The Hypocrisy of Ephraim Mirvis’s Attacks on Corbyn’s ‘Anti-Semitism’
This is the same Chief Rabbi Who Supported Tebbit’s Cricket Test & Marched with Israel’s Fascist Settlers chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’
If there is one thing guaranteed to increase anti-Semitism in this country it is the sight of Jewish leaders attacking a Labour Party that represents the only hope for millions of British people living in poverty. They will conclude that Jews are the friends of privilege and power
On August 8th in Brighton we defied a Zionist campaign of abuse and intimidation, which forced the Quaker’s Friends Meeting House to cancel a meeting with Chris Williamson. Despite this we held the meeting and defied the Zionist scum who tried to stop the meeting.
Two weeks later I overheard a conversation in my local supermarket, Morrisons, by two people. They were discussing how ‘the Jews want to stop Corbyn.’ I intervened and pointed out that ‘the Jews’ were in fact Zionists including people such as the racist MP for Hove Peter Kyle and most of the British press.
Yet it is very understandable that non-Jews who get their information from the media and BBC will believe that all Jews hate Corbyn. They will not know that Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the foremost academic historian of the Jewish community, has been waging a lonely campaign to get his fellow Zionists to tell the truth. In an article in the Spectator last May he asked ‘Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?’ and then proceeded to show why he was not.
The campaign to show that the Labour Party is anti-Semitic and that Corbyn is an anti-Semite has always been evidence-free. It has been based on the interests of Britain’s Establishment and its voice the BBC. It is in the interests of the rich and powerful to demonstrate that Corbyn’s Labour is anti-Semitic. If they were honest they would say that their real reasons were the threat that Corbyn represents to their pockets
The Zionists if they were honest would say that what riles them most is that Corbyn has consistently supported the Palestinians, but of course they aren’t honest.Britain’s Chief Rabbis have a habit of supporting the Conservative Party dating back to Immanuel Jakobovitz’s support for Margaret Thatcher and even further back, but none have been this blatant.
Ephraim Mirvis’s attack on Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism. This is the same person who was singing the praise of Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ not so long ago. The ‘cricket test’ was devised to show that the ‘real home’ of Britain’s Asian population is not in England but India and Pakistan.
Ironically if the same test were applied to British Jews then it would show that many of them belong in Israel! Which is what the Zionists desire most of all.
Mirvis’s instruction to Jews not to vote Labour is part of a well co-ordinated campaign to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon to inflict damage and destroy Labour’s electoral prospects.
What has made it most effective is the fact that Corbyn, instead of standing up from the start and saying that Labour did not have an anti-Semitism problem, that the allegations against it were malicious and without foundation, bought into the narrative.
No one forced Corbyn to adopt the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism originally. It was all his own work.
This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who joined his predecessor Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. The favourite chant of the settlers was ‘Death to the Arabs.’ Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion of the Palestinians.
Haaretz’s Bradley Burston described the March as:
an annual, gender-segregated extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city’s Palestinian Muslims.
marchers vandalized shops in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, chanted “Death to Arabs” and “The (Jewish) Temple Will Be Built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be Burned Down,” shattered windows and door locks, and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.’ And they repeated Samson’s prayer in Judges 16:28: “May I avenge (the loss of) my two eyes with one act of vengeance against the Palestinians – may their name be blotted out!”
This did not stop Sacks extending a “personal invitation” to Diaspora Jews to join him on a trip to Israel which includes “leading” the March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day and “dancing with our brave [Israeli Defence Force] soldiers” in the settler enclave inside Hebron.
Haaretz Anna Roiser pleaded with Sacks not to attend, saying:
one of the world’s most respected rabbis sends a message of normalization and acceptance of the occupation… Many Jews in the Diaspora work hard to emphasize that being Jewish is not synonymous with supporting the Israeli government, and that supporting Israel’s right to exist is not synonymous with supporting the occupation. Rabbi Sacks’ actions risk undermining these messages.
Not only did Sacks ignore them he marched together with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. It seems that Mirvis finds it difficult to oppose any other form of racism bar ‘anti-Semitism’. See Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march
However the attacks of Ephraim Mirvis, the BBC and the Jewish Chronicle would not have had any resonance but for the enemy within. Prime amongst those who laid the basis for these attacks is Jon Lansman, who I have emailed and texted tonight.
Dear Mr Lansman
I hope you are pleased with your work. By helping to spread the myth of Labour antisemitism you paved the way for today’s campaign by the Chief Rabbi and the media.
