Sodastream - an Alliance of Christian anti-Semites and Neo-Nazi Kach supporters Oppose the Demonstrators

Picket of Brighton’s Sodastream Shop

Christian anti-Semites are out to back up neo-Nazi Zionist & 'Christian' demonstrators

Many thanks to Inminds for these excellent photographs of the Palestinian BDS demonstrators and their anti-Semitic Christian/JDL opponents

 

 

One of the most obnoxious and stupid of the Christian demonstrators Jill Young.  Not unsurprisingly she is hiding her face.  Her message about other countries being more repressive than Israel is reminiscent of apologists for Apartheid in South Africa.

 

The public queues up to sign the petition opposing Sodastream and Israel's occupation of the West Bank

Exceptionally the Police escort one particularly abusive Zionist across the street

Zionist Doublethink - a Zionist carries leaflets entitled peace whilst advocating war.  Hitler as also a 'peacemaker' who was attacked by Poland!

Despite repeated threats Mike  on the right continues to come down from London to give support to the Palestinians

The shop is empty as usual, but it pays for a security guard nonetheless.  In the foreground another member of the public shows her support.

Sodastream playing dumb  (or dumber than usual) doesn't know where it's products come from.

Although I was there at the beginning of the pickets of the Israeli shop, Sodastream, I was forced to curtail my attendance last autumn owing to illness.  However I kept in touch with the magnificent work of the local Brighton & Hove PSC group.

In the last couple of months I have attended for the last half hour and I notice that the same anti-Semitic Christians are in attendance as when I first took part in the campaign.  Gill Young, a Daniel and a couple of others, Christian fundamentalists, who in places like Guatemala presided over the genocide of over 100,000 Mayan Indians.

The 'Christian's' consistent message has been that the Palestinians are the occupiers of the lands that they and their ancestors have live on!  Why? Because of the myth that the Jews lived there for 3,000+ years.  Apart from abysmal ignorance (there were no Jews then, merely Canaanite tribes who would have spoken a language far different from biblical Hebrew & who worshipped a variety of gods) for over 2,000 years most Jews lived outside Palestine for economic reasons i.e. the land could not sustain them.  Those who survived gradually became Christians, especially when Constantine, the Roman Emperor in the 3^rd century made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.  Even Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and Yitzhak ben Zvi recognised this fact.

Jesus was, apart from being a Phariseeic rabbi, a Jewish rebel against the corruption of the the high priests,  the Sadducees.  That was the reason why the ruling class and the Romans decided to execute him.  The descendants of the Jews who remained in the Roman state of Palestine were ironically the poor Jews who converted to Christianity!  The European Jews in so far as they had any specific lineage were descendants of the trading country of the Khazars, situated in between the Black and Caspian Seas.  This is well known to  historians and was the subject of the book, which was a best seller in Israel for 19 weeks, The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University and Arthur Koestler’s ‘Thirteenth Tribe’.  

The Christians who demonstrate in support of Sodastream support the transfer or  massacre of the Palestinian people of the West Bank.  Why?  Because their primary religious text is Revelations when the return of the Jews to Palestine will herald the second coming of Christ with the evil Jews (most of the Jews are so termed) dying in the battle of Armagheddon and the Christian faithful rising to heaven in The Rapture. In other words they look forward to a new holocaust of the Jews.  

 In the United States in WWII these Protestant Fundamentalists were the main force behind those who campaigned vociferously against the admission of Jews who wished to escape the holocaust.  Indeed one of the primary motivations of Evangelical Christians has always been to get rid of the Jews in their midst.  Examples about - Lord Shaftesbury, George Elliot, Ernest Laharanne, Palmerstone, Disraeli etc.

Perhaps the best example of these anti-Semitic Christians was Arthur James Balfour whose Balfour Declaration in 1917 set the seal on an alliance between the Zionists and the British which was the real beginning of the Israeli state.  Balfour as Home Secretary, introduced the Aliens Act 1905 whose primary purpose was to prevent the immigration of Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms into Britain.  He was a man who also disliked Jews intensely but he was a good Zionist, which is why Zionist HQ in Britain is named Balfour House.  He wrote that:

If [Zionism] succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support. [From co-existence to conquest, International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949 by Victor Kattan]

Examples abound of Evangelical Christians who are and were anti-Semitic Zionists, not least among the Nazis.  One example was H H Beamish who wrote that ‘‘There is only one cure for this world-evil, and that is for all the Christian white races to combine and to repatriate to Palestine and the neighbouring territories every Jew, male and female, and to take the most drastic steps to see that, once they have founded their Zionist state in their own Promised Land, they permanently remain there.’[The Jews’ Who’s Who: Israelite Finance. Its Sinister Influence, Popular Edition (London: The Judaic Publishing Co., H.H. Beamish, Proprietor, 1921), p. 43.  

