Tony Greenstein | 24 June 2017 | Post Views:

Early Day Motion Supporting IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism Means Supporting Israeli Apartheid

Write to your MP asking them not to sign it 

Model Letter Below

This is what Joan Ryan MP’s idea of loyalty to the Labour Party amounted to 
It was only a few days ago that I wrote about the disappointment of Labour Friends of
Israel and Labour’s Zionist lobby at the fact that Jeremy Corbyn did so well in
the election. [Labour
Friends of Israel & the Zionists are Set to Relaunch False ‘Anti-Semitism’
Campaign
].  Joan Ryan, Chair of
Labour Friends of Israel and one of the most corrupt MPs, issued
a letter to her constituents in which she compared Corbyn unfavourably to Theresa May:
John Mann – the leader of the false ‘anti-Semitism’ witch hunt
“I know from speaking to people around here that
many who have previously voted Labour are thinking hard this time because, they
tell me, they have more confidence in Theresa
May
 as prime minister than they would have in Jeremy Corbyn.

“The polls are all saying that the Conservative
party will win a large majority, possibly with more MPs than they have ever had
before. Realistically, no one thinks Theresa May will not be prime minister or
that she will not have the majority she needs to negotiate Brexit.”
This blog forced John Mann to delete the above FB page

The latest effort to restart the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is an Early Day Motion, in essence a parliamentary petition which MPs sign, as an indication for the support a topic has.  John Mann has put a second EDM down this year supporting the International Holocaust Definition of anti-Semitism.  The IHRA, which is essentially the same as the old Working Definition on Anti-Semitism that the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency junked 4 years, has just been rejected by the University Colleges Union (UCU).

Fraser -v- UCU Employment Tribunal was scathing about the quality of Mann’s evidence

Whereas some on the Right, like Owen Smith, have accepted that they
were wrong and are apparently reformed sinners, others such as John Mann, Ryan, Streeting
and Woodcock are determined to continue the fight against Corbyn and the Left. For
them, the main enemy is Corbyn not the Conservatives.

Ken Livingstone being harangued by a bore

Ryan and Mann’s priorities are stopping Corbyn not achieving a Labour
government.  After all no one is more
supportive of Israel than Theresa May. She is the lesser evil. Mann campaigned
furiously in the summer of 2015 to have the ballot called off when it
appeared that Corbyn would win the leadership. A rekindling of the false
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is seen by Mann, Ryan and co. as the best way of
undermining Corbyn.

Joan Ryan MP for Tel Aviv North attack on Corbyn is exploited by Daily Mail to attack Corbyn in election

Mann last year stage managed an attack
on Ken Livingstone in conjunction with the Murdoch media for speaking the truth
when he said that the Nazis had supported Zionism.  Mann as Chair of the Parliamentary Committee
on Anti-Semitism has fought a long- campaign alleging that the
Labour Party is overrun with ‘anti-Semitism’ and pillorying Corbyn for not rooting
out fake ‘anti-Semitism’.  He has called
for both myself
and Jackie
Walker
to be expelled.

Mann has fought tirelessly to conflate criticism of the Israeli state
with ‘anti-Semitism’.  That is why he
supports the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
definition of anti-Semitism.  It contains a short, confusing and ambiguous
definition of anti-Semitism and then 11 examples which might be anti-Semitic, 7 of which relate to Israel.
Despite stating explicitly that it is a ‘non-legal definition’ the IHRA has
been used to attack free speech, Israel Apartheid week and Palestine events up
and down the country.

Letter from Joan Ryan to her constituents attacking Jeremy Corbyn – 

A legal
opinion
from Hugh Tomlinson QC was recently obtained which holds that the
IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is vague and unclear.  He concludes that ‘A public authority which sought to apply the IHRA Definition to
prohibit or sanction such activities
[e.g. calling Israel a racist
endeavour or an Apartheid state] would be
acting unlawfully.’

