This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner from the CST blog in the UK.
A previously confidential Foreign and Commonwealth Office report (large pdf, here), officially released on 15 December by the FCO, suggests some foundational answers to the commonly asked questions regarding Britain’s apparent tolerance and accommodation of Islamist groups of varying extremes throughout the 1990s. In other words, what is sometimes termed the ”Londonistan” phenomenon of that time. (The report is 79 pages long and covers far more ground than merely these aspects covered below.)
This article by Winston Pickett was originally published in the UK Jewish Chronicle.
Now that the latest terror threat has been neutralized - with a little help from the Saudis - we’ve entered the predictable post mortem phase. This is the political scrum in which government, security, intelligence and law enforcement authorities scramble to apportion blame and devise strategies to keep air travel safe.
This blanket endorsement of the BDS campaign and the PSC is a major change in TUC policy, which used to be committed to a strategy of engagement and reconciliation. No longer.
The next paragraph is clearly the result of compromise, but read it carefully: “Congress instructs the General Council to bring to Congress a report on the impact of the boycott and investment withdrawal strategy, together with the outcome of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)/Histadrut discussions recently facilitated by the International Trade Union Congress (ITUC) and TUC. Congress agrees to join unions around the world for maximum coordination internationally for active solidarity to end the siege of Gaza and for a free Palestine.”
…The key bit is the final sentence, which is blatantly anti-Israel. And the clue is the use of Hamas terminology – the call for a “free Palestine.”
Eric Lee of TULIP explains the latest outburst of useful idiocy in the British Trades Union Congress in The Jerusalem Post.
‘Bloody Jews,’ he said. ‘Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I’ve no sympathy for them.’
I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I’m here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, ‘Bloody Jews.’
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry, but really…!’
‘I’m glad you’re sorry,’ I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ When I nodded, this academic - whom I’d met for the first time that day - put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethniccleansing, they’re like the Nazis, they’re the same as the Nazis…’
Read more from Eve Garrard at Normblog. And then prepare for the usual whining about how it’s unfair to call these people antisemitic, they’re just critics of Israel…
Why? Read about it here. As for the response, this powerful statement from the UK Board of Deputies of British Jews says it all:
Statement from Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council: Methodist Conference
30 June 2010 - This is a very sad day, both for Jewish-Methodist relations and for everyone who wants to see positive engagement with the complex issues of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Methodist Conference has swallowed hook, line and sinker a report full of basic historical inaccuracies, deliberate misrepresentations and distortions of Jewish theology and Israeli policy. The deeply flawed report is symptomatic of a biased process: The working group which wrote the report had already formed its conclusions at the outset. External readers were brought in to give the process a veneer of impartiality, but their criticisms were rejected. The report’s authors have abused the trust of ordinary members of the Methodist Church, who assumed that they were reading and voting on an impartial and comprehensive paper, and they have abused the goodwill of the Jewish community, which tried to engage with this issue, only to find that our efforts were treated as an unwelcome distraction. This outcome is extremely serious and damaging, as we and others have explained repeatedly over recent weeks. Israel is at the root of the identity of Jews and of Judaism, and as an expression of Jewish spiritual, national and emotional aspirations, Zionism cannot simply be ruled as illegitimate in the way that the Methodist Conference has purported to do. This smacks of breathtaking insensitivity, as crass as it is misinformed. That this position should now form the basis of Methodist Church policy should cause the Conference to hang its head in shame, just as surely as it will cause the enemies of peace and reconciliation to cheer from the sidelines.
For media watchers familiar with the White House Press Corps, the saga of Helen Thomas is has served up a pungent lesson on how antisemitic ideas can pollute and ultimately force a 58-year career to crash, burn and splutter to an inglorious conclusion.
Michael Mansfield is a renowned British criminal lawyer and in an open letter to Nick Clegg, Britain’s new Deputy Prime Minister, in today’s Guardian he writes,
This article includes a guest contribution by habibi from Harry’s Place.