It should now be clear even to you that ‘antisemitism’ is just a pretext for an attack by the Jewish Establishment and your Zionist friends on Corbyn and a radical Labour government.
The Jewish Labour Movement, a name which is a lie in itself, fully supported Mirvis’s attack. This is the same Zionist group whose platforms you graed whilst attacking Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and me.
What you and Momentum have sown others have reaped.
If you had any shame then you would retire now and take heed of Enoch Powell’s dictum, which you are so fond of quoting, that all political careers end in failure.
However as you are shameless I suspect you will continue to wreak havoc and damage.
Regards as ever
tony
John McDonnell also bought into this nonsense. He told Ken Livingstone to apologise for his remarks because ‘the Jews are a very forgiving people.’ Russell Lloyd-Moyle, the Brighton Kemptown MP, lied to me when I challenged him over his refusal to support Chris Williamson.
But above all the fault lies with Corbyn himself and his advisors, in particular Seamus Milne. Corbyn, given his experience in Palestine solidarity, knew that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the standard accusation of Israel’s defenders. I doubt if there is one single Palestine activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Corbyn should have drawn up a strategy from the start and stuck with it. It was obvious to me and it should have been to him that the ‘anti-Semitism’ he was being accused of was not hatred of Jews but hatred of what Israel does. That is why his denials that he was anti-Semitic or his pathetic repetition of how much he abhorred anti-Semitism have cut no ice. They were besides the point.
Corbyn was not being accused of Jew hatred but hatred of Zionism. If Corbyn from the start had responded vigorously and stated that he wasn’t going to be deflected from talking about Israeli Apartheid by ‘anti-Semitism’ then he would have buried the whole matter. Instead he made a rod for his own back by apologising, temporising, hesitating and failing to respond. He gave in repeatedly to people like Tom Watson. Even more appalling he threw comrades and friends like Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson overboard.
It is because Corbyn bought into the myth that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party that he is now facing such problems. Every time he apologised the Zionists asked for more. These scoundrels aren’t interested in genuine anti-Semitism. Israel is their only concern. It is curious that in the thousands of stories on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ there is such a marked absence of evidence.
See this very excellent article by Jamie Stern Weiner ‘Smoke Without Fire: The Myth of a ‘Labour Antisemitism’ Crisis’. My only criticism of it is that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is not about anti-Semitism and it’s not based on logic. Like fascism it is essentially irrational and it cannot be defeated by rational argument.
The ‘Anti-Semitism’ campaign is an Establishment ideological attack. It cannot be met on its own terms but by an implacable opposition that repeats that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. We should not be afraid of pointing out that Jews today are not oppressed. They are a largely racist community of White people, with high levels of Islamaphobia, the majority of whom supports Zionism and Jewish exclusivism. It is a privileged community which is repeating the errors of old when Jewish communities in Poland and elsewhere allowed themselves to be used by the nobles and kings. It didn’t end well then and it may not end well now.
The campaign to frighten the Jewish community in this country that Labour is anti-Semitic may have succeeded but all that means is that it is a testament to the powerful effect of a media manufactured campaign and the creation of a consensus. It is also testament to the fundamental stupidity of most British Jews today.
I am reminded of an article in 2015 in Ha’aretz by Anshel Pfeffer on the ‘finding’ in a survey by the far-Right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism that 56% of British Jews agreed that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of the 1930s.” Pfeffer wrote that
‘If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously. If they honestly think that the situation in Britain today echoes the 1930s when Jews were still banned from a wide variety of clubs and associations, when a popular fascist party, supported by members of the nobility and popular newspapers, were marching in support of Hitler, when large parts of the British establishment were appeasing Nazi Germany and the government was resolutely opposed to allowing Jewish refugees of Nazism in to Britain, finally relenting in 1938 to allow 10,000 children to arrive — but not their parents who were to die in the Holocaust (that shameful aspect of the Kindertransport that is seldom mentioned) — and when the situation of Jews in other European countries at the time was so much worse, then not only are they woefully ignorant of recent Jewish history but have little concept of what real anti-Semitism is beyond the type they see online.
After pointing out that British Jews today are exceedingly well represented in Parliament, Pfeffer went on to state that:
To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.
If Mirvis was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism in political parties then he would have asked why the Conservative Party’s MEPs supported the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a no confidence vote in the European parliament. The reason is that Orban may not like Jews very much but he is the best friend of Israel. Likewise he could ask why Tory MEP’s sit in the same political group (ECR) in the European parliament as fascists and anti-Semites.
However as Mirvis is a right-wing Tory it is unlikely he will turn on his friends, even in the cause of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Tony Greenstein