British Brothers League - opposed the entry of Jewish refugees but they were ardently in favour of Zionists

 Another example is the first proto-fascist organisation in Britain, the British Brothers League headed by William Evans-Gordon MP, who gets a remarkably sympathetic write up in Chaim Weizzman's auto-biography Trial and Error.  Its President, William Stanley Shaw, in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle of 6th November  1901, who declared that 'I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement which the British Brothers League will incidentally do much to foster.  The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of our times.' before going on to quote some obscure passage from the Bible.

British PM David Lloyd George, an ardent Christian Evangelist, standing shoulder to shoulder with his hero

 But  perhaps the best example of a combination of anti-Semitism was that of Lloyd George, the ‘Welsh Wizard’ and British Prime Minister from 1916-21.  He was the strongest supporter of the Balfour Declaration after Balfour himself.  He was also an admirer of Hitler and after a visit to Hitler in 1936, wrote that Hitler was "the greatest living German".  [Jones, J Graham. entry in Dictionary of Liberal Thought Brack & Randall (eds.) Politico's Methuen, 2007]  

In a Jewish Telegraph Agency report of 20 September 1936 it reported that ,David Lloyd George, who had just returned from a visit to Germany, had expressed enthusiastic approval of Chancellor Hitler, whom he visited twice, and he explained persecution of Jews as due to the Nazi leader’s belief that the Russian Jews were responsible for Soviet press attacks on the Reich.’   A lie of course as anyone who is at all familiar with Mein Kampf will confirm.  But Lloyd George was a fervent Zionist so he is forgiven..   

In case anyone should be under the impression that this was all in the past, the Baptist and Evangelical leader of American Christians and Pastor John Hagee of the San Antonio, Texas-based Cornerstone Church, Pastor, who heads Christians United for Israel, which has 1.1 million members, wrote in his book Jerusalem Countdown that Hitler was born from ‘accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.' Bruce Wilson, The Huffington Post, August 1, 2009.   

John Hagee during his speech describing Hitler as god's messenger demonstrates what a hunter does

 Hagee is best know for his statement that Hitler was a messenger from god sent to drive the Jews to Israel!

"Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." see video clip of the speech.

John Hagee addressing the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Zionist organisation in the United States, explaining why Hitler was much misunderstood

When Senator John McCain was running for President he sought and obtained the endorsement of Hagee.  Such was the outcry that he was forced to distance himself from the brute when  this was revealed.   

The Anti-Defamation League - opposed to 'anti-Semitism' when its anti-Zionism but supporting Christian anti-Semitism of John Hagee

None of this stopped the Abe Foxman, of the appropriately named Anti-Defamation League (it has its own history of Jewish uncle tommery) writing to defend Hagee: 

‘“We are grateful that you have devoted your life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel,” [The New York Jewish Week, 18.6.08] 

Glenn Beck, who believes the Jews killed Christ, after addressing the Knesset.  Seen here talking to Baruch Mazel
a settler and  supporter of Kach, the Zionist Nazi  organisation

  

 But Hagee isn’t the only anti-Semite who loves Israel.  Glenn Beck, who Murdoch was forced to fire from Fox TV for his explicit anti-Semitism, was responsible for the gems below, calumnies worthy of the gutter anti-Semite, Julius Streicher, who was hanged at Nuremburg.  He hosted one guest on his Fox show

‘“…who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.'

Knesset members give a rapturous reception to a prominent anti-Semite

Yet none of this prevented Beck being invited to give an address to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

Ami Kauffman of the radical Israeli 972 Magazine describes how ‘Outside the Negev hall, the atmosphere was like before a rock concert, complete with the pushing and shoving. Most attendees were religious, all the way from knitted kippas to haredim. After we sat down, it was only a few minutes wait till the star came in. Almost immediately the whole room stood up, including the Members of Knesset, and gave the man a standing ovation.’ 30.8.13.  

Whereas John Hagee is widely seen as a clown, Beck is an altogether different figure.  He is a convinced anti-Semite and a member of the US Establishment.  Beck is so anti-Semitic that he holds that the Jews killed Jesus.  Before being fired from Fox, he explained how "Jesus conquered death. He wasn't victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did."