Sir Stephen Sedley, the most radical civil liberties minded Judge to
have sat on the Court of Appeal, who is himself Jewish, was even more coruscating.  He spoke of:

The only thing Joan Ryan didn’t claim for was her toilet paper (wait – I’ll check!)
‘a protean definition of
anti-semitism which is open to manipulation and capture by the background
interests I have mentioned. In this regard I would go rather further than Hugh
Tomlinson does in his careful and well-reasoned Opinion. The
governing proposition that antisemitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards
Jews” carries the clear implication that it may equally be expressed in other,
unspecified, ways.

As Hugh Tomlinson says, this
passage is vague and confusing; but I am not sure that the critique should stop
there. It seems to me that its open-ended formulation has a thought-out
purpose: to bring within the pale of antisemitism perceptions of
Jews — possibly but not necessarily of all Jews — which fall short of hatred.
While this may legitimately cover familiar antisemitic slanders about greed,
clannishness and so forth, it is also capable of embracing perceptions of
Zionism which are the subject of legitimate debate and disagreement.

That this is part of the intended
reach is now becoming evident. One of the adopted examples is “Denying the Jewish people their right to
self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel
is a racist endeavour.”
This passage bristles with controversial
assumptions. Is there a single entity capable of being characterised as “the
Jewish people”? Am I obliged to regard myself as bound by ethnicity to
people like Benjamin Netanyahu? Then, assuming that there is such an ethnic
entity, from where does it derive a collective right to self-determination
capable of defeating the right to self-determination of other peoples, above
all the Palestinian people? There have been many Jews — my father was one — who
long before 1947 opposed the Zionist project on the ground that Jewish
exceptionalism was exactly what antisemitism needed.
…. why are people, including many Jews, not entitled, without being
branded anti-Semitic, to regard it [Israel] in its present form as both a
colonialist and an apartheid state? The demand that criticism, to be
legitimate, must be ‘similar to that
levelled against any other country
’ assumes that there are other countries
which behave like Israel.
There may well be, but how can this properly be a
precondition of any criticism?’[my emphasis]

The IHRA definition has but one purpose.  By defining anti-Semitism as
loosely and vaguely as possible, it can brand virtually all opposition to Zionism
and Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’.  The IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism is over 420 words because it needs to be lengthy in
order to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.  There is a much shorter, 21 word definition
drawn up by Brian Klug in his lecture to the
Jewish Museum in Berlin ‘What
Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’?  Echoes of shattering glass’
in November
2014. Klug is a lecturer at Oxford University and an academic expert in
anti-Semitism. The problem for the Zionists is that it doesn’t mention Israel.  

antisemitism is a form of
hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than
what they are.’

The IHRA is a group of 31
countries who have adopted a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which accords with
western support for Israel. It is an imperialist definition of ‘anti-Semitism’
and has nothing whatsoever to do with hatred of Jewish people.

Amongst these 31 countries is
Hungary, whose Prime Minister Victor Orban is a racist whose attitude to
refugees needs no elaborating.  Orban is
set on rehabilitating Admiral Horthy who presided over the deportation of nearly
½m Jews to Auschwitz from March 19th to July 9th 1944.  [The Reinterment
and Political Rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy
, Randolph Braham]. 
Like the anti-Semites in Trump’s administration, Orban is ardently pro-Zionist. 
Another member state of the IHRA is Poland whose Law & Justice party government is sympathetic to anti-Semitism. 

Theresa May’s government has
warmly welcomed the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, yet the Tory Party is
part of the European Conservative and Reform group in the European
parliament.  This group includes Poland’s
Law & Justice Party as well as
Latvia’s Robert Zile of the Fatherland & Freedom/LNNK. Zile spends every
March going on a demonstration with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS who
participated in the extermination of Latvia’s Jews.

The IHRA is an inter-governmental
definition of anti-Semitism whose purpose is to brand opponents of Israel as
‘anti-Semitic’.  It has nothing to do
with the traditional understanding of anti-Semitism as hatred or hostility to
Jews.

