19.03.2026

Nazi goons were ordered not to touch Zionists in 1930s

Don’t give in to the big lie

Jeremy Corbyn got it wrong. So has Zohran Mamdani. We must oppose, not appease, media claims that opposition to Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism, writes Eddie Ford

Very often when you are scrolling the news on your phone, you can guess from the headline alone where it comes from and what lies it is going to tell. This is especially the case when it carries the phrase ‘anti-Semitic’ in the strapline.

So it was on March 14, with the Daily Telegraph’s headline, in which Zarah Sultana was accused of “peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”.¹ Therefore we read that the co-founder of Your Party and its only officially registered MP is accused, by Labour Against Anti-Semitism, of “normalising anti-Semitic rhetoric in British political discourse” through social media posts. It submitted its complaint to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

Two of her posts on X contained the lines “Zionism is one of the greatest threats to humanity” and “they love killing kids” - which the Telegraph says was in response to an Al Jazeera news update about four children being among six people killed in an Israeli attack on the Lebanese town of Shmestar. Of course, Sultana could just as easily be referring to the deadly US Tomahawk missile strike on February 28 upon the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, for which there is clear video footage.² A “preliminary” US military investigation apparently determined that Washington was responsible for the attack, even if Donald Trump had crazily tried to blame Iran.³

Now, it might not be quite the language we would use, but you should certainly recognise the reality that comrade Sultana is pointing to, which is the relationship between the United States and Zionism, that sees Israel acting as a Rottweiler, or attack dog, for US imperialism. Certainly, if you are looking at the Middle East, and the possibility of a much wider and catastrophic conflagration, isn’t Israel clearly a threat? It has not only started war after war, it possesses nuclear weapons. Not Iran. As far as we know, it has about 140 or more nuclear warheads, and the ability to deliver them - not just store them in some underground bunker. Its cruise missiles, aircraft and submarines can hit anywhere in the region.

OK, yes, “they love killing kids” is heightened language. But just look at the front page of the last Weekly Worker. We reproduced a picture of a young child buried under wreckage and rubble. It was designed to move your heart and make anyone say, this is wrong. From that basis, you can perfectly understand why Zarah Sultana posted “they love killing kids”, in the same way that, during the Vietnam War, anti-war protestors chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”⁴ Not because they were deliberately targeted, but because - to use the infamous euphemism - they were acceptable collateral damage.

Twisted

Continuing the grotesque lies, LAA claims that the content of comrade Sultana’s X posts “employs the same rhetorical framework” as the blood libel and then alleges that “the historical context makes this particularly serious” - saying that the phrase, “threat to humanity” (which they translate as Gefahr für die Menschheit), appeared “repeatedly in Nazi anti-Semitic materials portraying Jews as a malign force that must be eliminated for humanity’s survival”. They add, using twisted logic, that, “since the majority of British Jews identify as Zionists”, Sultana’s statement “effectively declares” that British Jews are one of the greatest threats to humanity.

You could almost write a whole article on that last statement alone, which invites us to believe that Zionism - and by extension the ‘Jewish homeland’ of Israel - represents the interests of British Jews, and indeed all Jews everywhere. Amongst the Jews of course, Hitler included the Bolsheviks, communists and socialists. In other words people like Zarah Sultana and you and me. We could also mention Winston Churchill talking about the good or national Jews, who are “loyal to the land of their adoption”, and the bad or international Jews like Karl Marx, Gregory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky, who are part of a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation”.⁵

Indeed, Mein Kampf only mentions Zionism twice. Hitler certainly distinguished between the ideology of Zionism and Jews. Not that he was sympathetic to Zionism. He wasn’t. However, in the early years of the Nazi regime, many of Hitler’s cronies were. Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg, Adolf Eichmann and Leopold von Mildenstein can be mentioned. They viewed the Zionists almost as co-thinkers. In fact, amidst the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, orders were issued not to attack Zionist organisations, offices, publishing houses, etc. They had to be allowed to continue pushing their message urging Jews to leave Germany in pursuit of their own Blut und Boden colonial project in Palestine.

So that Telegraph article by Camilla Turner, its Sunday political editor, is based on a lie. Like most mainstream journalists on this subject, she talks utter rubbish that is based on either pure cynicism or plain ignorance. In fact, the stuff about killing kids and blood libel was put out by mainstream or orthodox Christianity, which you can argue fairly easily was ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ - hence the notorious passage from the Gospel of Matthew misdescribing the events taking place in Pontius Pilate’s court before the crucifixion of Jesus, which was meant to convey a certain message: it was the accursed Jews who murdered Jesus, not Pontius Pilate and the Roman oppressors! This is a ‘Big Lie’, as Joseph Goebbels would have understood it. But Camilla Turner never mentions any of this: rather she seeks to cast Zarah Sultana’s disgust at mass slaughter as a thought crime.

