Time is Running Out to Stop the JLM’s Clause Attacking Free Speech on
Israel

At the Labour Party Conference
at the end of September, the Jewish Labour Movement and a few CLPs are proposing
to move an amendment which, if passed, will brand criticism of Israel and Zionism,
as ‘anti-Semitic’. 

In Israel there is a far simpler
way of preventing criticism than changing Rule Books. Palestinians who express forbidden
views (& virtually everything can be forbidden at whim) are simply locked
up. Administrative detention means that you can be gaoled without trial, for 6
months at a time, renewable indefinitely. All this is in addition to
censorship.

Dareen Tatour who posted a poem,
Resist,
My People, Resist Them, on Facebook was arrested in October 15
2015 and spent 3 months in prison and the rest of the time since then under
house arrest.  Only a major international
campaign and petition, led by Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States, led
to her being transferred to house arrest. 
See Dareen
Tatour, Palestinian poet imprisoned by Israel for social media posts, shares
her story

The Jewish Labour Movement,
which has never, not once, opposed or criticised Israel’s racist and genocidal policies
towards the Palestinians is now attempting to make criticism of Dareen’s arrest
and similar injustices, a disciplinary offence in the Labour Party.  It is of course supported by Tom Watson MP,
Progress and other racist trash.

In Israel Jews can post the most
vile and obscene insults on Facebook with impunity – only Arabs are ever
arrested or charged.  See Train driver calls on every Israeli to “run over” an
Arab.  Benzi
Gopstein, leader of Lehava, a government funded fascist organisation which
campaigns to break up and prevent relationships between Jews and Arabs using
bands of thugs, called for the burning down of mosques and churches.  Despite calls from the Vatican for his
prosecution, he is still at liberty. Burning
of Christian churches in Israel justified, far-Right Jewish leader says  If an Arab had suggested burning down
synagogues then he would have been immediately arrested. 

The JLM Amendment, which is
based on a misrepresentation of a recommendation in the MacPherson Report into
the murder of Stephen Lawrence reads:

 “Where a member is responsible for a hate
incident, being defined as something where the victim or anyone else
think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race,
religion, transgender identity, or sexual orientation, the NEC may have
the right to impose the appropriate disciplinary options from the following
options: [same as D]”

Shami Chakrabarti in her Report
on Racism and Anti-Semitism dealt with this attempt to say that a hate incident
or crime was anything that the ‘victim’ defined it as. 

Submissions to
my Inquiry reveal a level of concern and confusion (in some quarters) about the
“Macpherson” definition of a racist incident. This is of course a
reference to the famous Report of 1999 into the Metropolitan Police after its appalling
mishandling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The principle that an incident should
be recorded as ” racist ” when perceived that way by a victim may indeed
have some useful application outside the policing context, and even here in the
world of Labour Party discipline. However the purpose of the approach is to
ensure that investigators handle a complaint with particular sensitivity towards
the victim. It is to suggest the seriousness with which a complaint must be handled,
but in no way to determine its outcome. If I complain to the police that I have
been the victim of a racist attack on the street, I should expect my complaint to
be so recorded. However investigation and due process must of course then follow
and it is perfectly possible that an investigator, prosecutor or magistrate will
subsequently find either that no attack took place at all, or that its motivation
was something other than racism. In the present context, my complaint that I
have been subject to racist or other personal abuse by a fellow Party Member should
be so recorded, taken seriously and handled sensitively. However it will be for
the investigation and any subsequent process to determine whether my complaint was
ultimately well -founded

In other words the JLM has
perverted the meaning of the MacPherson Report recommendation into the initial recording by Police of an
incident as a racial incident in order to brand as racists, people who
criticise Israel. 

If someone, who happens to be Jewish, takes offence at political criticism
of Israeli practices or policies and says that in their view what has been said
is anti-Semitic, then the proposed new rule means that their view will
determine the guilt or otherwise of the person accused.  According to this, any Zionist who happens to
be Jewish can call themselves a ‘victim’.

Imagine, in the days of
Apartheid in South Africa, a White South African saying that criticism of
Apartheid was racist against him as a White person. He would have been laughed
out of town.  Yet that is exactly what is
being proposed except that Israel is substituted for South Africa.

It
is identity politics gone mad. 
It means that a racist, when criticised, can define themselves as a
victim and no one can challenge their self-definition.

Logically anyone who wants to
defend reactionary or oppressive practices can claim they are a victim of
racism.  Some people argue that Female
Genital Mutation is an integral part of their religion or ethnicity.  Perhaps criticism of FGM could be construed
as racist? Likewise some people claim the Burka is part of the Islamic faith.  Perhaps criticism of this is also
racist?  Anyone criticising any religion
could be branded as racist thus forbidding at a stroke secularism.  What has happened to the principles of
Charlie Hebdo or Voltaire?