Even the ADL, which is tolerant of anti-Semitism when it comes from Christian Zionist supporters drew a line at this.  After all the ADL identifies the claim that "the Jews" killed Jesus as one of the top four most destructive of anti-Semitic lies.  It was the watchword of Christian anti-Semites throughout the ages.

 But none of this matters to the Zionists and their Christian supporters outside Sodastream.   

The Christians are part of a tiny but virulently anti-Semitic sect within the wider Christian church and the Zionists come from the far-Right of the Jewish community.  At least two Zionist demonstrators, including the leader of the counter-demonstrators, the thuggish Simon Cobbs is, as has been pointed out elsewhere on this blog, a supporter of the Jewish-Nazi group Kach (this description is not mine  but that of fellow Zionists for whom imprisoning Arabs who have sexual relations with Jewish women is reminiscent of the racial ‘hygiene’ laws of Nazi Germany under which many Jews were executed.  Like Nazi Germany Kach/Jewish Defence League does not seek to criminalise Arab (Jewish) women who have/had sex with Jewish/German men.

Hitler greets Bishop Muller, head of the Reich Church and Abbot Schachleitner

 The behaviour of a tiny minority, and they are a tiny minority of anti-Semitic Christian counter-demonstrators is not surprising.  In Hitler’s Germany the Protestant Churches were more sympathetic to the Nazis than those of the Roman Catholics (though the anti-Nazi Protestants like Dietrich Bonhoffer, who was hanged shortly before the liberation of Mauthausen) were dedicated anti-Nazis.  The Confessing Church of the Protestants, which grew throughout the 1930’s held that the doctrine of race was incompatible with the Christian message that all those who accept Jesus message of salvation will be saved.  In particular the Protestants set up, under Bishop Muller, the Reich Church, which was wholly  supportive of Hitler.   

  It is no surprise that both the Christian anti-Semites and Jewish neo-Nazis who make up the bulk of the counter demonstration have nothing positive to say or any message to impart.  They direct a volume of abuse at Palestinian supporters, including passers by, thus alienating the public even more.  Jewish demonstrators are particularly subject to villification as ‘traitors’ (when have we ever been loyal to a Nazi/Zionist creed?) and attempts at physical intimidation.  One particularly obnoxious specimen goes by the name of Chelsea.  She is a transexual who clearly does hate herself, as the  Christians despise transgender people and gays in particular.

It is no surprise of course that the Police have given consistent support to the Zionists, as has the business correspondent of the Argus John Keegan.  They have arrested people giving the Zionists a Hitler salute when they are simply recognising them for what they are.  But of course when anti-Semitism was at its height in Britain in the 1930’s with Sir Oswald Moseley, the Police were his best friends.  Just as today when we stopped the English Defence League marching in Brighton, the Police spent hundreds of thousands of pounds enabling them to pollute Brighton’s sea air (& still failed to force them through!) in April 2012.

Tony Greenstein

The Lies Our Leaders Tell in order to Justify War

When America Helped Saddam Hussein as he Gassed Iranian Troops

There is a simple test as to whether or not military action is justified.  Does that old war criminal Tony Blair support it?  Only last week Blair was supporting the military rulers in Egypt who have massacred up to 2,000 people and for whom torture is the normal method of investigation.  Clearly the death of a few hundred civilians in Damascus isn't going to cause him to lose sleep.

Cameron, who is said to style himself on Blair, is intending to renew the £100 billion Trident programme.  The incineration of a few hundred thousand people and the slow and painful death of thousands more from radiation burns and sickness doesn't cause these people to lose any sleep.  It beggars belief that the use of chemical weapons could be the real cause of any proposed military action.

What is excellent is that popular pressure and public opinion has, unlike the BBC, which was cowed into submission after the Hutton Report, even though Andrew Gilligan told the truth about the 'sexed-up dodgy dossier, made MPs think twice.  Coupled with the fact that bombing Damascus isn't going to resolve what is essentially a civil war, has led British MPs to reconsider the gung ho attitudes of their political leaders. Public opinion has turned decisively against another war.

The US and British governments have been straining for months in order to find an excuse to attack Syria.  Whilst those ‘democratic’ friends of the West, Saudi Arabia and Quatar, have been busy supplying Al Quada and the Jihadists with advanced weaponry, the US and Britain have been pontificating about human rights.  How strange it is that a war against terror, an abstract noun, has been abandoned.  Al Quada is now our friend!  It seems that Obama, Cameron (and f course Clegg) have lost all coherence.  It would be more honest if they were to say that their objective was to secure the Middle East for the continued supply of cheap oil and dependable sources and human rights must always be secondary to the West's interests.

