Fighting antisemitism

Anti-Semitism and the Left: an Open Letter to Tony Cliff [1988]

Click here to download pdf . Dear Cliff: The present nightmarish reawakening of the furies of Judeophobia in Eastern Europe demands of honest socialists whose commitment to the destruction of Israel puts them in an attitude of comprehensive hostility to all but a handful of the Jews alive in the world today that they look at their own political features in the mirror of these events. After Hitler, anti-semitism disguised itself, and drew new nourishment from the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East which had been intensified by the Holocaust. It was a doctrine that dared no longer...

Holocaust denial in the Middle East

Andy McKay reviews From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust by Meir Litvak and Esther Webman. This is good reading for anyone wishing to understand the current situation in the Middle East. It explains the centrality of “Holocaust denial” to Islamist and much other Arab political discourse, putting it into both its correct historical context and the wider context of the often incomprehensible politics of the most volatile region in the world. Throughout the rest of the world “historians” like David Irving, Robert Faurisson and Fred Leuchter are discredited and viewed as little...

Anti-semitism and the Iraq inquiry

One startling aspect of the Iraq war inquiry which interviewed Tony Blair on 29 January is the furore which developed around two of its five members, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman. (Both are ‘Sirs’, but they’ll have to do without for the duration of this article.) Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, a fact not missed by former British ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles. On 22 November Miles wrote in the Independent on Sunday: “The Prime Minister's choice of the members of the committee has been criticised. None is a military man… Rather less attention has been paid to the curious...

Channel 4 on Israel Lobby: Back the Palestinians, Reject 'Jew Conspiracy' Theories

The plain facts will impart a strong bias against Israel in any simple, straightforwardly honest report of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Today it is a David and Goliath story, with the Palestinians in the David and Israel in the Goliath role. Whether measured by economic weight, by military strength, or by diplomatic clout the disproportion between the strengths of the David and the Goliath is simply enormous. To translate the natural pro-Palestinian bias which the facts of the conflict suggest into ideas that there is a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy behind US, British and...

Remembering Steve Cohen

“Happy are they ... who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.” — William Hazlitt Steve Cohen, who died at the age of 63 on 8th March after a prolonged, brave, terrible battle against the progressive ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, became a revolutionary socialist early in life, in the late 1960s. He remained true to the insights and commitments of his youth, and died a...

Lenin on anti-semitism

This speech by Lenin, from 1919, shows how the Bolsheviks attacked the problem of age-old Russian anti-semitism after the workers' revolution of 1917. "Anti-semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed Tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landlords and capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we...

Israel and left-wing anti-semitism: an open letter to the editor of the Guardian (2009)

Dear Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian is the “house organ” of most of the non-Muslim people who took part in the two big demonstrations during the Gaza war. A vigorous campaign by the Guardian against anti-semitism on the “left” might do much good. On Saturday 7 February, the Guardian carried an editorial, “Language and History”, denouncing anti-semitism and specifically the “anti-Zionist” anti-semitism that is now commonplace, remarking on the growth of anti-semitic incidents in Britain (now on average, one per day, and increasing). Unfortunately, the editorial seriously misdefined the realities...

Anti-semitism in Venezuela

By Jack Yates The insects that swarm around decaying human bodies reveal a great deal about the cause and timing of death. Stomach contents are even more informative. Pathologists drain the fluid, conduct biological and chemical tests, look carefully at samples under the microscope. In this way they can pinpoint the exact cause of death, or at least discern the last meal of a murder victim. Analogous methods can be applied in politics. You can tell something about a regime by the vermin it attracts. But to get some sense of the real cause of political illness, a peek inside the guts is...

Left Wing Anti-Semite

LEFT WING ANTI-SEMITE Why do you misconstrue my view? Believe me, I don't hate no Jew; And seeing what pure love will do, What need have I for hatred too?

The New Testament and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Why, again and again and again, time after time, does Jew-baiting, in one form or another, become a force in history? There are always "immediate" historical reasons, but one central, continuous, underlying "cultural" reason is this: anti-Semitism is threaded into the very fabric of Europe's 2000-year-old Christian civilisation. Christianity is saturated with anti-Semitism. The New Testament of the Bible is one of the main documents of historical anti-Semitism. As Karl Kautsky, the leading writer of early 20th Century Marxism, showed in his book The Foundations of Christianity, the writers of...

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