Below is a condensed version of Lynne Segal’s article in Red Pepper. She
is a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North CLP and has known
him for forty years. I too was a member of this CLP; joining when
Jeremy became leader and resigning when he was ousted. My political
loyalties have always been to support socialists and anti-racists
rather than parties! So when the Labour Party had a leader who was
both of these, I was eager to give whatever support I could. In the
twenty years I have known Jeremy; helping me with neighbourhood
problems, in support of our local hospital, when I was press officer
at Stop the War Coalition and now, when we need to give Jeremy the
solidarity he has always shown others, I can confirm Lynne’s
sentiments. Here is a photo of Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to me when I
was a patient at Barts Hospital.
"It
is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to write
about
being a Jewish member of the Labour Party in Jeremy Corbyn’s
constituency … We have had to watch a wholly false invention of
charges of antisemitism against our MP, with our own views as Jewish
members completely ignored … I am devastated that this process has
climaxed in the suspension of our cherished MP, and former leader …
What we can confirm is that as Jews in North Islington we have always
felt more than safe, more than welcome, unfailingly supported, in
everything we do in the borough, and the Party … I have known
Jeremy Corbyn since helping to get him selected, then elected, almost
40 years ago. However, battles to discredit Corbyn as antisemitic
began only after his quite unexpected victory as leader of the party
… Methods first used by Corbyn’s opponents were the routine ways
of attacking the radical Left, as ‘unrealistic’, ‘unpatriotic’,
and so on ... It was only in the last few years, under Corbyn, that
continuing investigations into antisemitism began in the LP ...
clearly tied in with Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights ...
Over the years, Corbyn has had mutually supportive relations with the
practising Jewish community in Islington, attending Shabbat dinners
with the orthodox Chabad Rabbi, Mendy Korer, and attending numerous
other official Jewish events in North London … Unlike most of his
critics in Westminster, Corbyn unfailingly turned up to vote for
motions addressing antisemitism in Parliament, just as he worked
tirelessly against racism on every front …" (Lynne Segal)
Hannah
Arendt,
political scientist:
“The trouble is that Zionism has often
thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the
good of the Jewish people.”
Isaac
Asimov,
novelist: “I
find myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist ... I think it
is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any
one heritage of whatever kind.”
Uri
Avnery,
ex-Israeli army officer. writing after an Israeli military
victory: “What will be seared into the
consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a
blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and
not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
Daniel
Barenboim, Israeli pianist and conductor: “I
don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly
through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now
become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. That is why I am
ashamed of being an Israeli today.”
Lenni
Brenner, writer and 1960s civil rights activist: “Italy's
Zionists never resisted Fascism; they ended up praising it and
undertook diplomatic negotiations on its behalf. The bulk of the
Revisionists and a few other right-wingers became its enthusiastic
adherents. The moderate bourgeois Zionist leaders were uninterested
in Fascism itself. As Jewish separatists they only asked one
question, the cynical classic: 'So? Is it good for the Jews?'”
Martin
Buber, Israeli philosopher: “How
great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in
whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar;
whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest;
the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in
whose cities that we put up houses of education, charity and prayer.”
Noam
Chomsky: “In
the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than
apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by
"apartheid" you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s
happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
Richard
Cohen,
US columnist: “The greatest mistake Israel could make at the
moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of
creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and
some Christians) has produced a century of warfare.”
Marek
Edelman, a
leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising:
"Commanders
of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations - "to
all the soldiers of the Palestine fighting organisations.” letter
in addressed to the Palestine resistance.
Albert
Einstein: “The
(Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot
understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties
and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.”
Ben
Ehrenreich,
author
of the novel The
Suitors: “The
characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous
than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position
into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with
international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to
erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said."
Richard
Falk,
former UN special rapporteur on human rights: Called Israeli
policies in the Occupied Territories “a crime against humanity.”
Falk also has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to
the Nazi treatment of the Jews.
Andrew Feinstein, ANC member who served under Nelson Mandela: "I lost 39 members of my family in the Holocaust. Jeremy Corbyn is no antisemite."
Sigmund
Freud: “I
concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in
part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no
sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of
a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings
of the natives.”
Erich
Fromm,
social psychologist: “The claim of the Jews to the Land of
Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would
suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two
thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”
Gerald Kaufman MP: "My
grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of
Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed ...My grandmother
did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering
Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza."
Gabriel
Kolko,
a leading historian on modern warfare: “The large majority of
Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural sense, are
scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way people
live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or Amsterdam.
There is simply no rational reason that justifies the state’s
creation.”