Good friends - Donald Rumsfield, US special envoy to the Middle East and later War Secretary - shake hands over an arms deal

Hypocrisy and Human Rights

It is strange that the ‘war for democracy’ in the Middle East stopped at its most barbaric state.  The Saudi state chops the hand off a poor person who steals a loaf of bread, whilst members of the ruling royal family squander millions of pounds in the casinos and brothels of Monte Carlo and London whilst enforcing the most austere Wahabbist version of Islam against its people.  In the words of an old English saying 

They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common,
Yet let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
— Seventeenth-century English protest rhyme

But what makes the threatened western military attacks against Syria even more nauseating is its utter hypocrisy.  No one imagines for a moment that if this wasn’t the Middle East, and oil centre that the West would be at all bothered.  When the holocaust of Tsutsis occurred in Rwanda in 1994, the United States under Bill Clinton stood by with arms folded.  There was no humanitarian intervention because the US had no interests worth speaking of in the region.  Indeed the former colonial power France actually armed and colluded with the Hutu gangs that butchered up to a million people.

The Hypocrisy of the West knows no bounds

If you are gullible enough to believe that Obama and his Administration, to say nothing of his British poodle Cameron, are actually horrified by the chemical attack in Syria, and it was a horrific attack, then one would have expected the United States to have apologised to and compensated the Vietnames for the use of Agent Orange and Napalm (which burns to the skin).  We would have bombed Israel and the Zionist warmongers who used white phosphorous to bomb a UN school in Gaza and other civilian areas.

What makes this doubly appalling is that the United States (including Britain) have in the past condoned and colluded in the use of chemical weapons, not least by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  Remember the arms to Iraq trial in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf War?  Before Saddam Hussein made the fatal mistake of invading the artificially created British Emirate of Kuwait, Britain supported Iraq’s Ba’athist regime in its war against Iran.  Indeed we encouraged them to invade.  

You might even remember the Arms to Iraq scandal which resulted in the prosecution of the directors of Matrix Churchill for selling arms to Iraq despite a (formal) government embargo.  The trial collapsed when Minister of State at the War (Defence) Ministry, Alan Clarke, testified that it had been government policy all along to support Iraq, although they couldn’t say so openly.  Clarke famously described in his evidence that when answering questions in the Commons as to Britain’s real arms policy vs Iraq, he had been ‘economical with the actualite’.   The fiasco led to the setting up of the Scott Report into the affair (most of which remains secret - judges are reliable fellows when it comes to 'national security').

Indeed in 1968 the CIA had supported the Ba’athist coup against former President al-Bakr and it sponsored Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1969.  When the US’s favourite dictator, the Shah of Iran, was ousted in 1979 in Iran and following the seizure of the American Embassy, the US encouraged Iraq to wage war on Iran.  They supported every dirty tactic including the use of chemical weapons.

Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

FP Magazine 26.8.13

The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand. 

The CIA supplied Saddam Hussein with Intelligence despite knowing of its use of chemical weapons

It's only wrong to use chemical weapons when our enemies do so

In Foreign Policy magazine we learn that according to recently released CIA files (above), the US condoned and indeed supported the use of chemical weapons by Iraq.  According to FP, ‘America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen’.  

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent. 

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose. 

U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture. 

The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy.

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story. 

In contrast to today's wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted. 

In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons' use -- even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions. 

It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States' knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.

BY SHANE HARRIS AND MATTHEW M. AID | AUGUST 26, 2013

As Unarmed Egyptian demonstrators are massacred the Silence of Obama & Western leaders is Deafening

The Arab Spring Dies in Egypt

burned Rabaah al-Adawiya mosque

Update

You will no doubt be relieved to hear that I was that upset at the mental contortions Obama has to go through that I decided to write to the Independent to support him (in Lenin's phrase like the rope supports a hanging man!).  It was my first letter to a national since my recent illness so I was more chuffed than usual!!

When Obama was first elected as President I took a lot of flack from those with illusions in the potential of a Black President for my article ‘Obama – the Black Face of US imperialism’  I was even accused of racism.  White liberals often feel guilty at the use of the term 'Uncle Tom' which I used even though, as Joe pointed out, radical Black leaders like Malcolm X regularly assailed Black politicians and time servers as Uncle Toms.  The Socialist Workers Party, ever the opportunist, was fulsome in its coverage of Obama’s election.  Millions the world over breathed a sigh of relief that the era of George Bush jnr. was over and America’s first Black President had been elected.

