Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitic
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Yes by all means we can call Hamas a “terrorist” organisation. But is the carpet bombing of Gaza not also a tactic of terror and is not the organisation behind it – the Israeli state – no less, therefore, a “terrorist organisation”? In the Big Brother state called Britain a teenager gets arrested by the Thought Police merely for posting something on social media in support of Hamas. Deluded though he may be all he is doing is expressing an opinion. Is the British regime now going to be consistent and arrest anyone who supports Israel’s actions in Gaza that have already led to the murder of 11,000 human beings including 4500 thousand children? I suspect not.
And what about the deluded nationalists who support either Ukraine or Russia in that other war we hear about? Britain supports the authoritarian far-right Zelensky regime. Why does it not also proscribe the authoritarian far-right Putin regime as a terrorist organisation like Hamas? It makes you wonder….
The BBC continue to cover ukrainian draft evasion, this is a new version of substantially the same story they’ve told before, but with added stats: 20K have escaped, 20K have been caught, and maybe more that aren’t picked up in these stats. (As an aside, Engels was keen on universal conscription – the end section of the pamphlet is an interesting read). Others have noted the demographic cliff in Ukraine where under 35 the population plummets: also, looking at the heat map of population, Russia has taken out some of the more populous districts already.
I don’t know if the BBC is teeing up for a narrative to blame Ukraine for its defeat because they weren’t willing to fight…
Here is an extract from an article in today’s Times headed “Pupils skip school to March on Labour office over ceasefire stance”:
“Many of those marching were holding banners carrying a logo for the Socialist Party, which has organised many marches since the conflict in the Middle East began.”
Not us of course, not that we would have an objection in principle to schoolkids expressing criticism of the Labour Party’s support for the continuation of the siege and bombing of Gaza. Only our leaflet and placards would be conveying a quite different message.
Incidentally SPEW, unlike many of the others, is not calling for the dissolution of the state of Israel but for a “workers government” there.
Alistair Crooke´s assessment of the situation:
“Israeli popular sentiment — even amongst former liberals — is moving toward a Greater Nakba. Gaza is under Nakba pressures. So is the West Bank, as settler violence against Palestinians surges. Even a ‘liberal’ such as former opposition leader Lapid now agrees that ‘settlers’ in the occupied West Bank are not ‘settlers’ at all, since the land is but the ‘Biblical land of Israel’.
Nakba ‘ambitions’ are widening to South Lebanon (up to the Litani River) too. The radical members of Netanyahu’s government say Israelis will never return to the kibbutz adjacent to Lebanon, without Hezbollah’s removal from the border area.So, the call is heard for “Israel” to ‘take’ Lebanon up to the Litani (a key water source) — and ‘serendipitously’ the Israeli air force has begun operating up to 40 kms inside Lebanon. Cabinet members now openly speak of the IOF needing to turn its attention to Hezbollah once Hamas has been ‘obliterated’.
…
Plainly, the White House is struggling to avoid the slide towards full regional war, as both the Lebanese front and the Iraqi front heats up: On Sunday, Iraqi movements again fired missiles at the American base in Shaddadi.“Israel” is sensing the present crisis to be both an existential risk, but an ‘opportunity’ too – an opportunity to establish “Israel” across ‘its Biblical lands’ over the long term. There is no mistaking it — this is the direction of travel of Israeli popular sentiment, from both Left and Right wings, to bloody eschatology.”
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/-israel-s—nakba-doctrine
The second link is indeed ironic but the first (which doesn’t work for me but I found it by a different route) is more problematic as Almayadeen has been accused of being pro-hesbollah and pro-Iran.
This is what Wikipedia says about them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Mayadeen
This is what they say about themselves:
https://english.almayadeen.net/
Bearing in mind that Israel’s “biblical lands” extend to the whole of Lebanon and as far east as the river Euphrates, extending Israel to that extent would be impossible, even if it is what some crazed Jewish Nationalists might be thinking and calling for. The Israel Attack Force is not that powerful.
