IHRA fake ‘anti-semitism’ definition is Labour’s Nuremburg law!

Demand Corbyn and the left repudiate this racist purge!

The attack on and suspension of Chris Williamson is the most serious attack on the anti-racist, anti-imperialist left in the Labour Party since the expulsion of George Galloway in 2003. What is worse is that Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, and it seems many of the leading lights of the Labour left have gone along with it. No one prominent that we know of right now is prepared to stick their head above the parapet and denounce it.

But there is a considerable backlash from below. Many of those who in the constituencies who voted for Corbyn and were the mass base that forced the adoption of an unprecedented motion at the 2018 Conference that condemned the Naqba, the 1947-9 mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland that is at the root of today’s Palestinian struggle, are incensed about this attack. They correctly see it as an attack on the entire Corbynite left by agents of the Blairite split, the so called Independent Group of class traitors and class enemies who are in favour of benefit cuts, attacks on the poor, Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and all the neocon wars, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya.

Tom Watson is now the leader of the racist, pro-imperialist fifth column in the Labour Party, an outright enemy of the overwhelming majority of Labour members. We need an election for a new deputy leader immediately. We must drive them out of the party. So are the political chameleons of the so-called Tribune Group, which was formed out of the softer detritus of the Chicken Coup, the failed attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn through bureaucratic and legal manoeuvring in the Summer of 2016.

McDonnell: a new Kinnock?

In fact another coup is underway, in disguise. Its aim, as Labour approaches the strong likelihood of the collapse of May’s tottering government, is to completely wreck the possibility of a Corbyn government, drive out as many disillusioned members as possible, and then lay the basis for replacing Corbyn after a hoped-for election defeat with some kind ‘pragmatist’ – who will provide a way back for the right. It’s even possible, given his grovelling before the Blairites over the ‘anti-Semitism’ Big Lie, that John McDonnell could possibly play such a role, that of a Neil Kinnock-like figure, a long-time left who is prepared to betray everything he claimed to stand for in order to get a sniff of power, or at least the chance to lose an uninspiring future election, with the backing of the neoliberal right. Notwithstanding his regular fulminations against the government and austerity, his grovelling about the things that matter to the ruling class: Israel, and also to an extent Ireland, have a distinct whiff of Kinnock about them. John Lansman’s role as the sole owner of the completely undemocratic Momentum is also revealed as a reactionary attack on the mass base of the Labour party on behalf of Zionism and the right following his role in forcing acceptance of the IHRA definition on 4 September and acting as a cover for the right during the Labour party conference. He is an even more insidious fifth columnist in the ranks of Labour. And what do we make of the grovelling specimen Owen Jones? A disgrace to his parents

Chris Williamson has just been suspended by Labour. That’s the right decision, and should be part of a healing process with Britain’s Jewish community – so many of whom want a society free of injustice, exploitation and oppression – showing we take their upset seriously.

The motive for this purge is simply racism. It’s about ramming the IHRA pseudo-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ down the throats of a Labour membership the majority of which are crystal clear that the struggle against Israeli oppression, dispossession , and slow-motion genocide of the Palestinians, is a struggle against the most murderous racism.

Supporters of that struggle in the Labour Party are the collateral targets. Whether they be Muslims of Arab or Subcontinental origin, Jews, Blacks, Irish, ordinary white Brits or anyone else, who support the Palestinian struggle and refuse to accede to the twisted logic that says that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to condemn Jewish-Zionist racism is targeted by the Labour Party’s own analogue of the Ku Klux Klan: the Labour Friends of Israel; the Jewish Labour Movement, the Blairite Progress etc. Now the new Tribune have joined them and exposed the fact that they too are racist political gangsters of the same ilk as LFI etc.

The allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ against defenders of the Palestinians is actually a charge of being ‘Arab-lovers’ by pro-Zionist racists, akin to the bizarre racist slur ‘n******r-lover’ that was endemic in earlier struggles against open white supremacy. Jewish supremacists have merely come up with a tortuous, long-winded way of saying the same thing about defenders of Palestinian rights. But today’s Jewish supremacism is every bit as disgusting and racist a threat to oppressed minorities and democratic rights as the white supremacism it allies with. That is why so many of today’s fascists, the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and Britain First, have shifted their orientation away from demonisation of Jews and carry Israeli flags. Israel is de-rigeur on the far right. That is what is behind the IHRA definition also.

Saying that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to characterise Israel as a racist endeavour, when reality is that the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY it could ever have been created was the way it was: through the mass expulsion and dispossession of the Arab population, is effectively to define that Arab population as unworthy of basic anti-racist solidarity. It is to define them as sub-human, similar to the way the Nazis defined the Jewish population after Hitler came to power in 1933.

Likewise to say that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to compare far-right Israelis to the Nazis, when mobs of state-incited racists march through Israeli streets chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ as Nazi mobs chanted ‘Death to the Jews’ in Germany in the 1930s and neo-fascists mobs do today. Similarly, violent gangs of heavily armed settlers terrorise Palestinians under occupation on the West Bank, daubing ‘Arabs to the Gas Chambers’ on Arab homes. Or when, as happened a few years ago, the IDF flattened large areas of Gaza, causing the deaths of thousands of civilians, and a prominent Israeli minister threatened to carry out a ‘Shoah’ (Holocaust) against the Palestinians. To compare such things to the Nazis is apparently ‘anti-Semitic’.

Or it is supposedly ‘anti-Semitic’ to note the highly organised racist activities of very wealthy, racist Jewish-Zionist bourgeois in the West, loyal to Israel, in pressing for US and other governments to adopt hard-line policies on Palestine, and other geopolitical issues like a threatened war with Iran, that reflect Israeli interests in line with those of the far right warmongers of US imperialism. even more than they reflect the interests of the Western powers, rationally considered. This is a fault-line in Western politics that has resonated from the Iraq war to Trump’s policy on Jerusalem and cutting all aid to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in August 2018, a move welcomed by Netanyahu, which would have cut all funding to schools, healthcare, and social services. But on 28 February the EU agreed to provide 82 million Euro to replace this funding, preserving access to education for 532,000 children, provide primary health care for more than 3.5 million patients and assistance to over 250,000 acutely vulnerable Palestine refugees. He also abandoned Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, to gel with the warmongers in Jerusalem. But to speak of these glaringly obvious facts is ‘anti-Semitic’, apparently.

For a Renewed Left to fight Zionism’s Big Lie

This is utter rubbish. The entire ethos of the IHRA fake-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which Labour only adopted because of the spineless political cowardice of the Labour left, and the left-wing of the bureaucracy such as Len McCluskey of Unite, is an implementation of the motto of Josef Göbbells’, Hitler’s minister of propaganda: “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty”.

So organised racists and supporters of atrocities against Arab civilians, part of a chain of alliances that lead to active fascists, are accusing the anti-imperialist left of ‘racism’ as an excuse for a witchhunt. We need a new left, which consciously and utterly rejects this lie. A key part of its programme should be to drive all supporters and apologists for Israeli racism out of the Labour Party. Labour would never have tolerated a “Labour Friends of the Third Reich” in its ranks; nor a “Labour Friends of white South Africa” or “white Rhodesia”.

It’s only the unprecedented reversal of fortune of the Jewish people in the late 20^th Century, from victims of Hitler to partially the social base of a racist settler movement that has major bases of support in the West and is carrying out a slow genocide of its own against the Palestinians, that has allowed this racist movement to sink some roots in the workers’ movement.

But they are shallow, predominantly among the most privileged middle class hangers-on of the labour movement. These people, both the Zionist Jews and their non-Jewish fellows, are nothing like the Jewish left of old when large numbers of Jews were indeed oppressed and fought back by methods of working class struggle with the rest of our class. The presence of a significant layer of reactionaries with special privileges to abuse others on the basis of supremacism and racism is totally inimical to socialism and anti-racism. We need an internationalist, anti-racist party, not a racist Zionist party.