Military show of force in Cairo

However since those early days and his much heralded speech in Egypt promising a new dawn   (courtesy of Egypt’s dictator Mubarak) Obama has shown himself to be as bad as Bush.  Drone wars and ‘smart power’ have become the hallmark of his Presidency.

Child holds up gas cannisters fired at demonstrators

Even US Presidents usually pay lip-service to democracy.  Obama, who is usually so verbose, has literally been struck dumb.  He can’t oppose the Egyptian military murderers yet he cannot openly support the machine-gunning of unarmed demonstrators.  What we see is a naked exposure of the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy.  Of course it would be difficult to say ‘we are bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to provide a conduit for oil’ but as Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.

Yet even the most cynical observer of politics (the BBC excepted of course!) can see that the Western leaders have been exposed as hypocritical war mongers.  Apparently Obama has difficulty in deciding whether the removal of a democratically elected civilian President is a coup or not!  Black is white and peace means war, as Orwellian doublethink becomes the order of the day. 

injured member of MB carried by riot police

What is happening in Egypt is a demonstration of the fatal weakness of the Arab spring.  Unlike the 1848 revolutions in Europe that were unsuccessful at the time but which nonetheless achieved their objectives with time, the events in Egypt spell the death knell for the Arab spring.

Police storm al-Fath mosque

When demonstrators in Tunisia forced Ben Ali, its long-time dictator out of office in January 2011, it provided hope that Arab politics, frozen for so long with long-serving dictators such as Mubarak and Assad, would now herald in real change.  When Mubarak was forced out of office, its momentum seemed unstoppable, spreading even to Bahrain in the Gulf.  But whereas Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly mourned the departure of Mubarak, western leaders were more astute.  For them the question arose as to how there could be change in the faces of its dictators whilst maintaining Western interests.  It was a dilemma that was solved, firstly in Libya, then Syria and now Egypt.  In the first two, the growth of mass movements who were calling for change, had to be pre-empted. 
What this meant was the militarisation of the struggle.  Instead of mass popular movements that might go on to challenge the existing economic order and in particular imperialist domination of Arab oil, the West decided to arm one or more factions of the opposition.  Instead of a mass movement to oust Assad and Ghadaffi, we saw a military conflict aided by Western air power.

Egypt proves, if proof were needed, that in the Arab and Gulf States, reformism has no possibility of succeeding.  The structure of politics and western interests mean that the struggle is all or nothing.  There can be no Egyptian Kerensky or Attlee.

Women mourns death of her daughter

Unfortunately it is a lesson that the Arab masses have to relearn.  The need for an all-Arab socialist movement, which is capable of planning and channeling the protests, is self-evident.  Western powers will simply pick off individual countries, turning them into sectarian cesspools and seeking to redivide the political entities that western imperialism itself first created (an obvious example is northern Iraq and the Kurdish semi-state there).

No one doubts that the government of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was truly awful.  Morsi saw himself as the next pharaoh and devised a constitution that gave the President absolute power.  Sharia law and the encroachment of Islamic law, which is nothing but a façade for the legitimation of repression and the entrenchment of economic power in the hands of sections of the petit-bourgeois its clerical offshoot was something that Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood proposed and intended. 

MB volunteer sleeps amongst shrouds

There is no doubt that Morsi wished to see an  ‘Islamic’ dictatorship in Egypt.  However Egypt is a largely secular society and the Muslim Brotherhood was and is a conservative political force that sought to co-opt imperialism in its plans.  Right to the end Morsi had illusions that Obama would prevent the military stepping in!

However those millions of Egyptians who hated Morsi, were wrong to support a military take-over in Egypt.  It is staggering that such a large section of society seems to have learnt nothing from the days of Mubarak.  The Egyptian army and police are the deadly enemies of any popular or democratic movement.  They who supported Mubarak and it is noteworthy that the charge against Morsi is that he and his followers used violence against their gaolers when they made their escape from prison.

General Sisi even compares himself to President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers who ousted the pro-British King Farouk.  Those taken in by this comparison know nothing of their own history.  Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and was faced with a triple invasion by Israel, Britain and France.  All of this was plotted in Sevres near Paris.  Israel did the bidding of the two powers, though Ben-Gurion was openly skeptical about whether he would be betrayed, and attacked on cue and Britain and France imposed themselves as ‘peacekeepers’ bombing Port Said in the process!  The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who presided over the Suez disaster, will go down as the worst prime minister of the last century (except for Gordon Brown).

