to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew people of Israel? Genetically? Dr Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem conducted the first comprehensive DNA study of Israelis and Palestinians in 2001. She concluded that the European emigrants on ships to Palestine before it became Israel were of Mongolian genome (40%) and Turkish (40%) - ie, from Kazakhstan. So not from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel either …

There should be a lot more to being a Jew than being circumcised and celebrating Hanukkah. I mean, I celebrate Christmas, but that does not make me a Christian. I think it is essential in our campaigning to recognise that the linkage between the majority of Israeli ‘Jews’ - who do not adhere to the Torah - and the Jews who lived in Israel 2,000 years ago is close to nil.

This is not like the South Africa struggle … These people argue they have every right to be there, by dint of their ancestry. And most of us in the west accept this claim, which is entirely bogus.

The Zionists lay claim to being of the Jewish race and ‘of the land’. As a result, to date, we have tried to critique their actions on a humanitarian basis, which, of course, has largely failed, because they use the holocaust and ‘self-defence’ to justify all the violence that they do.

We need to use the genetic angle, as well as the religious one, to prove that the Zionists are not of the original Jewish race. Because in modern times there is no Jewish race. Those Ashkenazis running Israel are Europeans, pretty much like me. When we let them claim a Jewish connection to the land they take, we lose our case. The British census does not recognise Jewishness as an ethnicity, but as a religion. National Health Service hospital records do not identify patients as Jewish, but they do have markers for Africans, Pakistanis and ... Arabs - who really are an ethnic minority, as their DNA shows. The Nazis claimed the Jews were a race - an attribute that the Zionists claim for themselves as well, but the truth is the opposite. Unlike the Palestinians, that is, who were Jews and Christians prior to their conversion to Islam in the 9th century, and whose DNA is 100% tied to the area they are being ethnically cleansed from.

The Palestinians are the only ones with a true claim to the land, like the blacks in South Africa had, whose battle against apartheid and their removal to Bantustans was one the whole world could get behind. The Zionists must learn to live with the fact that they are guests in Palestine - and should behave as such. For further proof of how badly two-state solutions work out, we need only look to Ireland, which should never have been partitioned in the first place.

Most Palestinians want a single-state solution. We in the Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism share rabbi Weiss’s view that Israel has no right to exist. We believe that the Zionists must give up their claims and learn to live as citizens of Palestine - in one state - a single state for all.

To promote the single-state solution and further the aim of getting our UK politicians (and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign) to drop the futile two-state approach, I am bringing rabbi Weiss over from New York to tour Britain with his message.

He, along with Palestinian broadcaster and author Dr Azzam Tamimi, who has written extensively on Middle Eastern/Islamic politics, including Power-sharing Islam and Hamas: unwritten chapters, will feature in our UK tour running in April-May next year.

Over the course of three weeks, rabbi Weiss and Dr Tamimi will be speaking in every single one of Britain’s 16 major cities in our ‘Muslim and Jew Tour: Beyond Israel’. Learn more about these wise men and book your free advance tickets for a town near you, at www.bogusantisemitism.org

Pete Gregson
Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism

Energy strike

In mid-June of 2022 an organisation called Don’t Pay UK was set up as a result of one massive energy price increase after another. The announcement of the starting up of this protest campaign coincided with workplace strikes taking place by more and more workers across many industries, who were understandably fed up with rising energy and the wider cost-of-living increases, when pay offers from employers were nearly always well below the rate of inflation and state benefits were also under attack.

Something clearly needed doing and in mid-August I signed the Don’t Pay UK pledge (a form of payment strike) to cancel my energy direct debit. Don’t Pay UK said the payment strike should go ahead if a million pledges were received by October 1. This seemed a sensible strength in numbers approach.

In early September the crisis-wracked Tory government installed Liz Truss as the new prime minister - voted for by only 81,000 members of her party. Recognising something had to be done, Truss and her cabinet mates agreed a two-year energy price cap, which would theoretically mean energy prices in any household would not exceed £2,500 a year (but even this meant many people were still struggling to pay for an energy crisis which was not of their making). The crisis in the Tory government was so extreme that Truss resigned after only 44 days in office. Her chancellor had already been “asked to resign” by this time and his replacement promptly announced the energy price cap would be slashed down from two years to a mere six months, with only vague talk about how only those in “desperate need” might get more help. Who decides who is in “desperate need”?