In January John Mann, who I exposed
on this blog as a liar for denigrating a 90 year old Jewish doctor who had
criticised him, put down an EDM
supporting the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’.  Mann is now up to his old tricks again and
has proposed the following EDM. I suggest that people write to their MP and
also those MPs who signed the EDM last time, urging them not to sign it this
time.  It would be a waste of time
emailing the DUP MPs as they are all Christian Zionist bigots. Caroline Lucas
has already stated that she no longer supports the IHRA.

The MPs who signed the last EDM and
who were re-elected recently are:

Conservative
Party
Harrow
East
19.01.2017
Conservative
Party
Worthing
West
24.01.2017
Liberal
Democrats
Carshalton
and Wallington
02.02.2017
Scottish
National Party
Kilmarnock
and Loudoun
23.01.2017
Scottish
National Party
East
Kilbride Strathaven and Lesmahagow
02.02.2017
Labour
Party
West
Lancashire
25.01.2017
Labour
Party
Bolton
North East
31.01.2017
Scottish
National Party
Linlithgow
and East Falkirk
25.01.2017
Democratic
Unionist Party
Belfast
North
02.02.2017
Labour
Party
Liverpool
Riverside
03.02.2017
Scottish
National Party
Motherwell
and Wishaw
20.01.2017
Labour
Party
Don Valley
03.02.2017
Labour
Party
Ilford
South
24.01.2017
Scottish
National Party
North East
Fife
02.03.2017
Scottish
National Party
North
Ayrshire and Arran
25.01.2017
Labour
Party
Stretford
and Urmston
03.02.2017
Scottish
National Party
Inverness
Nairn Badenoch and Strathspey
20.01.2017
INDEPENDENT
North Down
30.01.2017
Labour
Party
Barking
20.01.2017
Labour
Party
Luton
North
19.01.2017
Labour
Party
Knowsley
25.01.2017
Scottish
National Party
Dundee
West
24.01.2017
Conservative
Party
New Forest
East
30.01.2017
Green
Party
Brighton
Pavilion
26.01.2017
Labour
Party
Bassetlaw
18.01.2017
Labour
Party
York
Central
30.03.2017
Labour
Party
City of
Chester
20.01.2017
Labour
Party
St Helens
North
30.01.2017
Scottish
National Party
Falkirk
25.01.2017
Labour
Party
Wigan
02.02.2017
Democratic Unionist Party
North Antrim
25.01.2017
Labour
Party
St Helens
South and Whiston
02.02.2017
Democratic Unionist Party
Belfast East
23.01.2017
Labour
Party
Coventry
North West
02.02.2017
Labour
Party
Enfield
North
02.02.2017
Plaid
Cymru
Dwyfor
Meirionnydd
24.01.2017
Democratic Unionist Party
Strangford
19.01.2017
Democratic Unionist Party
Upper Bann
25.01.2017
Labour
Party
Stoke-on-Trent
North
02.02.2017
Scottish
National Party
Glasgow
South West
23.01.2017
Labour
Party
Ilford
North
02.02.2017
Labour
Party
Blackley
and Broughton
22.02.2017
Labour
Party
Liverpool
West Derby
03.02.2017
Labour
Party
Leicester
East
27.01.2017

 The e-contacts for the above are:

This is the EDM that Mann put down on 21st
June.  So far it has one signatory.
EDM 7: IHRA
DEFINITION
– Session: 2017-19 Date tabled: 21.06.2017 Primary sponsor: Mann, John   
That this
House welcomes the adoption of a formal definition of anti-Semitism by the
Government in response to the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (IHRA); further welcomes the agreed cross-party support for the
definition, including from the Leader of the Opposition and hon. members of all
political parties represented in the House in the previous Parliament;
congratulates the IHRA and its 31 member countries for adopting the definition;
notes that the definition has been officially adopted by the Government, the
Labour Party, the UK Police College, the Crown Prosecution Service, the
National Union of Students, Universities UK, the London Assembly, the Greater
Manchester Combined Authority and a number of local councils; welcomes the
Government’s update report on anti-Semitism, including progress made in
ensuring wider adoption of the definition; and calls on all other political
parties, universities, councils and other public bodies and organisations to
continue to adopt the definition and use it to better understand and act against
anti-Jewish hatred.
Below is a
model letter to your MP, which you might like to amend according to
circumstances and send them:
Dear Member of Parliament,
I am writing to you because you were one of 59 MPs
who supported an Early Day
Motion
, sponsored by John Mann, in January 2017 welcoming the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. Mann has put down a
new EDM
on the same topic.  The IHRA conflates anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism.  If you are genuinely
opposed to anti-Semitism then accusing people who are not racists of
anti-Semitism is the best way of giving succour and support to genuine
anti-Semites.  That is one reason why the
Christian bigots of the DUP have all signed up to it.
The accusation that opposition to Zionism, the
movement that led to the creation of a ‘Jewish’ state, is anti-Semitic has a
long pedigree. This is unsurprising since it is easier to question the motives
of Israel’s critics than to defend its policies. 
The IHRA suggests that it is anti-Semitic to
describe Israel as a racist endeavour. 
How else is one to describe a situation in which Israel rules over 5
million people, who have no civil or political rights and has done so for 50
years?  A situation in which those living
under occupation co-exist with settlers who have stolen their land and who are
subject to an entirely different legal system? 
Nothing demonstrates the apartheid nature of
Israel’s military occupation better than the disparity of treatment between Jewish
and Palestinian children.  Israeli children
cannot be detained under the age of 14.  In
just one month (March/April) five Palestinian children were killed
by Israel’s army. Palestinian children as young as 12 can be detained. There
are repeated
reports
of the use of solitary confinement, shackling and torture of
(Palestinian) children.  Yet according to
the IHRA describing this as apartheid is being ‘anti-Semitic’.
The IHRA is being pushed by Labour Friends of
Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, the ‘sister’ party of the Israeli Labour Party
which, in 1948, expelled nearly a million Palestinians in order to create a ‘Jewish’
state.  It has not changed. Isaac Herzog,
its present leader, recently declared that his nightmare
was waking up to find that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61
Palestinian Members of the Knesset. 
Herzog also declared that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP
were ‘Arab Lovers’ 
Herzog slammed for remark about ‘Arab lovers’.  If
you doubt that these remarks are racist then what would your reaction be if someone
said their nightmare was to wake up and find Britain had a Jewish Prime
Minister or that the Labour Party should not be a ‘Jew lovers’ party?
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of
the Labour Party there has been a false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, waged by LFI and
the JLM.  In May 2017 Sir
Stephen Sedley, the most radical Judge to have sat on the Court of Appeal, and
himself Jewish, wrote an article, Defining
Anti-Semitism
for London Review of Books.
Shorn
of philosophical and political refinements, anti-Semitism is hostility towards
Jews as Jews…. By contrast, criticism (and equally defence) of Israel or of
Zionism is not only generally lawful: it is affirmatively protected by law.
Endeavours to conflate the two by characterising everything other than anodyne
criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption by
the UK government (and the Labour Party) of a definition of anti-Semitism which
endorses the conflation.
The IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is over 420
words.  By way of contrast there is a much shorter, 21 word
definition drawn up by Brian Klug of
Oxford University, in his lecture to the Jewish Museum in Berlin ‘What
Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’?  Echoes of shattering glass’

antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as
Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’