The United States under Eisenhower used the Suez invasion to oust the British from the Middle East.  When Britain and France began bombing the US took  both countries to the UN and only by use of   their veto did the Security Council not censor them.  But Eisenhower engineered a run on the pound, in the days when there was still a sterling area and both imperialist powers were forced to withdraw from Egypt.  When David ben-Gurion chafed at the idea of a withdrawal of Zionist forces, Eisenhower memorably said that it was not for those who are guilty of aggrandizement to set conditions on their own withdraw, something we should remember today.

Nasser was the most popular political leader Egypt ever had, even when defeated by Israel in 1967, because he stood up to imperialism.  When he resigned in 1967 popular demands led to his reinstatement.  Sisi on the other hand has only stood up to the Egyptian masses – the Muslim Brotherhood today but workers, socialists and women tomorrow.  Those who supported the military coup will not be able to complain when the military turns against them.

The massacre of Morsi’s supporters, maybe 2,000 have been killed, bodes ill for the future.  Army and police guns may be turned on Islamists today but they will target workers and socialists in the future.  Of course there are some in the Egyptian middle classes who supported Sisi’s actions, who also supported Mubarak.  But Sisi and SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) still pretend that they are continuing the Arab spring whilst making it clear that violence against the armed forces is a deadly crime (though massacring unarmed demonstrators is quite acceptable).

The hypocrisy of western leaders should be obvious to anyone who is not blind.  Rhetoric about a ‘war for democracy’ is limited by their own greed and interests.  However the Arab masses have their own interests.

Imperialism seeks to divide people on confessional lines.  It is essential that any popular movement in Arabia has emblazoned on its banner opposition to confessionalism.  It is also crucial that the existing state forces are disarmed.  The mistake in Egypt was to limit the struggle to Mubarak.  But even then those seeking revolution and the overthrow of Zionism in the Middle East face an enormous problem.  The bastion of counter-revolution in the region resides in Saudi Arabia.  From the time of Nasser to today the Saudi ruling class has been active in opposing any popular movements and were unhappy at the removal of Mubarak.  Today, thanks to people like Edward Snowden, this fundamentalist government is exposed as having strong links with Israel, supporting and encouraging the bombing of Iran, just as it supported the Phalange in Lebanon's civil war.  It is now a major supporter of the military in Egypt and is funding them.  The Wahabi rulers of Saudi Arabia are, when not governing, to be found in the nightclubs and brothels of the West.  A poor man who steals a loaf of bread can have his hand and legs amputated whilst the real thieves in society are its rulers.

Western policy in the Arab East, from the earliest times, have been to separate the people from the oil.  This was one reason why whole western armies were transplanted to Saudi Arabia to fight the first Gulf War, as a result of Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait.  Overcoming this obstacle is crucial to the success of any revolution in the region.  Part of the same problem is the sectarian nature of much of Arab politics.

In Iraq, the US overcame the armed resistance through encouraging and perpetrating civilian massacres and car bombings.  It is one of the ironies of the ‘war against terror’ that whilst nominally fighting Al Queda, in Libya, Iraq and now Syria, they have used them to foster sectarian violence.  It demonstrates that the increased use of western forces in the region is legitimised by a bogus excuse.  Whilst Arab fought and killed Arab in Iraq, the US forces took stock and increased their own power.  In Faluja, the centre of the resistance, the US carried out a massacre as they sealed the city off.  Torture centres and prisons, of which Abu Ghraib was not the worst, were set up.

In the Gulf, the local population is not and will not become revolutionary.  Of course in places such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the Shiite masses have that possibility, if they resist the temptations of sectarianism.  In Bahrain Saudi troops were sent at one point to the aid of King Hamad.  But the centre of any mass movement has to be the thousands of migrant workers in the Gulf.  Of course there are real problems with this strategy, not least that it is easy to deport workers from the Philippines or Thailand.

As the Egyptian Armed Forces prepare for further massacres, the burning need is for imperialism to be placed at the centre of the struggle.

Tony Greenstein

David Hirsh – the Fake & Ignorant 'Leftist

Apparently the Nazis were anti-nationalist, left wing univeralists!

Apparently David Hirsh, vehement figurehead of Engage and fierce opponent of all boycotts of Israel, is a leftist!  Well for 'socialist Zionists' he might be but by most other peoples' definition he is a conservative imperialist.