Rabbi
Michael Lerner,
editor of Tikkun
Magazine: “If
a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world
and says, 'I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the
commandments,' most will still welcome you in and urge you to become
involved. But say, 'I don’t support the State of Israel,' and you
are likely to be labeled a 'self-hating Jew' or anti-Semite, scorned
and dismissed."
Primo
Levi, writer
and Auschwitz survivor. "Everyone has their Jews. For the
Israelis they are the Palestinians."
Miriam
Margolyes,
actor: “The black South Africans asked for our support and now
it's the Palestinians who are asking for our support. I hate what
Israel is doing over there to the Palestinians.
I think that boycotting is a very active and non-violent way of
protesting."
Harold
Pinter. In 2008 he joined 105 prominent Jews who said, “We
cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism,
massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We
cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in
ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting
a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza
and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and
national aspirations. We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as
equals in a peaceful Middle East.”
Henry
Siegman, Rabbi
and director of the U.S./Middle East Project: “Israel has
crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’
to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”
I.F.
Stone, US
journalist: “Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia
in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on
the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In
Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed
marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and
exclusionist.”
Prof
Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations: “Israeli
propagandists deliberately, yes deliberately, conflate anti-Zionism
with anti-Semitism in order to discredit, bully, and muzzle critics
of Israel.”
“The
UK government has awarded £10 billion
worth of contracts related to the coronavirus crisis to private
companies since March 2020,
mostly without a competitive tender.” The
Financial Times
Cabinet
Office Minister, Julia Lopez, has
responded to criticisms of a chumocracy by assuring us that
‘The government will carry out its own inspection on procurements
during the pandemic.”
Here
is a list of the Chumocrats at work:
BARONESS
DIDO HARDING, Chair of NHS Improvement and NHS Test and Trace is the
wife of Tory MP JOHN PENROSE, who has responsibilities for …..
anti-corruption.
KATE
BINGHAM, head of the government’s vaccine taskforce, is married to
Tory Minister JESSE NORMAN and is a business colleague of DOMINIC
CUMMINGS.
RUPERT
SOAMES, CEO of SERCO, and awarded £57 million in Covid contracts, is
brother of former Tory MP SIR NICHOLAS SOAMES whose wife, CAMILLA
SOAMES, is a Tory party donor.
PAUL
STEPHENSON, director of HANBURY STRATEGY and awarded £900,000 in
Covid contracts, is a friend and business associate of DOMINIC
CUMMINGS.
SEAN
TOPHAM and
BEN GUERIN of TOPHAM GUERIN and
awarded £3 million in Covid contracts, were behind the Tory party
2019 election strategy and worked with DOMINIC CUMMINGS.
JAMES
FRAYNE and RACHEL WOLFF of PUBLIC FIRST and awarded £840,000 in
Covid contracts, are friends of DOMINIC CUMMINGS and MICHAEL GOVE.
THEODORE
AGNEW, responsible
for the government’s
digital technology, is a major shareholder in FACULTY,
awarded £500,000 in Covid contracts. He
is also
a
business associate of DOMINIC
CUMMINGS and worked with him on Vote Leave.
DAVID
MELLER of MELLER DESIGNS, awarded £148 million in Covid-related contracts, is a Tory
donor and friend of
MICHAEL GOVE.
STEVE
DECHAN, director of P14 MEDICAL, awarded £120 million in Covid
contracts, is a former Tory councillor.
SIR
MERRICK COCKELL, employed by PA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LTD who were awarded £156
million in Covid-related contracts, is a former Tory leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council
STEVE
PARKIN, Chairman
of CLIPPER LOGISTICS, and awarded £1 million in Covid-related
contracts, is a major Tory Party donor.
ANTHONY
PAGE of PPE MEDPRO Ltd, who were awarded £203 million in
Covid-related contracts, was secretary of the firm that provides
branding services to Tory peer Baroness Mone’s company.
Daniel
Bruce, the chief executive of anti-corruption campaigners
Transparency International UK, warned the government should not use
the crisis like a “blank cheque to get rid of controls around
transparency and accountability ….The alarming number of contracts
seemingly awarded without any competition risks setting a dangerous
precedent.”
I
leave you with this one. Controversy and mystery
surrounds a £32m Covid-related
contract
handed to a rodent
infestation
control company called PestFix to source surgical gowns. It
has listed net assets of only £18,000.
The Pavarotti Centre in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, opened in 1997 after the bloody wars in the former Yugoslavia. The objective was to try to bring a divided people together through music. So I was I very happy to see that the PMC has had a facelift and opened a new social area at the front of the building –
Klub 27. I am honoured that my Bob Marley quote greets
visitors as they come in the door.