She also does not mention Jeremy Corbyn’s bumbling and criminal response to the slanderous witch-hunt inside the Labour Party equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, which has been correctly attacked by comrade Sultana. Monstrously, Corbyn tried to appease the right by throwing colleagues he had known for decades, like Ken Livinsgtone and Marc Wadsworth, under the bus - he knew perfectly well they were not anti-Semites. But they were expendable. That pathetic response to the accusations actually fed the witch-hunters’ appetite for new victims.

Genocide

Unfortunately, if not unexpectedly, Zohran Mamdani - the socialist mayor of New York - seems to be making the same mistake. That is, doing a Corbyn, when instead he should be doing a Sultana and not giving an inch to the Zionist campaign of lies and slander.

Endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani has found himself at the centre of a political firestorm started deliberately by several rightwing news outlets that reported on his wife, Rama Duwaji, and her past work. This was connected to the Palestinian-American activist and writer, Susan Abulhawa, author of the acclaimed novels, Mornings in Jenin and The blue between sky and water, and founder of the children’s organisation, Playgrounds for Palestine. This furore has led numerous people to question their previous support for the socialist mayor because of his perceived anti-Zionist credentials.⁶

Hence last week in the Washington Free Beacon, New York Post and similar rags, it was reported that Duwaji - a freelance illustrator - had provided a picture for an “essay” that was part of a story collection from Gazan writers edited by Abulhawa, entitled Every moment is a life: Gaza in the time of genocide.⁷ As it turned out, that piece was actually a short story written by a resident of Gaza displaced during Israel’s genocidal war that detailed the difficulties and indignities of using a public, makeshift restroom in the war-torn city. Mamdani said that his wife had been commissioned by a third party and had never “engaged with or met with” Abulhawa, which the writer confirmed.

The issue came to light, almost inevitably, when these pro-Zionist papers dredged up past comments made by Abulhawa - whose parents were Palestinian refugees of the 1967 Six Day War. Shamelessly lying, the rightwing press attempted to make out that her scathing criticism of Zionism was meant to be a reference to all Jewish people, which she naturally denied - consistently maintaining that her comments were a “reflection” of the pain she felt as a Palestinian who has twice travelled to Gaza for aid work during Israel’s genocidal war.

Writing for The Electronic Intifada, she described October 7 2023 as a “spectacular moment that shocked the world” - which is just a factual observation, but the Zionist and mainstream media now endlessly repeat it expecting us all to be appalled. Other remarks on social media that supposedly place her beyond the pale are: decrying “Jewish supremacist slaughter” and hoping that “these sons of Satan will taste what they meted to us”; warning of “Jewish supremacist ghouls” and “vampires”; calling one commentator a “Jewish supremacist cockroach”; and so on and so forth.

Again, this is not the language that a communist writer would deploy. But the sentiments are perfectly understandable. And, to point out the obvious: Israel is a Jewish supremacist state and Zionism is a Jewish supremacist ideology. But, regardless, Mamdani held a press conference saying his administration was “against bigotry of all forms”, finding Abulhawa’s rhetoric “patently unacceptable” and “reprehensible”. It goes without saying that offline and online, she has been relentlessly depicted as a crazy racist and anti-Semite.

However, in a calm and dignified video statement on X, Susan Abulhawa said she hoped to clear things up for “Mr Mamdani, for his supporters and detractors alike, for the reporters, for my readers, for my own friends, and for the public in general”.⁸ She pointed out that she was responding to a Zionist power structure and its proponents, from the perspective of a Palestinian who has experienced the ravages of that system, and added that Israel, which we are “constantly told” is the “only democracy in the region”, has “destroyed, shattered and robbed my family of everything”.

The Zionist state, she says, has “committed the genocide in full view of the world” with its “blood and gore” and “apocalyptic horror”, and as a writer, she has attempted to honestly describe “the feelings” Palestinians have of “pain, rage, contempt or hatred, coupled with the impotence to make the suffering stop”. As for Mamdani, she was not “mad” at him, but maybe a bit sad that he has “succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife” and are “clawing harder with each apology or concession you make” - running the danger that “they will siphon your soul before you even realise it.”

Very encouragingly, she has attracted strong support for her position - one person describing Mamdani as “stupid for apologising and explaining”, as “nothing will ever be enough for Zionists anyway”. Another pointed to Mamdani’s very own account of being motivated to enter politics by the issue of Palestinian rights - therefore it was “fair to hold him to his word”. Somebody else wisely urged the New York mayor to “forget what your aides are telling you”, as “fear is not a sound basis for politics at this moment in history”.

Reacting to Abulhawa’s video, the verdict on X was even harsher, if anything. ‘Captured by Ros’ denounced Mamdani for being “just another liberal Zionist who has exploited the Palestinian cause for political advantage”, and has “been a huge disappointment since he started to appease the Zionist mafia”. Similarly, ‘barryBDS’ bluntly writes of Susan Abulhawa being “disgustingly thrown under the bus by liberal Zionist Mamdani”.

The parallels with Jeremy Corbyn are unmistakable - weakness, dithering, fudging and trying to placate the right wing is the road to hell.