I would imagine that more pragmatic counsels would prevail amongst the rulers of Israel even as regards southern Lebanon and the West Bank. Besides, the US wouldn’t let them do it.
We can not place our hands on the fire for anybody involve in this conflict, all of them pull to one side including the journalists who are the darlings of the left, we can jump from one fry pan into another fry pan. Right now they are glorifying saint Jimmy Carter when he was the promoter of the doctrine to defend the US interests in the Middle East, but the interests of the US capitalist class.
Jehovah does not know anything about geographic, in order to fulfill his promise Israel would need the army of all the powerful empires of the earth, that promise was made when peoples had bow and arrow and swords, and despite they would have not conquered that large extension of lands, it is like the myth about Joshua who destroyed the wall of Jericho and there were not walls in that place in that time, it was like a ghetto.
Whoever believes in those mythologies can also believe in the Greek mythologies and the Book of the dead of the Egyptians and the chronicles and myth of the Rosicrucians
Once again we see yet more examples of the inexorable creep towards an authoritarian Big Brother state in the case of Britain. A deluded supporter of Hamas makes a speech a day after that organisation breaks through the Israel security fence on a murderous mission to kill Israelis and she describes this as an act of resistance. All this woman did was voice an opinion and however much you might disagree with the opinion, she did not murder anyone.
Should she have the right to voice her opinion? Of course, she should. Just as one should equally have the right to oppose her. Any kind of censorship whether from the left or the right demonstrates an underlying contempt for the ability of working people to come to a conclusion themselves about what is being stated, the inference being that they need to be condescendingly protected from hearing such opinions by others, superior to them
I would still like to know if, since the British state is going to arrest people who support a murderous organisation like Hamas, it is also going to arrest people who support the actions of the murderous Israeli state that has led to the mass murder of at least 4500 completely innocent children in Gaza so far. Perhaps the British state can start by rounding up culpable individuals like Messrs Sunak and Starmer and arraigning them before a judge in Westminster?
The murder of children is happening not just in Gaza but in the West Bank too. It is absolutely sickening
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/11/jeremy-corbyn-peace-is-hard-but-possible
He says: ‘If we understand terrorism to describe the indiscriminate killing of civilians, in breach of international law, then of course Hamas is a terrorist group.’. He doesn’t say: ‘I think Hamas is a terrorist group’. [The unwritten words are no doubt closer to: ‘…I don’t – they are liberationist freedom fighters with right on their side…but if we’re dealing in hypotheticals, equivalence must be applied to Israel].
He claims that ‘Many of the Palestinians I know are no supporters of Hamas’, which by implication means the significant number of others are supporters of Hamas.
No doubt alluding in part to the Morgan interview, he argues ‘we should reject hectoring from those whose questions serve to justify the horror unfolding before our very eyes.’, which is all well and good when challenging the agenda of folk such as Morgan who endlessly ram the ‘Israel’s-right-to-“defence”’ narrative down everyone’s throats; however, not all that legitimately ask these types of questions share this worldview. Some reject Israel and its actions not from a Palestinian nationalist perspective but from a socialist position opposed to all nationalism and all conflict underpinned by competing capitalist interests.
He rather sanctimoniously asserts that: ‘History will judge those who had the opportunity to stop this massacre’, although he knows the U.K. Home of Commons vote, even if carried, would have no power to change anything (although it goes without saying that voting ‘for a ceasefire’ is clearly better than supporting a continuation (post-‘pause’, of course) of the carnage).
He states: ‘Peace is not possible without understanding the root cause of its absence’, without properly understanding what that root cause actually is…
And if at the end of everything, the ultimate goal is simply to ‘put steps in place to give the Palestinian people the right to decide who governs them’, it is one that will prolong the misery of the vast majority of them far beyond the weeks and months to follow – and prevent their true liberation for as long as this remains the extent of their ambitions as a class.