A group of friends in London alerted me to this grubby little piece by a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, Bob Marshall-Andrews, concerning his recent visit to Gaza. Upon reading it, I was struck by various thoughts, not least the degree to which Marshall-Andrews words will be welcomed by the Hamas cheerleaders who compose the Palestinian solidarity movement, in marked contrast to the fierce condemnation with which this blog, and others like it, will greet his compendium of antisemitism-laced falsehoods. Why bother to refute such lies, one might ask, when those of us who defend Israel are at irreconcilable odds with those who demonize her, when any charge of antisemitism we make is bound to be dismissed as another tired attempt to muzzle debate? The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that some things - and Marshall-Andrews article is one of them - are so odious that they cannot pass without rebuke.
“Anthony ‘Genius’ Julius, 39, is not a divorce lawyer but a specialist in media law, acting for Robert Maxwell and once employed by the Daily Mail. His background could not be further from the upper-class world inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual and Labour supporter and less likely to feel restrained by considerations of fair play.” So wrote a reporter on The Daily Telegraph during the divorce proceedings between Princess Diana and Prince Charles. Read more from Anthony about the antisemitism which can surface in England’s elite here.
Please take a copy and embed it in your blogs, as a reminder that the Police should not be involved in legitimate political criticism and discourse on the Internet.
Ben Cohen writes: Stephen Sizer, the Iranian regime’s dutiful mouthpiece inside the Anglican Church, has been intimidating the author of the excellent blog, Seismic Shock, as you will read below. Both cowardly and odious, Sizer’s action underlines the fanatical determination of the pro-Palestine lobby in the UK to shut down open debate. So it’s time to declare that “We Are All Seismic Shock” - and communicate that same message to Sizer by emailing him here.
As some people have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet in blogging about the Reverend Stephen Sizer’s activities of late.
After all, what more can be said of a man forwards emails from Holocaust deniers, shares platforms with Holocaust deniers, and shamelessly flaunts his anti-Zionist theology before Iran’s apocalyptic Holocaust-denying regime? As Iranian pastors are arrested and house churches closed down, why is the Khomeinist regime translating Sizer’s book on Christian Zionism into Farsi? How many more times can I point all this out?
Here’s British parliamentarian Sir Gerald Kaufman on Israel’s operation in Gaza against Hamas: “”We have had a fuss in our country about the inability of certain Israeli politicians to visit Britain for fear of being arrested…Anybody who uses white phosphorus should be arrested and should be tried for war crimes.”
Sounds like a bold interventionist on behalf of human rights, no?
Here’s what Gerald Kaufman, then the Shadow (opposition) Foreign Secretary, said at the onset of the Serb onslaught against Bosnia, in June 1992: “The situation is far too confused for forcible intervention from outside to do any positive good…The Foreign Secretary is equally right to make it clear that the Serbs are not the only guilty party - that others share the guilt.” (Quoted in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, Penguin 2001, pps. 297-98.)
And here he is again in early 1993, when the genocidal nature of the Serb campaign was becoming increasingly clear: “The European Community should have no military role in this conflict or indeed in any other. The need is not to extend the conflict but to maintain it [sic].” (See Brendan Simms, p. 298.)
To maintain it. To maintain, in other words, a state of affairs which enabled the punishing siege of Sarajevo, the concentration camps in which women were raped and men brutalized, the massacre at Srebrenica and myriad other atrocities.
Gerald Kaufman was perfectly content for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia to continue apace. So whenever you hear him delivering one of his inchoate, hateful rants against Israel, ask for the salt.
Now here’s one item in The Guardian that’s really worth reading:
We should not have put the headline “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs” on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers without getting permission from the families of the deceased (21 December, page 15). That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter.
How, I wonder, could such an error have been made?
In the video below, a wonderful example of the species antisemitus lunaticus (not the fellow you see in the still, but the one that crops up at the beginning.) He’s got all the lines: some of his best friends are Jews, he tells the interviewer, in between foul-mouthed rants about the evil nature of, errrm, Jews. By the way, all this took place at an event organized by Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign, for whom the phrase “Boycott Israeli Goods” is another way of saying “Kauf nicht bei Juden!”
News from Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC): its annual conference is urging the British government to “a) condemn the Israeli military aggression and the continuing blockade of Gaza; (b) end arms sales to Israel which reached a value of £18.8 million in 2008, up from £7.7 million in 2007; (c) seek EU agreement to impose a ban on the importing of goods produced in the illegal settlements; and (d) support moves to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement which provides preferential trade facilities to Israel.”