A brief aside. I helped smuggle in a Marley photo/music exhibition into Mostar in 1995 in the war because, as he says, “When music hits you, you feel no pain”. Twenty five years
later, that remains true of this centre, of the people who work here
and the young people who take part in its actvities. Good luck
to Klub 27. I will be there as soon as I can. Rock on. And here's the link to Marley's "One Love".
NB: I wanted to include this excerpt from the 'Music & War' chapter in my memoir, Left Field. The whole book can now be read free online here.
"The
Centre allowed the healing power of music to enter this community.
The young were particularly affected by the war and, from the day the
PMC opened its doors, they flooded in. Some of them used music to
escape their darkest memories. They would tell me that only when they
played, or heard music, could they escape their nightmares. Children
and young people were brought together to make and listen to music:
to sing, to beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and react together
through music."
photos
Every
single House Democrat who endorsed Medicare for all won reelection.
They included “The Squad”, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. As women of colour
they championed climate action, healthcare for all Americans, the
creation of well paid jobs and support for unions.
Other
progressives who won re-election include Pramila Jayapal of
Washington and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. And they are joined by new
winners, Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Marie
Newman of Illinois and Iman Jodeh of Colorado.
Ilhan
Omar tweeted: “We are building a movement that sees my struggle as
inherently tied to your struggle, and sees a world where all workers
can be uplifted. Together. The results of this election are not the
end. This is just the beginning.”
Marie
Newman tweeted, "As we begin to rebuild we're going to work
together to lower health care costs, fight climate change, create new
good-paying jobs, revitalize our transportation infrastructure system
and continue to make a strong economy no matter who you are or where
you are."
Ayanna
Pressley added: “Together, we have fought for our shared humanity.
We have organized. We have mobilized. I believe in the power of us.
And we’re just getting started.”
They
will be continuing the fight to pull the Democrat Party to the left,
a fight which started with their victories over right-wing
incumbents. Bowman did this in New York by knocking off 16-term
Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel, while Newman ousted Illinois
Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski, one of the last remaining
pro-life Democrats in the chamber.
Perhaps
Bernie Sanders didn’t lose the Democrat Party leadership after all.
His place has been taken by a new younger leadership and led by
women.
In
his congratulatory message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris he said
this:
"This
election result was brought about by millions of grassroots
activists, black and white, Latino, Asian American, and Native
American … But our work is not done … Now a whole new chapter of
hard work begins. We cannot go back to business as usual. We cannot
go back to a situation in which the corporate elite and their
lobbyists dominate the economic and political life of this country.
We need to create a People’s Agenda, of, by and for working
families, a powerful movement that demands that agenda be
implemented.”
I
am writing this from the UK. The US election result has lessons for
us here.
This
morning I received an email from Edwin Maynard, a poet/photographer friend
of mine, who visited me when I was living in Mostar in the 90s. Today
he lives in California. He wrote this:
“We
have a neighbour who has been flying a large TRUMP 2020 KEEP AMERICA
GREAT flag near our driveway and another neighbour on an adjacent
driveway who was toting an assault rifle the other day to deter a
small (mostly White) unarmed Black Lives Matter demonstration that
passed by along a nearby street. The demo consisted of around 30
people tailed by four police cars. And this is regarded as a
‘progressive’ Democrat-voting state!”
He
included a pdf of his recently published, ‘Squaring the Circle’,
a book of photos and poems. It opens with a great poem about Mostar,
but this one caught my attention.
Traumerica
Forty
days of toxic rain
and
the madman in the White House
is
set lose again
as
his evangelical henchmen
lie
low and exonerate themselves
wth
vacant words in the Senate
The
streets are empty at this hour
apart
from the circling pickup trucks
flying
confederate flags
and
the lone SUV with the license-tag sting
MN8
JOY.
The
populace is silenced
and
sealed away behind screens
or
plague masks.
Fear
and hatred are the entrails
served
in the tyrant’s
blasphemous
orations
while
'Sympathy for the Devil'
plays
at the rallying call
to
the festval of lies.
Poisoned
words from the bully pulpit,
positioned
above the law,
trumpet
walls, wars, disinformation, ostracisms,
a
eucharist of dominion
over
the Earth,
and
the sodden ashes
of
tomorrow’s Rapture.'
As
I write this we don’t yet know if this tyrant will be removed from
his ‘bully pulpit’, but am I alone in thinking that there are
parallels between the bully and the Bullingon? Yes, I know. Boris
Johnson has been to Eton and can speak in Latin .
I
am reading a lot of tweets and blogs extolling the superiority of us
Brits in our scorn for the illiterate and humourless President, but
is the ability of our leader to say, ‘rideat non possum’ a cause
for smiling relief?