There was no national demonstration this week, only local ones. The one in Islington in London seems to have been organised by the SWP. They had a big stall and were handing out placards saying Free Palestine. They also led the chant of “from the river to the sea”. At least I think it was them rather than the Stop the War Coalition which also had a stall — otherwise they’d be the Start the War Coalition.
I doubt if they really meant that but were more likely chanting it as an act of defiance as it’s what the government and the media say should be banned. The police didn’t intervene.
In any event, not everybody there agreed with it. SPEW was there too and their leaflet called for “an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with two capitals in Jerusalem.” That’s a novel proposal — a two state-capitalist states solution.
There was also a march in Camden to Starmer’s constituency office in St. Pancras (he’s the local MP). It’s not known whether, in view of his support for the siege of Gaza, they revived the slogan of “Keir Starmer, Kid Starver”, coined over a different issue.
https://internationalistperspective.org
IP: Warmonger Left and Right
The world watches in horror as one of the most advanced armies on earth is destroying a mostly defenseless enclosed urban zone, like shooting fish in a barrel. No wonder there is widespread outrage and a worldwide demand to stop this madness. But rather than to stop the war, many leftists want to continue it, on the side of Hamas. And they want us to ignore the violence against innocents committed by their side because it was done for a good cause. Was it?
The apologists of Hamas claim that its army are indigenous freedom fighters rising up against a colonial power and that the history of colonial wars shows that these conflicts are inevitably brutal, with many innocent victims on both sides. It is up to the ‘freedom fighters” to decide how they wage their struggle, they claim, and those who support the liberation of “the Palestinian people” should not question their methods. Especially not if they are white and living in countries which had colonies themselves. Shame about the past or present behavior of “their” countries should silence any critical thought on the tactics and goals of the “anti-colonial” struggle. They are not well placed “to hand out moral lessons to the resistance.”
They didn’t chant “Keir Starmer, Kid Starver” only “Starmer is a wasteman”:
Christians unite ‘for Zion’s sake’ this afternoon: ‘Never Again Is Now’
https://www.cufi.org.uk/events/never-again-is-now/
https://cufi.org/While there has indeed been a real, worrying rise in antisemitism (along with increases in Islamophobia), this is vile manipulation.
Yes, condemn this, sing your hymns and offer your prayers, if you must, but don’t bundle that together with support for the indefensible actions of the Israeli state.
Oddly enough, contrary to what some suppose, many members of the British Jewish community, religious as well as secular, are revolted by what is happening in Gaza, and mourn not just the 1,200 Jews murdered in cold blood but the ten times that number of (mostly) innocent Palestinians.
What Hamas did on 7th October was horrific and should be strongly condemned by any decent human-being, but propaganda that cynically seeks to defend Israel’s current actions by employing comparisons with the Holocaust is truly repulsive.
This view is also expressed by a significant section of British Jews, including one of the subjects of this interesting article, who rightly states the unpleasant, but obvious truth that: “The Holocaust is being invoked, Jewish pain used and mobilised for acts of bloody revenge at the moment”
Using the Holocaust in this way is just as deplorable as denying or minimising its extent, as some of those supporting a Palestinian nation state have been guilty of.
Those Christian cultists are utter nutters:
“Hagee’s flagrant support for Israel has its basis in Scripture, to be sure, but in weird Scripture–namely Revelation, the strangest book of the New Testament. Revelation is the source of the phantasmagoria known as the Rapture, in which the battle of Armageddon is fought (against the Arabs, one expects), Israel triumphs, Jesus returns in celebration, lifts all Believers to heaven…and everyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is incinerated.” (https://swampland.time.com/2008/07/23/but_what_happens_to_jews_in_th/)
So Israel wins the war. Jesus returns and all those who don’t believe in him are incinerated, including any Jew who doesn’t convert (and I can’t imagine Nutty-yahoo and his cabinet doing that) is destined to be burned . . . along with us.
As they say, with friends like that.
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