Category: Fascism
Why Marxists must address the Jewish Question concretely today
This is reblogged from Socialist Fight‘ s website:
“The Jewish bourgeois were exceptionally well-suited for capitalist success because the social role of Jews as commodity-traders, and later money-traders and lenders: a ‘people-class’ in the phrase of Abram Leon, the great Belgian-Jewish Marxist theorist of the Jewish question, in medieval Europe prior to the emergence of capitalism, gave them the cultural advantage of a much older tradition in commodity economy than the ‘native’ ruling classes.”
Zionism is the cutting edge of bourgeois reaction today. It is not simply a Middle Eastern matter, but plays a major role in the politics of advanced capitalist countries with much larger populations and formal social and economic weight than Israel. It is not possible for political people not to notice this today; those who do downplay its significance act from social conditioning, not addressing the real world.
Two Commentaries on the Middle East and the Jewish Question
Introduction
Reproduced below are two letters from myself that were recently published in the Weekly Worker. These are published, in this particular case, without any intention of either praising or blaming the editors of that publication, but simply because there is material in those two letters that readers here might have missed. This material is worthwhile in addressing contentious questions relating to the Middle East and the Jewish Question, and making some observations about the progress of discussions on these questions.
The first item was published in the 5th March issue. It is worth noting, since the letter is a reply to a previous invective-filled letter from Tony Greenstein, that it is published alongside a further letter from the same author, mainly addressing in a moderately interesting and thoughtful manner some aspects of analysis concerning ISIS. However, at the conclusion of his letter, Greenstein makes the following remarks about previous exchanges between us:
“On another topic – the recent exchanges with Ian Donovan – I have informed the editor of the Weekly Worker that I have no intention of responding to any further letters which indulge in ad hominem attacks, as I don’t wish to feed what is clearly a personal obsession.”
Zionist Hope Not Hate attacks Theresa May for being ‘soft’ on Muslim ‘radicals’
Reprinted below is a circular from the Zionist-dominated ‘Anti-Racist’ campaigning organisation Hope not Hate, to its contacts and supporters. The circular effectively attacks Theresa May’s Home Office for being too soft on ‘Muslim terrorism’, in failing to jail Anjem Choudary, the former leader of the now banned Islamist radical group Al Mujaharoun, who, though the organisation has been made illegal, makes no secret that he still shares and expounds the kind of views that he used to advocate before the ban.
The problem is that Choudary has not been convicted of any crime, even though he has been routinely arrested whenever there is any kind of panic over likely acts of terrorism. He has never been shown to have been actively involved in any illegal acts. Hope not Hate does not seem to care about this; it is a thinly-veiled call for an individual to be jailed simply for his political views.
Germany’s PEGIDA and Zionism: The New European Far Right
Here we see a remarkable indication of the shift in the focus and orientation of far right politics in the West, regarding the Jewish question, Muslims and the Middle East, and the strategic effect of this conflict in the imperialist world. Open encouragement from an overt and proud Israeli-Jewish reactionary for German nationalism and anti-Muslim extremism, at a PEGIDA rally in Frankfurt. It is inconceivable that this person just represents himself: he reflects the ideology of the Israeli government and the dominant political trends in Israel.
State Collusion: Jewish Extremist Escapes Trial for Religious Assault on Galloway
From the Jewish Chronicle: – which appears to be the only paper to have covered this. Will the left media make an issue of it, I wonder? Don’t hold your breath!
It appears that Neil Masterson, who admits this disgusting, violent attack on free speech of an elected representative, is not to be tried for the religiously aggravated component of the assault he has admitted upon the Respect MP George Galloway on 25th August.
Since he was heard by eyewitnesses screaming that Galloway was ‘Hitler’ and an ‘enemy of Judaism’, most reasonable people would conclude that he should be tried for the religiously-aggravated aspect of the assault. It is clear that such utterances signify a religious motive, just as much as those Islamic extremists who carry placards saying ‘behead those who insult Islam’.
In principle, there is no difference between Masterson and the two Islamic fanatics who attacked the soldier Lee Rigby with knives and meat cleavers in Woolwich. The idea that punching someone repeatedly while screaming that they are an enemy of ‘X’ religion is ‘borderline’ is a sick joke.
But the state bends over backward to get this violent extremist off the hook with a reduced sentence. This reflects the fact that he is a fascist with state backing, in support of a cause – the brutalisation of the Palestinians – that the racist British state is supporting. Masterson is an extra-parliamentary enforcer for Israeli terror in Britain. One could say that he represents a violent adjunct of the ‘Friends of Israel’ factions that dominate all three of the major political parties in the UK.
H/T Gilad Atzmon
A Jewish carer has admitted punching and kicking George Galloway, leaving him with a broken rib.
Shlomo Sand and Jewish Identity: Crystallisation of Hope
Shlomo Sand’s new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew (Verso, 2014), as he says, an extended essay (of just over 100 pages), is something that may come to be seen as very significant in years, maybe even decades to come. This Israeli writer and academic is someone of considerable courage who has braved death threats and opprobrium in Israel, not just for support for the rights of the Palestinian people, but also for his attempts to analyse the history and myths that provide the ideological, and insofar at those ideologies grip people and social classes, material basis for the oppression of the Palestinians.