In
the USA any chance of a social reformist leadership was put paid to
with the replacement of Sanders with Biden. In this country we have
had the same result with, in the words of conservative commentator, Peter Oborne, the ‘political assassination of Jeremy Corbyn’ and his
replacement with Starmer, In the USA there are attempts to stop votes being counted, Here the
general secretary of the Labour Party has informed party members
imperiously that, 'You will not discuss the suspension of Jeremy
Corbyn.'
The
UK establishment are, in many ways, a lot more secure than their
American partners. This is what Theresa May told Jeremy Corbyn in
Parliament in 2015,“We will never allow you to rule”. That is
perfidious Albion with all its born to rule arrogance.
That
perfidiousness has been spotlighted most clearly by those who have lived
and stuggled against oppressions in its greatest extremities.
They
are former ANC government minister Ronnie Kasrils who is Jewish;
Pallo Jordan who narrowly escaped assassination by the bomb that
killed anti-apartheid academic Ruth First and Mandela advisor
Ismail Ebrahim who served 35 years in prison on Robben Island for his
anti-apartheid activism. Former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, who lost
family members in the Holocaust, has also added his support.
It
says, “We are aware of the machinations within the Labour Party to
conduct a witch-hunt against Corbyn and those who support him. The
charges of anti-semitism that have been levelled against him are
patently unjust and morally groundless.”
Antonio
Gramsci was correct that now indeed is the time of monsters, but it
is also the time to bring about the birth of a new world.
Anti
Nazi Germans
Enemies
of the Nazi State within the Working Class, Merilyn Moos
German
Volunteers in the French Resistance, Steve Cushion
Book launch - 29th
November 2020, 2pm
This book may come as a surprise to many readers. We are brought up to believe
that the Nazis came to power in Germany with the overwhelming support
of the people and that the French Resistance was like an overlong
episode of “Hello Hello”.
As
Merilyn Moos argues, “It is a commonly held myth ... that there
was little resistance in Germany to the Nazis. In fact, there was a
wide diversity of opposition to the Nazi state: initially from within
the working class movement and, later, from different sections of the
State, judiciary and also the army.”
Close
to one million Leftists were imprisoned in Germany between 1933 and
1945, of whom 200,000 were killed.
Of
those who escaped this fate, around 5,000 German and Austrian exiles
fought against Franco’s fascism in the Spanish Civil War as members
of the Ernst Thälmann and Edgar André Brigades. Many of them were
Jews.
After
escaping from Germany with their lives many were not so lucky and
died at the hands of Francos forces. Those who survived fled north
into France and continued their anti-fascist struggle as part of the
French Resistance.
This
book is a harrowing account of what it meant to be a German
anti-fascist. In Germany imprisonment, torture and death were
the expected fate of resistors, but even so as late as 1943 strikes
took place in the Ruhr mines and sabotage was reported inside
armaments factories.
There
was even an alternative to the Hitler Youth , the Edelweiss
Pirates. Girls and boys managed to hold together as an anti-Nazi
force at a time when resistance had become close to impossible. “They
wore unconventional clothes, sang anti-militaristic songs, assaulted
Hitler Youth patrols, insulted uniformed officers and party
functionaries and even purchased illicit firearms"… Some
of them carried out sabotage, derailed ammunition trains, distributed
anti-Nazi leaflets and hid Jews.
A
1943 Nazi report from Düsseldorf admitted the appearance of "Down
with Hitler’ graffiti and that however often it was removed, it
would quickly reappear, especially during air-raids. The report goes
on to admit these actions negatively affected the morale of some
soldiers, who were even beginning to congregate among the Pirates.
The
book gives detailed accounts of these anti-Nazis and is a powerful acknowledgement of a tradition of German anti-fascism that goes back to
Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacists and the Bavarian Revolution.
In
post-war Germany anti-Nazis remained criminalised. As one working
class resistor, Gertrud Koch, said "After the war there were
no judges in Germany so the old Nazi judges were used and they upheld
the criminalisation of what we did and who we were".
In
post-war France, Steve
Cushion explains, “Charles
de Gaulle was committed to reconstructing French imperialism and
wanted to stress the part that the French had played in liberating
themselves from German occupation. The
presence of German anti-fascists
contradicted this
account and they were
ignored.’
Hidden
too long from history this book is a valuable homage to anti-Nazi
Germans and recognition that Trotsky was right when he said that
‘fascism is capitalism going to the dentist’. But, as with
all dental visits, many refuse to open their mouths.
Zoom
log in details; Topic:
Mary Quaile Club public meeting
Time: Nov 29, 2020 02:00 PM
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