The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 30th March 2018
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 30th March 2018
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 30th March 2018
MONDAY evening in Parliament Square saw some unlikely scenes: senior Tories, right-wing Blairite MPs and members of the Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — most of whom claim to be “Christians” of some sort — standing alongside right-wing Zionists in the demonstration organised by the British Board of Jewish Deputies and berating Jewish members of Jewish Voice for Labour with being anti-Semitic. The anti-Corbyn Blairites are making common cause with the Zionists to try every trick in the book to undermine Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. And after a preposterous attempt to smear Corbyn as a Russian spy backfired badly and resulted in a surge of support for Corbyn and a Tory MP being obliged to make an apology and pay a large sum of money to his local food bank, they are reviving the “anti-Semitic” witch-hunt with a vengeance.
This is an easy target for them because real anti-Semitism is abhorrent and no Labour supporter wants to be suspected of supporting it, however inadvertently. This is perhaps why the strongest opponents of the Zionist-inspired witch-hunts in the Labour movement have been Jews, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and the members of Jewish Voice for Labour. Surely, they cannot be accused of anti-Semitism — they are people who have been on the receiving end of it and well know its evils.
But the Zionists have had no qualms about accusing working-class politically active Jews of somehow being anti-Semitic. There have been a tiny handful of Jews who have aligned themselves with Nazis and other fascists who have been described as self-haters and are clearly mentally troubled. The victims of the Zionist witch-hunt in no way fall into this category.
They are people who have spent their lives campaigning against racism and fascism, alongside Jeremy Corbyn. They have turned out in the streets against the National Front, the BNP (British National Party), the EDL (English Defence League). They have fought against apartheid in South Africa and against Islamophobia in east London. They are the descendants of the Jews who came out and blocked Cable Street, stopping the march of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, when the Board of Deputies had told them to stay at home and let the fascists pass. And they have consistently supported human rights for the people of Palestine.
It shows that amongst the Jewish people in Britain, like any other community in the western world, there is a class division in the outlook of the very wealthy and the outlook of working-class activists.
A much-respected photojournalist reporting the events in Parliament Square on Monday evening overheard a conversation: “Interestingly I overheard a fascinating discussion between two of them:
“Protestor with placard: ‘You should not have brought that, they’ll say we’re all Zionists!’ The chief bone of contention that the Zionists are using is a mural in the East End, intended, according to the artist, to depict famous bankers, Rothschild, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Warburg, Carnegie and anti-Semitic mystic Aleister Crowley, seated around a Monopoly Board that is held up by enslaved black workers. But many have looked at the elderly, bearded figures and have seen a likeness to Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures. It says something about the prejudices of the viewers who can look at a satire of greedy bankers and assume they must all be Jewish.
Six years ago, when the mural was about the be painted out, Jeremy Corbyn added his signature to an unsuccessful campaign to keep it, in the name of freedom of expression, without examining it clearly or noticing any similarity to Nazi propaganda. When this was pointed out he apologised. But it shows the lengths and depths to which the pro-Zionists will go to seek out some tiny error on which to berate Corbyn.
But as the day grows nearer when Corbyn is to become Prime Minister we expect the ruling class to get more desperate in their attempts to bring him down. The campaign has exposed the duplicity of those Blairite MPs who, after last June’s general election results, seemed to drop their opposition to Corbyn. They are as treacherous as ever.
Even so, the evidence so far is that Corbyn’s popularity among the voters continues to grow despite all this venom. We must insist that the victims of the witch-hunt are not sacrificed but are treated in accordance with the protocols set out by Shami Chakrabarti last year. And we must stand ready for the next onslaught from the agents of the ruling class