Anti Zionism does not mean Anti Semitic.

23 Feb 2020

Jews against apartheid. Jews against Zionism…. Jews against Tories….

When Zionists call someone a self-hating Jew (for being anti-Zionist) they are stripping a left-wing, Socialist Jew of their identity in a sustained anti-Semitic attack on them for political gain. Anti-racists are being accused by racists of being racist…

I know there are conservative Tory Jews. I would argue with them against their Tory beliefs and ideology, not because of their race. I would argue and fight against any racist views a Jewish person held against Moslems or blacks not because they were Jewish but because they held racist views.

I remember hearing a racist woman spouting anti ‘black-African’ racist comments. She was married to my great uncle, my Grandpa’s brother...that, I regret to say, made her my auntie, through marriage. The Yiddish word ('schwartzers') ‘Blacks’ was the derogatory Word I heard) ... a rare racist comment for me to hear from a Jewish person. She was Jewish and it made me realise how impossible it is to ‘stereotype’ any race or religion as a ‘whole’ even one's own race or religion....’ and that racism from anyone should not be tolerated. Actually, this woman was a particularly, sour and unpleasant character too, nothing like my Jewish Grandma and Pa or Grandma and Pa’s brothers and sisters who fought against fascists and British Nazis in the 1930s.

My grandma's brother.... my great-uncle Joe was a wrestler. He fought under the name of Joe Gold. I discovered that He and other Jewish wrestlers, who grew up together in the housing estates there (Rothschilds Buildings) and others stood at the barricades as vigilantes at The battle of Cable Street against the black shirt fascists to stop them coming through... if the police couldn't protect the community... the wrestlers would. The Daily Mail owner Lord Rothmere supported Oswald Mosley’s fascist black shirts and was also in favour of Hitler's Nazis and Was sympathetic to Mussolini. This explains the Daily Mail's right-wing xenophobic racist stance and bias today.

The Tory press hate and fear Corbyn... the rich tax-avoiding Brexit supporting press baron owners…of The Daily Express, The Mail, and Murdoch’s rags, are racist and antisemite. The only clear way I can see is to look at WHO is doing the accusing and WHY...what it is they want to achieve by it..... It is the kettle calling the kettle black.

I’m not trying to redefine my Jewish identity... as Zionists would try to do. I am proud of my British Celtic Jewish culture. I don’t hate anyone because of his or her race... My beliefs are based on love not hate or oppression.

The state of Israel has been strengthening its relationship with non-democratic, dictator regimes across the world, in Eastern Europe, with countries like Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine, where they have huge problems with anti-Semitism. A reason for this practice is Israel is using its arms trade to buy votes in international forums against the Palestinian people When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Israel, he did a press event with Netanyahu and President Rivlin. One of his comments was that the anti-Semitism in Hungary is getting smaller, but we know what’s happening in Hungary with the Orban government and in Ukraine, where Israel supplies arms. There are neo-Nazi militias that are part of the government’s regular security forces, and this is very concerning.

Instead of fighting anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe or right-wing populist parties throughout Europe that are popular among anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, anti-immigration activists, and Islamophobes, Israel is choosing to fight this so-called “new anti-Semitism,” which is simply just criticism against the Israeli government and its policies, it is not anti-Jewish.

They are not ready to deal with what they call the old anti-Semitism, the people that are neo-Nazis, or their supporters in power. But they are putting all their efforts into fighting any criticism of Israel instead.

The Netanyahu government itself is actually enlarging the risk for the Jewish people around the world because they are not dealing with the real problem, just the artificial problem. They are not concerned with real anti-Semitism; they only want to fulfil their political agenda of taking the issue of the Palestinian people off the world stage. Re Calling me a Self-hating Jew’ The aim in Doing this seems to be to create "a new definition of anti-Semitism that would equate criticisms of Israel with hatred of Jews.... and to define the state of Israel, so it is perceived as a Jewish collective. Just because I was born a Jew.... doesn't give me any authority to speak for all Jewish people! Neither does the Israeli government have the authority to speak for all Jewish people.

The real threat that faces Jews in the UK, Europe and the USA are, those who wear swastikas as badges of honour. Where is your and Netanyahu’s concern for our community then?

The Christian fascists and alt-right support Zionism.... not because they are Jewish... but because, their enemy is the Alt rights enemy.... for now...Islamaphobia... Those Fascists might talk in support of the state of Israel, i.e. Britain First, an anti-Semitic, loyalist racist organisation, a group 'opposing' Muslims more than supporting Jews. Zionists Jews seem to ignorantly believe that their enemy’s enemy must be their friend! So it is really about the politics of power.

