Trotskyist Faction statement: Labour/BOD’s miniature-Naqba against Palestine supporters – 11,400 expelled?
1409/02/2020 by Ian
Reinstate Jo Bird and Mo Azam!
Vote Burgon 1, Butler 2 for Deputy. No Vote To Any of the Blairite/Zionist Stooge Leader Candidates!
The Trotskyist Faction, the revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist wing of Socialist Fight, calls for critical support for Richard Burgon as the first choice for Deputy Leader. He at least has defied the demands of the racist Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) to sign their ’10 commandments’, as has the softer left Dawn Butler who deserves a second preference vote. Though he himself has not always stood firm , as when he apologised for saying the simple truth, that Zionism is the “enemy of the Palestinian people”, he at least is defiant now and should be put to the test.
The actions of all the candidates standing for leader in capitulating to the pro-Tory BOD enemies of organised labour, have put the Zionist attack on democratic rights at the top of the political agenda. We say: No vote to Long-Bailey, Starmer, Thornberry and Nandy. All of these candidates, from the overt neoliberalism of Starmer to the Corbyn continuity of Long-Bailey, have sold themselves and Labour to the class enemy by signing up to the BOD’s agenda, that of organised anti-Arab racists who applauded the massacre of Palestinian civil rights marchers in Gaza and seek the wholesale expulsion of Palestine supporters from Labour.
The capitulation of Corbyn and the Labour left in the period before the election laid the basis for these attacks. For all the feverish desperation of the official ‘lefts’, it is not clear than Long-Bailey is even in a position to win, so much has the left been undermined. One very good reason why she most likely will not is that her leftism, her talk of Open Selection and democratic reform of Labour is completely contradicted by her signing the Zionists’ pledges, to destroy the democratic rights of Labour members on behalf of the Israeli state. Thus her candidacy and her left-wing promises are just not believable; she like the others standing against her, have already sold Labour to a very important part of the ruling class. The likely result of her treachery is to let in Starmer.
The labour movement should regard the BOD and other Zionist cheerleaders for racist massacres and ethnic cleansing of Arab civilians as roughly equivalent to Neo-Nazis trying to dictate to the working class. We would not have tolerated Nazis when Jews were persecuted telling the left we had ‘no right’ to stand up for Jews. Well we should no more tolerate viciously racist bourgeois Jewish-Zionist organisations dictating to us about Palestine and banning criticism of their totalitarian racism today. They need to be very publicly declared persona non-grata to the whole labour movement. Support for Israel should be anathema in every labour movement body, just as much as support for Nazi racism.
The suspension of Jo Bird and Mohammad Azam in the NEC election is racist-ballot rigging, pure and simple. Of course we demand their immediate reinstatement, but it has to be said that capitulation of the vast bulk of the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy, including much of the ‘left’, to the Zionist takeover of the Labour Party has made that very unlikely today. The blatant racism of the suspensions is breathtaking: Jo Bird is Jewish but in this reactionary climate she has already been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ once, a smear akin to accusations of ‘anti-white racism’ from neo-Nazis and the like. And the motive for purging Azam is equally transparent, as they don’t want people of Asian/Muslim background, particularly leftist ones, on leading committees as they cannot be relied on to vote for Israeli racism.
Pam Bromley, a left-wing councillor who has just been expelled herself, reported that 11.400 members have been recently expelled. That is an incredible number purged and there must be a risk to the right-wing and the Zionists that if they became organised, they could become a substantial political force.
We need a political lifeboat for the many Labour members who are in the process of being purged, or leaving in disgust. There needs to be created a principled bloc of socialists on the basis of the principle of freedom of criticism and debate, and unity in action, to build a broadly left-wing movement that can organise both pro-socialist militants within the Labour Party, and outside it. Given the totalitarian climate that currently exists within the Labour Party, there may even have to be a degree of clandestinity about the way it organises. Such a body must have a revolutionary component to act as the yeast to bring into being a genuinely anti-capitalist party, a party that can fight for socialism and which realises that capitalism in decline is making a serious struggle for social reforms impossible within the existing social and political system.
We Trotskyists stand on a transitional programme whose purpose is to act as a bridge between the felt needs of working class people today and the destruction of capitalism. But a felt need of today is for a political movement, a party, of the working class that can enforce class independence against the Zionists and the mendacious neoliberal media machine, which has effectively hollowed out and abolished in practice even much of the limited democracy that exists under capitalism. That party cannot be just declared, it must be fought for and built by a regroupment of forces currently within and without the Labour Party, not on the basis of trying to repeat the errors of the Labour left, but going beyond Labourism itself, so that a truly mass force, not just a sect or an agglomeration of existing sects, can be crystallised.
Of course that sounds like a tall order today. But with the rapid decline of both capitalism and democracy, and the advancing shadow of environmental and economic catastrophe, nothing can be more urgent.
