By Gerry Downing

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump with Donald Trump. He has two Jewish daughters, a Jewish son-in-law, a Jewish ex-wife, and many Jewish grandchildren, but he is still antisemitic. On Tuesday, November 22, 2022, he hosted white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago home. Trump’s willingness to associate with figures who have repeatedly spread antisemitic and white supremacist tropes is deeply concerning and has not gone unnoticed by extremists who Trump needs.

The antisemitism debate is back over the tweet put out by David Miller, a victimised lecturer at Bristol University. He was previously critically defended by almost the entire ‘left’ but this tweet was condemned by Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), the SWP and others saying it had “crossed a line” of antisemitism.

This is the tweet:

“The facts:

1. Jews are not discriminated against.

2. They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.

3. They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.”

 The basis for the objection from the JVL was:

“He presents these three bald statements as ‘facts’. They are overstatements at best, flattening and homogenising Jews, ignoring any historical, international or social context and creating an impression of Jews exercising power as a cohesive force. Many were distressed by some of Miller’s statements in the past which seemed to exaggerate Israeli power but we believed they fell within the terrain of academic freedom. This recent tweet, focusing on Jews, is of a different order and has crossed a line.”

We agree with this statement and also with the SWP’s objection that Miller: “lump(s) together all Jews without any recognition of class or other differences. Miller targets Jews, not the actual ruling class, and plays on the idea of Jews as ultra-rich and manipulative.” On August 31 Mike Macnair wrote a piece in Weekly Worker (WW), Anti-Semitism of useful idiots, in which he sets the correct context for the debate, the machinations of US imperialism internationally in the first half of the article:

“This turn in US policy took place before anti-Semitism in the US had seriously declined: it was only in the early 1960s that Ivy League universities got rid of caps on the number of Jewish students, and in the mid-1960s that polls began to report a decline in anti-Semitic prejudice. Jews ‘became white folks’ because the Kennedy administration chose to make Israel a specially favoured vassal, in order to promote US geostrategic control of the Middle East. It was not the other way round… In consequence, people who actually put forward ‘Jewish privilege’ arguments serve as useful idiots for the benefit of US Middle East policy.”

Mike then goes on to defend Miller on the basis of his right to free speech and condemns ‘cancel culture’ at the end, which we think seriously undermines the identification of the main enemy in the first half. No platforming for fascists is standard leftist practice and just because we in Britain are not yet threatened with it does not mean we should take a libertarian view of what it is. Similarly, Tony Greenstein has lost his focus by identifying Zionism as the main enemy.

Taking up the cudgels against Macnair Peter Gregson has drafted a letter to WW with which I disagreed on the same basis. Gerald Downing email to Peter, Sep 3, 2023, “I do not agree with the letter either (others in the group have also objected – GD). The USA is the global hegemonic imperialist power and Israel is its aircraft carrier in the middle east. It certainly is not the other way around. The tail does not wag the dog.”

Peter responded, basically asserting that the tail does indeed wag the dog and “the Jews” do indeed dominate US politics:

“Hi Gerry, If you consult Alan Hart’s brilliant book “Zionism- the Real Enemy of the Jews” you’ll read how the USA originally refused to support Zionist takeover of Palestine and actually sided with the Arabs. All that changed in 1947 when Zionist Jews in the USA started flexing their media and financial muscles. Truman was in favour of issuing 400,000 visas to Jews in Europe’s concentration camps so that they could come to the USA. The Zionists were furious because they wanted to send them to Palestine.

“Truman was told that if he continued, he would never be elected president again. (see chapter 11- President Truman surrenders to Zionism). He dropped the visa plan. So the camp survivors went to Palestine and formed the backbone of the Hagganah, showing no mercy in the Nakba. Then, when they wanted to declare Israel, Zionist pressure again forced the US to support the UN Partition Plan. Then Truman won in 1948, thanks to Zionist Jews supporting him. Since then, no US president has risked alienating the Zionists. Best wishes Pete.”

We would mention that motivation for the demonisation of Corbyn by the Zionists and the British mass media and establishment in general was not primarily to assist the Zionist state of Israel in attacking the Palestinians but to protect British capitalism and the Labour party as a fall-back against a discredited Tory party when Corby’s election as leader caused a huge surge in support for the perceived sharp turn to the left in British working-class politics. It grew rapidly to half a million members, the biggest political party in Europe. However Corby was unable to promote this surge, seeking to placate his worst enemies and throwing his strongest supporters under the bus.

Nor is it true that the Holocaust and fascism is simply history and Jews have no cause to worry about a repeat. A survey by the Anti-Defamation League in May of this year found that over a third of people in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine have ‘extensive’ antisemitic beliefs. Remember the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of October 27, 2018, in which eleven Jews were killed and six wounded, the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States. The Proud Boys are explicitly antisemitic and Donald Trump, despite his Jewish daughters, son-in-law and Jewish-raised grandchildren has made explicit antisemitic statements; Jews have legitimate fears of another Trump Presidency. In September 2020 Trump said:

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s gotta do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.” ▲