Sands has written scholarly works that question in historical terms the idea that Jews were seen as in any sense a nation prior to an attempt to create a nation-like mythology for them during the mid-to-late 19th Century. His work The Invention of the Jewish People resurrected from obscurity several facts that are very inconvenient for Zionist ideologues – such as the fact that there was no exile of Jews from Palestine in late Roman times, andthat the so-called Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean, later spreading throughout Europe and the Middle East/North Africa and even wider, was the product of widespread proselytism and conversion, not exile.
He reiterated the long-known, but historically buried understanding that many, if not most, Jews of East and Central European heritage had their ultimate origin, not from the Levant, but rather from Khazaria, an early medieval kingdom and empire of Turkic origin in the far Eastern fringe of Europe, roughly coinciding with today’s Ukraine and Caucasus region, that was converted from above by its monarchy around the 8th Century. He therefore concluded, in a manner that is really very devastating to the entire Zionist project and the racist myths that justify it, that the Palestinians were much more certain to be descendants of the ancient population of Hebrews, whose state Israel claims to be the resurrection of, than the Jewish population whose armed settler movement created Israel. This resurrection of facts at least some of which were once acknowledged by many, including by many early Zionists, turns the entire rationale for Israel upside down.
He was also the author of a sequel, also highly regarded but perhaps less well-known, titled the Invention of the Land of Israel, as well as a number of shorter essays on similar topics.
The historic importance of his new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, is that is a part of the crystallisation of a trend among radical intellectuals of Jewish and often Israeli origin that offers the potential to provide an opening whereby the Israel-Palestine conflict can be resolved in a democratic manner. This means as a matter of democratic principle that it has to be resolved through the restoration of the full rights of the Palestinians. Sand represents a part of this broad trend, with some differences, whose most prominent representative up to now has been the Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, representing people of Jewish origin who have come to recognise that the secular Jewish identity, which was the basis of the Zionist movement that created Israel, and which is still the mainstay of Israel’s ruling class, is empty and self-contradictory, and insofar as it has a political manifestation, harmful.
Third Category
At first sight, the title of Sand’s book seems impossible – no one can ‘stop being’ a person of Jewish origin, any more than someone can stop being black, European, Chinese, or of any other ethnic background. But for Sand, it is not his ethnic origin that he is renouncing, but something else. One weakness of his book is that it is not entirely clear what, if it is not an ethnic origin, Sand is renouncing and ceasing to be.
Centrism and fear over Gaza: “Communists” vote down equality of peoples
Reacting in fear of being falsely branded as ‘anti-semitic‘ by the political mainstream that stood aloof in August in silence while more than 2000 Arabs were butchered in four weeks of carnage by the so-called Israeli Defence Force, on September 14, one small fraction of the British far left showed its lack of revolutionary politics. The Communist Platform, a tiny grouping within ‘Left Unity’ run by the publishers of the Weekly Worker, the almost-as-tiny Communist Party of Great Britain, disgraced itself by voting, in fear of the wrath of the overwhelmingly Israel-loyal British ruling class and no doubt some of its small-scale lackeys on the left, against a key aspect of communist politics: equal opposition to all forms of racism.
This point may at first glance seem subtle or even arcane. but it is not at all. It is a crucial ideological means of manufacturing consent, to steal a phrase from Noam Chomsky, for Israel’s brutality in Western societies. This concept says that Jews are a special people, eternally the victims of racism even when their fellows in the Middle East are the ones doing the overwhelming amount of the killing, and that if anyone protests too loud about this or points the finger at Israel’s supporters in the West, they are guilty of ‘anti-semitism’ – an ultimate form of evil associated of course with Hitler. This facile smear against serious critics is a key method of social control in Western countries today.
Racist philo-semitism, not anti-Jewish racism, is dominant in the West today, and acts as massive social pressure on anyone who tries to meaningfully oppose Israeli crimes. It needs to be opposed, by decent and progressive-minded people, by a firm anti-racism. This should not need saying. But this needs to be a different kind of anti-racism, with the same basic message: the equality of all peoples, but a somewhat different emphasis than in the past. In fact today, this kind of anti-racism is the only genuine kind of anti-racism.
Beating Galloway
Reblogged from Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine
On Friday 29 August the British parliamentarian Adam West, Conservative MP for South Benfield, was viciously attacked by a Muslim fanatic while posing for a photograph on a London street. Horrified onlookers watched helplessly as the MP was punched in the head and knocked to the ground during a three-minute assault in which his assailant rained kicks and blows down on him, shouting ‘this is for Iraq and Gaza’ and calling him ‘Netanyahu.’
The 61-year-old Mr West suffered a cracked rib and a broken jaw and his face was badly bruised. Mr West is well-known for his outspoken support of Israel and his fervent and provocative advocacy of British military interventions. His attacker, who was arrested shortly afterwards, is reported to be a second-generation immigrant of Arab origin, and had previously expressed a desire on Twitter to ‘cut West’s throat.’
Leaders of all three parties have united to condemn the attack. Labour leader Ed Miliband called it an ‘assault on democracy and free speech’. Prime Minister David Cameron, who visited Mr West in hospital, condemned what he called a ‘cowardly’ and ‘vicious’ attack against ‘all of us’, and promised that there would be a robust response to the ‘radical and violent fanatics in our midst who do not share our common values.’
Communist Explorations 