Hirsh pontificating about things he knows nothing about

I first saw this article on Jewssansfrontiers  and I posted the comment beneath.  Although I haven’t posted for some time, I couldn’t resist the temptation to deal with the pretend academic Hirsh, who went down with Yale’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, which was deemed by the authorities to be more concerned with political advocacy than scholarship.   Even as ardent a Zionist as Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, of Daving Irving v Penguin fame, wrote in an article ‘How To Study Anti-Semitism’  that:

‘The university defended itself against charges of having succumbed to Muslim pressure by listing the Jewish studies courses taught at the school and stressing its extensive library holdings in the field. (Yale, admittedly, does have an excellent Jewish studies program, and its libraries have one of the best collections in Jewish studies world-wide.) …

There is, however, another side to this story. Apparently, there were people on the Yale campus who were associated with YIISA and who were eager to have it succeed. These friends of YIISA counseled the institute’s leadership that some of its efforts had migrated to the world of advocacy from that of scholarship. They warned YIISA that it was providing fodder to the critics’ claim that it was not a truly academic endeavor.

The anti-nationalist socialist surrounded by Israeli flags!

I have twice participated in YIISA’s activities. I gave a paper at one of its weekly seminar sessions on Holocaust denial and attended its conference last August. While serious scholars who work in this field gave the vast majority of the papers  - They were passionate and well argued. But they were not scholarly in nature.

Two lessons can be drawn from this imbroglio. First, there is a real need for serious academic institutions to facilitate and encourage the highest-level research on anti-Semitism….

Second, this struggle also demonstrates the necessity of differentiating between those who do advocacy and those who do scholarship. Both are critical — but entirely different — endeavors.

The horrors that Ford found so appealing

 But I digress.  In his talk Hirsh  argued that:

'The Nazis are usually thought of as right wing.  But in some ways, they were also similar to the left.  They were radical, they wanted profound change.  They didn’t like nationalism, they had a global programme for changing the whole world.  They were hostile to British and American imperialism and democracy.  They put their big political ambitions before the ‘pursuit of happiness’.  Hitler claimed to be the universalist and he said it was the Jews who wrecked society for everybody by following only their own selfish interests.

But by and large, the left opposed Hitler and his antisemitism….
When Israel was first established, it was supported by most people on the left.  They liked the socialist experiment of the kibbutzim and the Labour Party which ran Israel in its first decades.  They admired Israel as an anti-imperialist movement which defeated the British.  They supported Israel as the underdogs, the survivors of the Holocaust.

The Nazis were univeralists, who ‘were not so much right-wing as radical had a global programme for changing the whole world.  They were hostile to British and American imperialism and democracy’ Whilst conceding that ‘’by and large, the left opposed Hitler and his antisemitism.’

Some of this is just pig ignorant and shows how Hirsh is a master of the superficial and unacquaintted with the history of the Nazi Party.   Calling anti-Zionists 'anti-Semites' is the limit of his knowledge of racism.  As an example of Hitler's opposition to the British Empire one could quote from Mein Kampf:

Germany should not try to take advantage of turbulence in the British Empire, and link its destiny with racially inferior oppressed peoples.  An alliance with Russia against England and France was no substitute for an alliance with England.  An alliance with England and Italy would give Germany the initiative in Europe (Mein Kampf pp. 601-7)….

Inmates of Auschwitz

It is remarkable how, up to two decades later, Hitler’s views had changed very little since the publication of Mein Kampf.  He was to retain this opinion of Britain until he realised that it would not grant him the free hand in Eastern Europe which he craved, and even then, he repeatedly stressed his ambition to come to terms with Britain.  During the Second World War, the last pre-war British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, wrote that Hitler “combined … admiration for the British race with envy of their achievements and hatred of their opposition to Germany’s excessive aspirations” [Failure of a Mission, Sir Neville Henderson, p.266]

Hitler repeatedly remarked to Albert Speer that the English were “our brothers.  Why fight our brothers?” [Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, Gitta Sereny, p.218]

The idea that the Nazis were universalist is laughable.  Hitler consistently talked of the German Volk (people) and saw everything from that absurd perspective.  Jews and the mentally handicapped were not of course part of his racial comradeship.  He was not so much a supporter of German nationalism, as per the Equality, Fraternity and Liberty of the French revolution, as a nationalist.  These sentiments were codified in the 1935 Nuremburg laws.  In this he was one with the Zionists who also derided the 'assimilationists' and the idea that you could be a German Jew as opposed to a Jew residing in Germany, witness the obsession with a Jewish demographic majority in Israel.  There were no ideas or principles that the Nazis had that could be applied world-wide and nor did they make any such claim.  Unless of course world conquest is a form of universalism!