There has been a bogus
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party for two years.  It has been directed at the Left, including Jewish
supporters of the Palestinians such as myself and Jackie Walker.  Jeremy Corbyn was accused
of anti-Semitism for allegedly associating with a holocaust denier. The bogus
Zionist ‘charity’ the Campaign Against
Anti-Semitism even filed
a complaint against Corbyn for anti-Semitism.

If
the JLM amendment is passed then anyone who criticises Israel or Zionism, the
ideology and movement that led to the founding of the Israeli state as a Jewish
majority and racial supremacist state, will be liable to be accused of
anti-Semitism.  The JLM’s attempt to
forbid criticism of Israel by crying ‘anti-Semitism’ will have a chilling
effect on free speech in the Labour Party. 

Anyone can define themselves as
a victim. In practice this will be only Zionist Jews.  Anti-Zionist Jews, who are the subject of real
abuse, (‘self haters, kapos etc.) can expect to be disregarded.  Some of us already have been suspended in
Iain McNicol’s witch-hunt. 

The JLM is the British branch of
the Israeli Labour Party.  It describes
itself as the ‘sister party’ of the ILP.  The ILP is an openly racist party.  Isaac Herzog, its recently resigned leader
spoke of his nightmare that Israel
had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s
Knesset.  Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?  Herzog also recently declared
that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab
Lovers’ Herzog slammed for remark about ‘Arab lovers’.  It was
an Israeli Labour Government that expelled ¾ million Palestinians in 1948 in
order that Israel could become a majority Jewish state. 

So the ‘mere holding or expression of belief’ will become a disciplinary offence
– this is thought crime.  Many people
hold racist opinions.  We live in a
racist, sexist etc. society.  The way to
eradicate such views is not to expel people but to persuade and educate
them.  It would exclude large swathes of
the working class from membership because their language is not PC.

This is a pernicious and
dangerous amendment from those whose prime purpose, ironically, is to defend a
state that thinks nothing of demolishing a Bedouin village such as Umm al-Hiran
in order to replace it with a Jewish town. 
See New
Israeli Town Built on Ruins of Bedouin Village Trying to Bar non-Jews (Ha’aretz,
8.8.17.)

It
is ironic that the defenders of Apartheid are proposing an ‘anti-racist’
amendment to Labour’s rules!

Israel defines itself as a
‘Jewish state’, that is a state in which Jews will always be in a large and
permanent majority.  It is a state where Jews
are privileged over and above non-Jews. 
That is why Israel has a Jewish and Arab education system, why Arabs are
barred from many areas of employment and land, why Jewish students are eligible
for grants unlike most Arab students and why a plurality of Israeli Jews
believe that Arabs should be physically expelled from Israel altogether.  The chant of ‘death to the Arabs’ is a
favourite of the Right in Israel. 

The whole purpose of the JLM is
to defend the Israeli state, right or wrong. This amendment means that if
Israel is criticised, it is the critics who will be charged with
‘anti-Semitism’.

The JLM also propose that:

‘A member of
the Party who uses antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist language, sentiments,
stereotypes or actions in public, private, online or offline,
as determined by the NEC, shall be deemed to have engaged in conduct
prejudicial to the Party.’ 

So if someone is deemed to have used racist language
in private they are guilty. This is an open invitation to set up a police state
within the Labour Party, replete with informers. This suits the JLM, since
their whole purpose is to defend the Israeli state, but Labour members should
be worried.

The JLM helpfully provide what they call ‘Supporting argument and rationale’ and
here they get to the real reason for these amendments on ‘anti-Semitism’.  The JLM says that

‘This
rule change would recognise that it is not acceptable to use Zionism as a term
of abuse or to substitute the word Zionist for where the word Jew has been
commonly used by antisemites, such as alleging Jewish political, financial or
media conspiracies and control.’

The JLM’s actual amendments are
ostensibly about anti-Semitism not Zionism but these ‘supporting arguments’ make it clear that the intention and
rationale behind the amendments is to defend Israel and Zionism.  In other words the JLM is admitting to the
fact that their amendments are not about anti-Semitism but have an ulterior
purpose.

The JLM want to outlaw any use
of the term Zionist or Zionism that is pejorative.  The problem is that Zionism is a racist
political ideology and movement.  It is
an extremely abusive indeed murderous ideology. 
How can its use be anything other than abusive or derogatory? There is
no ‘nice’ version of Apartheid.  Of
course the word Zionist should not be substituted for Jew but the people who
are most guilty of this are Zionists!  For
example in his article for the Daily Telegraph, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis,
wrote that ‘One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the
City of London from Great Britain. [see Ken
Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of
anti-Semitism].