At the end of September the energy strike pledge figures on the Don’t Pay UK website stood at just under 200,000 and it was announced that the strike would not go ahead. There is nothing wrong with a tactical reconsideration, but on October 26, with the pledge figure standing at around 230,000, Don’t Pay UK announced on their website and on emails to those who had signed up for the pledge that “We strike, 1 December!” Whilst the website said that as many as two million people had said (as opposed to officially pledging) they couldn’t pay their fuel bills, where seven million were struggling, the real (and very sensible) strength in numbers of a million pledges had been removed altogether from the site. Why?

Just how many of these two million people who can’t pay may or may not be word of mouth is obviously a matter of conjecture and many, many people are certainly worried sick. Nobody can know for sure what the pledge figures on the website may be as December 1 approaches, but whatever happened to the solid and entirely sensible strength in numbers figure (or something close to it) of one million strike pledges?

Increasing numbers of ordinary working people are certainly being pushed into a war (a class war) with this appallingly reactionary government and its unending austerity politics, and campaigning tactics are always in need of constant review. This government and the leeching energy bosses certainly need taking on. However, as any capable military general will tell you, you surely don’t go into battle before your troops are properly pledged and organised.

Geoff Smith
Birmingham

Hold-up

At least as it came over to me, Eddie Ford’s piece was bang on target (‘Tories in a hole’, October 27). It succinctly and astutely focused upon how various facets of the ‘market’ are the ultimate or even actual government of any notionally ‘sovereign’ capitalist nation-state.

If expanded upon just a little further, then what follows is how that international ‘market’ in finance, commodities, etc, is also the hidden but primary controller of both daily and overall life for the population.

In the particular scenario of the UK’s ‘prime minister’ being ousted and replaced by Rishi Sunak, surely what also should have been highlighted is how everything took place in the wake of ‘control’ and ‘sovereignty’ having been ‘taken back’ from the European Union: ie, as the core justification for Brexit. Consequently, that whole exercise was yet again exposed as a grotesque mash-up of fraud, distraction and charade.

A both cheery and handy chant that would summarise where things stand, might well be this: “Observe their poisonous paradigm in its fulsome glory. This grandest-scale omni-hoax continues!” That’s to say, not only for the working class of those ‘Great’ British Isles of Johnson, Truss, Sunak and all other such ‘local’ agents for a continuing optimal profitability of big business, but also, of course, globally.

And still those bastard establishment elites of ours are able to get away with maintaining that capitalism is a ‘democratic’, decent and consequently desirable affair! The conclusion is bleeding obvious: urgently we need a Communist Party - a consolidated, duly evolved, tightly organised, but sensitively attuned one. So where’s the real problem - what’s the effing hold-up?

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Wrong label?

Sotsialnyi Rukh, a leftist movement in Ukraine, is, according to Andries Stroper, a social-imperialist organisation (Letters, October 27). I wonder if he would give the same label to the anti-fascist partisans of northern Italy in 1943-45. They also got help from the Anglo-American imperialists.

Hannu Reime
Helsinki

Refugees

Home secretary Suella Braverman has created a “concentration camp” in the old Manston airport in Thanet, east Kent, local campaigners claim.

Over 200 local people held a vigil, called by the Thanet Left group, in support of the refugees, who are being held in what’s claimed to be “appalling conditions”. Local councillor Candy Gregory said: “This demonstrates people care about the terrible things that have been happening in Manston and we will not accept what the home office is doing in our name.”

The migrant processing unit in Manston airport was supposed to hold 1,000 people on a temporary basis - for just a day. It has been used to detain around 4,000 people - and many of them for weeks. People have to sleep in tents, on floors, in unsanitary, unhealthy, dangerous conditions. This is totally illegal and amounts to keeping people in a concentration camp.

For legal reasons Braverman has been unable to achieve her dream of sending refugees to Rwanda, so it seems she has decided to create a hell-hole for them here in Kent. She must be called to account for what she has done here. We challenge her to come here on Sunday to explain herself.

The conditions, the campaigners have learnt from staff inside the camp, are absolutely appalling. We know that the lights are kept on all day and night, including in sleeping areas. The refugees have nothing to wash themselves or their clothes with. There’ve been cases of norovirus, scabies, coronavirus and - worst of all - diphtheria. Security staff simply can’t cope with what’s happening. This is disgraceful and shameful.

Campaigners are vowing to keep up their pressure until the camp is closed. Councillor Gregory said: “We managed to get toys into the camp for the children of the refugees and we stayed for a long time outside the gates chanting, ‘Refugees are welcome here’. I hope the people inside heard us - it’s so important they know that they have support from the outside world. We will not give up until this terrible place is shut down.”

Another demonstration will be held in support of the refugees outside Manston at 2pm on Sunday November 6.

Norman Thomas
Thanet Left