Ford too was a socialist

As for being ‘left-wing’.  Only particularly stupid conservatives makes this claim.  He was funded by the Iron and Coal barons such as Thyssen and Emil Kordof and the other leaders of German heavy industry in particular.  He was  put in power by the German military, led by President Hindenberg.  One of his first acts was the abolition of the unions and its replacement by the German Labour Front led by Robert Ley.  Its purpose was not to organise workers and strikes (which were made illegal) as to spy on workers and ensure they did not form new unions.  A strange form of socialism. The fact that people like Henry Ford supported Hitler, until a Jewish and trade union boycott forced him to distance himself from the Nazis, should tell Hirsh something.  Then again he probably didn't know of the use Ford made of his newspapers such as The Dearborn Independent from 1921-27. 
The American Jewish Historical Society described the ideas in the paper as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic.  In Henry Ford, Adolph Hitler's Inspiration For Treatment Of Jews - How Henry Ford Helped To Create Auschwitz that Hitler talked of how "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration" - Adolph Hitler, 1931.   Hitler even had a picture of Ford on his wall.  Perhaps Hirsh considers Ford too as left-wing?

On 30 July 1938, Ford celebrated his 75th birthday by receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the most important honor that Germany might offer a non-citizen.   He received the award -- a golden Maltese cross embraced by four swastikas -- in his office, joined by the German consuls from Cleveland and Detroit. 

A longtime admirer of Ford's, Adolf Hitler sent a personal note of gratitude to be delivered at the ceremony. Signed on July 7, the parchment scroll warmly thanked Ford for his "humanitarian ideals" and his devotion, along with the German Chancellor, to "the cause of peace." No doubt Ford too was a universalist!

Hitler was also an imperialist, not something normally associated with socialism.  The 'socialist' part of his ‘national socialism’ was a sop to the plebeian element in the Nazi Party, around the SA stormtroopers, who believed that the Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and once they were got rid of then they would take control of industry, the ‘second revolution’.  The Night of the Long Knives settled that particular dream when Ernst Rohm and the unofficial leader of the Nazis ‘left-wing’ Gregor Strasser and hundreds more were murdered at the behest of the Army and the capitalists in June 1934.  Hitler believed in elites, not just racial, but within the Aryan nation, with capitalists and the leaders of industry and finance being at the top of the racial ladder. 

Left wing?  Not unless your definition of socialism includes Israel and the Kibbutz.  But then Hirsh does see the Kibbutzim as socialist rather than as stockade and watch tower settlements, the outposts of the future Israeli state.  A socialism that excluded the Arabs from membership, in other words ones of racial exclusivity is Hirsh's idea of socialism!

David Hirsh was the leader of the Engage group of Zionists who in 2005 decided to oppose the Boycott of Israeli universities.  Engage was later found to be partly funded by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who are anything but leftists – fake or otherwise.  No doubt the Israeli state contributed to the financing of Engage.

Hirsh is someone who gives lectures about subjects he knows nothing about.  He is a junk academic dealing in cliches and trivia.  Anyone acquainted with Mein Kampf would know of Hitler's oft-expressed comments that he was an admirer of the British Empire and explained how one must never align oneself with those whose countries were under colonial domination.  It was simply that he wanted to replicate it in Eastern Europe.  For example he gave no support to the General Strike and Arab rebellion in Palestine from 1936-9. 

The rest of Hirsch's points such as universalism have been dealt with above and of course Hirsh compared the left and the Nazis whilst denying that the Nazis were right wing.  That I suppose is why on May 2nd he abolished all unions and sent socialists and trade unionists to Dachau.  That is why the Nazi party was given massive support by the capitalists, especially the Iron and Steel barons of the Ruhr.  And oh yes, the old Prussian army generals who put him in power did so because Hitler was such an ardent socialist!!

What Hirsh does is betray his own ignorance of the development and politics of the Nazi party and also the function that anti-Semitism played within it.

That is not to say that Hitler wasn't contemptuous of the conservative parties (DNVP, DVP, Centre Party).  They were gentle folk who would never win over the workers, whom they despised.  They were unable to work amongst the masses and they even purported to believe in democraacy.  In that he was right.  The Nazis organised their plebeian followers and the lumpen proletariat whereas the Conservatives confined their work to the middle classes and rich.  What the industrialists and army feared came to pass.  In exchange for attacking the left, outlawing the KPD (Communists), abolishing the unions they made a deal with the devil.  They surrendered political power to the Nazis and Thyssen ended up in a concentration camp and the army leaders of the attempted putsch were hanged with piano wire.  It was an experience the bourgeoisie are not keen to repeat.

One can only suggest that Hirsh go back to school!

Tony Greenstein