Tony Greenstein 12 October 2016

At the end of last week Jackie Walker, who was Vice Chair
of Momentum’s Steering Committee, was suspended from the Labour Party. Although
no reasons were given there is little doubt that it was as a result of
allegations of anti-Semitism made by the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM].

The Jackie Walker affair began in May of this year
when a private Facebook discussion between Jackie and a friend of hers was
broken into by the Israeli Advocacy Movement. 
The IAM, which describes its purpose as to ‘counter the increasing hostility
Israel suffers at the hands of the British public’, has no visible means of
support.  It is likely that its operations, including two staff, are
funded as part of the campaign against Boycott Divestment and Sanctions by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs [MOSA] run. MoSA’s remit includes co-ordinating and organising anti-BDS
activities globally. It has a $50m budget.

Jackie was suspended in May and after an outcry was
quickly reinstated about three weeks later. This was a decision that the
Zionist movement and the JLM have never accepted.

What
was Jackie Walker’s offence? 

In the course of a complex and nuanced Facebook
conversation Jackie Walker declared, ‘I will never back anti-Semitism but
neither am I a Zionist’. The friends spoke about her combined
Jewish-African heritage, the suffering involved in the slavery movement, and ‘the
Holocaust’ as a debt owed to the
Jews, to which Jackie responded:

I hope you feel the same towards
the African holocaust?  My ancestors were involved in both – on all sides…
millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their
oppression continues to this day on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews
and many Jews, my ancestors too, were the chief financiers of the sugar and
slave trade… so who are the victims and what does it mean .  We are
victims and perpetrators, to some extent by choice.  And having been a
victim does not give you a right to be a perpetrator.

In the light of subsequent accusations it seems clear
that Jackie wasn’t saying that only Jews
were financiers of the slave trade, but acknowledging that her Jewish ancestors
were amongst those prominent in financing the African slave trade. One side of
her family had been involved in the enslavement of the other side of her
family.

The Israel lobby in Britain doesn’t do
nuance. Their role, with the aid of the mass media, is to shout down all
opposition with megaphone propaganda.  The Jewish Chronicle which was
handed the transcript of Jackie Walker’s Facebook comments went to town in the
best traditions of the tabloid press, leading with the headline ‘Labour
suspends Momentum supporter who claimed Jews caused ‘an African holocaust’.

On the basis of this egregious lie, the campaign
against Jackie Walker, a dedicated and long standing anti-racist activist,
began. Stepping up the hype, the Community Security Trust’s Dave Rich claimed
in The Left’s Jewish Problem,
that what Jackie Walker wrote was an echo of a book published by Louis
Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship – Between Blacks and
Jews. In an act of calculated hyperbole, he compared this book with the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, rightly termed a ‘warrant for genocide’.

There is a longstanding academic debate on ‘Jewish
involvement in slavery’ and it too has been the focus of  ‘anti-Semitic’ allegations. Of Tony Martin’s The Secret Relationship, the late
Professor Winthrop, renowned historian of the slave trade, reviewing the book
for The Atlantic in 1995, observed:

‘Ironically, Martin’s assertion that
“Jews were very much in the mainstream of European society as far as the
trade in African human beings was concerned” was very close to what many
Jewish scholars had claimed some thirty years before.’  

Criticising the book’s
selective approach to evidence, he wrote:

‘If
one were to inquire more neutrally into what role Jews played in the Atlantic
slave trade, one would find that it was a considerable one during the formative
years of the trade, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a very
small one when the trade reached much greater volume, in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.

Another more recent contributor to this debate, Dutch
Orthodox Rabbi Lody van der Kamp, in an article in The Jewish Journal,
the largest Jewish magazine in the USA outside New York, wrote in
December 2013,

“Money was earned by
Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to
Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it,” he said. “Non-Jews were also
complicit, but so were we.”

By this definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, Jackie Walker
and the Rabbi are equally culpable.

Round
two

The Jewish Labour Movement, having refused to accept
Jackie Walker’s reinstatement in May, the accusations of anti-Semitism
against her were ongoing. When John McDonnell was announced as a
speaker at a JLM meeting at Labour Party conference, there were calls for
him to be disinvited when he spoke on the same platform as Jackie at a TUC
Conference fringe meeting. The Jewish Chronicle
quoted Jeremy Newmark, Chair of the JLM as saying that McDonnell ‘”must
explain his defence of Walker which is inconsistent with his call for zero
tolerance. This raises serious questions. Our members expect him to explain
himself.’ 

Despite her being a long-standing anti-racist
activist, regardless of her remarks having been made in the context of a
private Facebook conversation, Jackie Walker was hounded. She received a
torrent of racist tweets, the main thrust of which were questioning her own
Jewish status. At no time has the JLM ever condemned the abuse Jackie
received.

Jeremy Newmark, friend of Jon Lansman and former CEO of the Jewish Leadership Council, a Zionist Big Business Group, has apparently become a socialist now as well as sponsoring the political lynching of Jackie Walker

When Jackie went to a JLM ‘training event’ at Labour
Party conference, she walked into a honey trap. The event was secretly
recorded and the video footage was passed to the press. On the basis of
remarks by Jackie Walker which questioned whether Holocaust Memorial Day was
open to other holocausts, such as the millions of Africans who died in the
slave trade; and whether the security precautions around Jewish schools were
likely to exaggerate the fears of anti-Semitic attacks in the Jewish community,
Jackie was further accused of anti-Semitism.

When Jackie challenged the assertion by JLM’s Vice
Chair Mike Katz, that the EU Monitoring Committee’s Working Definition on
Anti-Semitism was the standard definition of anti-Semitism, she was making an
important point. The successor agency to the EUMC, the Fundamental Rights
Agency, removed this ‘Working Definition’ from its website in 2013, as even
the Times of Israel accepted, on the grounds
of its inadequacies. That a training session conducted after the
Chakrabarti Inquiry could once again be based on these discredited premises
does not augur well for a cessation of hostilities.

The volume of the attacks on Jackie increased: by this
point, the aim was clearly to have Jackie Walker suspended from the Labour
Party. Momentum which is chaired by Jon Lansman, instead of standing up
for the Vice Chair’s right to debate these issues, was described in the Jewish Chronicle
as having ‘reached the end of his tether’. In an interview with the
Independent,
Lansman reported that the chair of JML, Jeremy Newmark, with whom he worked
‘very closely’ had been made ‘very upset’ by Jackie’s remarks. The
Independent article concluded that it was ‘widely expected’ that Jackie
would be removed as Vice Chair at the next meeting of Momentum’s Steering
Committee. Sure enough, on Monday October 3, Jackie Walker was so removed,
by a vote of 7-3.

Momentum’s Steering Committee released a statement in
which they accepted that nothing Jackie had said was
anti-Semitic. Nonetheless the Steering Committee had ‘lost confidence’
in her. Reacting to this obscure decision, Brighton & Hove Momentum’s
AGM voted by 56-6 to condemn the removal of Jackie Walker. Camden
Momentum voted by a similar majority as have other Momentum groups. At the very
least, this raises some questions around the internal democracy of
Momentum. 

Despite all the talk of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour
Party there has been a sparsity of evidence. As Asa Winstanley argues in How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s
anti-Semitism crisis, many of the alleged
instances of ‘anti-Semitism’ have been fabrications. The attacks on Jackie
Walker and others represent a determined effort by the Israel lobby to make the
Labour Party, in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory, safe for Israel and
Zionism.