The Trotskyist Faction documents that Gerry removed from this site are now back online. Here
https://commexplor.com/2020/02/10/trotskyist-faction-statement-on-communist-financial-norms-democratic-accountability-security-and-membership-standards/
And here
https://commexplor.com/2020/02/10/trotskyist-faction-statement-on-zionism-and-the-divisions-in-socialist-fight/
Its amazing how Gerry cannot justify his behaviour either anywhere and just removes them without acknowledgement or justification to the members of SF.
The irony is that for all the demented fascist-baiting he has sporadically come out with, this is a real bunker mentality.
My access to the website is now denied. As is that of another TF member of SF and my access to the SF facebook group. We are still full members of SF and I am the National Treasurer. Our faction is almost half of the full members and we are exercising our rights under the constitution of SF.
Yet Gerry is trying to tear up the constitution without being prepared to openly justify it. Problem is, it’s not his to tear up. A sad state of affairs. But not our doing.
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Did he remove your directly reply to my direct question about Gilad Atzmon’s penchant for happily promoting the neo-Nazi myths of Holocaust denial, and why you find it such a thrill when he does that — or did you just never give a direct answer?
Smart money on the latter, of course.
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Of course he wont remove genocidal racist Zionist scum like this. If Alan Dershowitz or Dave Rich himself posted here, they would be welcomed with open arms by Downing.
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So Ian is still incapable of a direct reply.
Gerry was entirely right to give Ian a rethink. Ian is an antisemite hiding behind chop logic. He’s also a wonderful counterexample to the proposition that prolixity implies intelligence, and that the longer argument is the better argument.
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❤
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Here, humbly submitted, is a draft of a resolution SF may consider endorsing as a way to draw the line under Ian Donovan’s racist infatuation with an antisemitic promoter of Holocaust denial. I have posted a form of it before, but apparently Ian kept “disappearing” it.
As follows.
Whereas Gilad Atzmon lionises antisemites for their antisemitism and celebrates Holocaust deniers for their Holocaust denial;
Whereas Gilad Atzmon eagerly shares speaking events and podcast appearances with leading alt-right figures, not for the purpose of confronting them but to telegraph his essential agreement with their racism;
Whereas Gilad Atzmon promotes the racist myth of “Judeobolshevism,” the claim that the October Revolution was decisively racially Jewish in character;
Socialist Fight is hereby resolved:
That Gilad Atzmon’s politics are those of the extreme far right, not the Marxist left;
That Gilad Atzmon’s view of the Jews is steeped in pernicious, reactionary racism no Marxist can accept;
That Gilad Atzmon’s twisted history is bunk no Marxist can swallow;
That, although antisemitism and anti-Zionism are different ideologies, Gilad Atzmon demonstrates that he is comfortably both anti-Zionist and antisemite;
That Gilad Atzmon’s sporadic and winking deployment of the vocabulary of the anti-imperialist left, even as he denounces the anti-imperialist left, is window dressing meant to fool fools; and
Socialist Fight is highly resolved:
That we are decidedly *not* fooled; and
That support for Gilad Atzmon’s analysis — regressive, benighted, with overtly Nazi sources and overtly Nazi overtones — cannot in any form be reconciled, in word or in spirit, with the anti-racist platform of Socialist Fight.
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I’m sure Gerry will be quite willing to pass this resolution. If he can cite Dershowitz and Dave Rich, he could of course pass something formulated on a troll-farm in Tel Aviv. Why not?
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Ah, this gets better all the time. Now, apparently, I’m “a troll-farm in Tel Aviv.”
Ian is in the throw-anything no-credibility-left-to-lose stage.
For what it’s worth, in my six decades I’ve spent exact as much time in Israel as I have on the surface of Mars. But Ian Donovan apparently believes you have to be “a troll-farm in Tel Aviv” to think that Holocaust denial is a bad thing, and he apparently believes that those who gleefully promote it in the name of “anti-Zionism” are helping rather than hurting the Palestinians’ cause by doing so.
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Ah, this gets better all the time. Now, apparently, I’m “a troll-farm in Tel Aviv.”
Ian is in the throw-anything no-credibility-left-to-lose stage.
For what it’s worth, in my six decades I’ve spent exact as much time in Israel as I have on the surface of Mars. But Ian Donovan apparently believes you have to be “a troll-farm in Tel Aviv” to think that Holocaust denial is a bad thing, and he apparently believes that those who gleefully promote it in the name of “anti-Zionism” are helping rather than hurting the Palestinians’ cause by doing so.
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Svengali is upset at being considered a troll. Haha. Like hell.
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Not “upset,” just noting that you’re keeping your never-get-a-single-damned-thing-correct streak going at truly heroic lengths. Did you lose a bet in January with the penalty being that you couldn’t get within fifty leagues of a fact throughout February?
That is to say, I’m as “upset” as I am “Israeli.”
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It protesteth too much
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“It.”
See how it works? Disagree with Donovan and you’re not actually human. Sort of the same way he thinks about the Jews.
Finally ready to give a direct answer to a direct question about Atzmon’s promotion of Holocaust denial?
Of course you aren’t.
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Our troll certainly doesn’t have much going for them in the humanity stakes. As the whole point of their activity is to defend the murder machine that is destroying the Palestinian people.
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