You find echoes of this anti-Semitic Zionism among some right-wing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then-Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”. Re White supremacist Christians…It’s more than just ‘Strange bedfellows’ Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “We have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military. Netanyahu and his party welcome the support of these racists.

More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said ‘Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus’, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.

In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.

Not only did Israel’s leaders choose Trump over American Jews, but they did so easily, naturally, and without hesitation, leaping to the defence of a political leader who is actively and openly fanning the flames of hatred that now has an unprecedented death toll.

I recall It was a rare moment, An American Jew confronted one of the packs of Israeli officials who saw it as their role to act as Trump’s political armour, shielding him from any responsibility for the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist Nazi Terrorist.

The Israeli minister was confronted by 89-year-old Edward Bleier, a former Warner Bros. president, media pioneer and Jewish philanthropist who, disgusted by Bennett's observation, gave him the schooling he badly needed. He noted that the Israeli minister is poorly educated when it comes to the Jews of the Diaspora, their history and sensitivities. “Some of us are older than you are and we recall the pre-war period in America when the Nazis convened in Madison Square Garden and paraded on 96th Street with brown shirts and swastikas. And the rallying cry of the anti-Semites was ‘America First.’ So my hair stands on end when I hear an American president invoke that line,” Bleier told him.

This reveals again Netanyahu's hypocrisy in fighting anti semitism...

Double standards are everywhere... I recall The Tory Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, a supporter of Benyamin Netanyahu, who has been convicted on many corruption charges, including fraud, breach of trust and bribery. He had no moral authority to lecture us on how Jeremy Corbyn was unfit to be the Prime Minister of our country. He had politicised his spiritual position to influence voters...

Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in anti-Semitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.

Anti-Semitism exists without anti-Zionism; anti-Zionism also clearly exists without anti-Semitism. The state of Israel defines itself and so is perceived as a Jewish collective. But that doesn't give the Israeli government any authority to speak for all Jewish people! Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”

Trump supporters, who fear homogenising globalism, admire Zionist Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.

Ultimately I believe any effort to fight anti-Semitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians or any other race, is no fight against anti-Semitism at all. And vice versa... any fight against Islamaphobia that dehumanises Jewish people is no fight against Islamaphobia at all.

Zionists elevate and represent the Israeli state to claim ownership of Jewish history. This is Ironic given the Zionists’ extremely patchy record of opposing anti-Semitism and Nazism in the 1930s.

And to define the state of Israel, so it is perceived as a Jewish collective. Those weaponising criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitism are not ready to deal with what they call the old anti-Semitism, the people that are neo-Nazis, or their supporters in power. But they are putting all their efforts into fighting any criticism of Israel instead. the Netanyahu government itself is actually enlarging the risk for the Jewish people around the world because they are not dealing with the real problem, just the artificial problem. They are not concerned with real anti-Semitism, they only want to fulfil their political agenda of taking the issue of the Palestinian people off the world stage.

Instead of fighting anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe or right-wing populist parties throughout Europe that are popular among anti-Semites, neo-nazis, anti-immigration activists, and Islamophobes, Israel is choosing to fight this so-called “new anti-semitism,” which is simply just criticism against the Israeli government and its policies, it is not anti-Jewish.

Socialist Jewish people who support Labour, who criticise Zionism or the Israeli Government are told they’re ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. That is antisemitism. There are Jewish people with all kinds of beliefs and all shades of political leanings... including Tory anti-socialist Jewish people who are Zionists and there are Socialist Jews against Zionism and apartheid.

Just because a parent scolds or criticised their children doesn’t mean they hate their child. It is the same with one's friends and one's country... to criticise, not to blindly love, I am proud of my British Jewish culture I don’t hate anyone because of their race... My beliefs are based on love not hate or oppression...But being critical.

Anti-Jewish or Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are two different things... that is where much of the confusion lies... The word Anti semitism has been wrongly redefined by Zionists so that anti-Zionism or any criticism of the Israeli government has become twisted to mean anti-Semitic.

I am told that to deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory. All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it. Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot. You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians. But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges. Just as the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders. A civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. I used the Kurds and Tibetans as an example to propose that it’s not discriminatory or anti-semitic to deny Israel the right to Palestinian lands…when Israel denies Palestinians the same thing…National determination.

There have always been Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists and Zionists. Zionism and anti-Zionism are political viewpoints. Many anti-Zionists believe in equal citizenship for all Israelis and all Palestinians in a single state.

Anti-Semitism exists without anti-Zionism; anti-Zionism also clearly exists without anti-Semitism. Criticism of the criminal actions of a state is not anti-Semitism... Criticism of the criminal actions of a state whether that state is Zionist, British or American or any other, is not unpatriotic. Those that say it is ...are probably fascists or dictators