The IHRA definition of
anti-Semitism gives 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which relate to
Israel.  It is clear that the IHRA’s main
concern is with using ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon against supporters of the
Palestinians not in opposing anti-Semitism per se.  It is an attempt to stifle and curb free
speech on Israel and Palestine.
The International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance is an alliance of 31 countries.  It includes for example Hungary, whose Prime
Minister is Viktor Orban.  Orban is not
only an open racist he is seeking to rehabilitate Admiral Horthy who presided over the
deportation of nearly ½ million Jews to Auschwitz between March 19th and
July 9th 1944.  [The Reinterment
and Political Rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy
, Randolph Braham]. 
Orban has no difficulty signing up to the IHRA because, like many anti-Semites,
he is ardently pro-Zionist.  The Law
& Justice government of Poland is also riddled with anti-Semitism and it
too has no problems with the IHRA. 
The IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism
holds (Point 7) that one example of
anti-Semitism is ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,
e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist
endeavor.’
Joan Ryan’s Wiki entry on her expenses and attempts to cover her claims up
The idea that there is a single Jewish
people or nation has always been an anti-Semitic idea.  It is the basis of the world Jewish conspiracy
theory. The fact that Zionism adopted this belief merely proves that Zionism
and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same racist coin.  Sir Edwin Montagu, who became Secretary of
State for India, was the only Jewish member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet and
the only member to oppose the 1917 Balfour Declaration.  In ‘Memorandum
of Edwin Montagu on the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government

of August 1917.  He wrote:
I assert that
there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have
been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view
or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that
they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true
to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than
it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the
same nation:…
When the Jews are told
that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to
get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine
driving out its present inhabitants, …’
According to the IHRA definition,
the above passage is anti-Semitic.
Other examples of the pernicious
nature of the IHRA include equating anti-Semitism with ‘Applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not
expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’
  This assumes that Israel is like any other
democratic nation. 
In which other democratic nation would
the village of a minority group be demolished to make way for the
majority?  In January the Bedouin village
of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev was demolished in order to make way for a Jewish
town, Hiran. [Opinion
Umm al-Hiran: A Cautionary Tale of an Israeli Government Emboldened by Trump
].
Umm al Hiran is one of a number of Bedouin villages under threat of demolition because
of a policy of Judification of the Negev. Half of Israel’s Arab villages are
‘unrecognised’ which means they are liable to demolition at any time. No Jewish
settlement has ever been demolished to make way for an Arab village.  Criticism of this is, according to the IHRA,
‘anti-Semitic’.
Despite the Negev being a thinly
populated desert area, Israel refused to build a Jewish town alongside Umm
al-Hiran. Like good colonialists, Israel sought to remove the indigenous
population entirely.  It is practices
such as this which the IHRA is seeking to protect under the rubric of
‘anti-Semitism’.
The State of Israel defines
itself as a Jewish state.  In Europe
religious states went out of fashion with the French Revolution in 1789.  It is inevitable that those who are not
Jewish in Israel are seen as strangers and interlopers.  The idea that religion and nationality are
coterminous is a backward and reactionary idea. 
According to the Pew Research Centre’s Report Israel’s
Religiously Divided Society
a plurality, 48% of Israeli Jews, want the
physical expulsion of Israeli Arabs. 
Israel today is a society which
is rapidly moving to the Right.  In the
past year legislation has been passed allowing for the expulsion of Arab
members of the Knesset, a Jewish State Bill which removes Arabic as an official
language, a bill barring anyone who supports BDS from Israel and the Muezzin Bill
restricting the use of outside speakers by Muslim (but not Jewish) religious
institutions.  The latest legislative
proposals include the banning of all foreign funding of human rights NGO’s such
as B’tselem and Breaking the Silence. 
Those who sign John Mann’s EDM
conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are aligning themselves with Israel’s
far Right and its attacks on Israel’s remaining democratic rights.  You will be supporting a state where
demonstrations chanting ‘Death
to the Arabs’
are now commonplace.
I hope that you will think
seriously about whether or not you wish to add your name to an EDM whose sole
purpose is to legitimise Israeli racism under the banner of fighting
‘anti-Semitism’.
Yours sincerely

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Tony Greenstein

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