Left antisemitism

On 20 November 1952 the Slansky Trial finally opened in Prague. The Slansky trial: contents . Court documentation published in preparation for the trial emphasised the fact that this was not a trial of “ordinary” Czechoslovak nationals: the names of 11 of the 14 defendants were followed by the words “of Jewish origin.” Where the name was deemed not to sound sufficiently Jewish, the original name of the accused was also included: Slansky alias Salzmann, Frejka alias Freund, and Andre Simone alias Otto Katz. Slansky and his 13 accomplices were accused of “high treason, espionage, sabotage and...

They claimed to have also sabotaged the Czechoslovak economy by making trade agreements with Israel under which the latter paid 17% less than it should have done for goods which it imported from Czechoslovakia. The Slansky trial: contents . Otto Sling, one-time CPC Brno Regional Secretary, “confessed” to having been part of a British espionage organisation and to having prevented accurate information about anti-Czechoslovak conspiracies from reaching Gottwald. Sling also outlined the role of the “conspiratorial centre” in the event of war: “Our anti-state conspiratorial centre was a fifth...

At the Labour Representation Committee conference last Saturday, 19 November, Dave Osler approached me and said: "Do you know that the Morning Star stall is selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ?" Startled, I went across to the stall, with Dave. There it was, the famous Tsarist police forgery, a basic text for anti-semites in many countries in the 20th century and still in wide circulation. "Why do you have this on the stall?", Dave asked. "Oh", said the stallholder, and, I think, candidly, "we just found it in our storeroom and thought someone might be interested". Seeing both Dave and...

By AWL Tube workers RMT's London Transport region held a public meeting on Monday 24 October entitled "Palestine's fight for freedom". Clips from this meeting have been published on the internet. Steve Hedley, the regional organiser, introduced the meeting initially with some points that Workers' Liberty supporters wholeheartedly agree with. He talked about the meeting being in solidarity with both the Palestinian and the Israeli people, expressed support for the massive social protest movement in Israel and made the correct point that the the current economic situation there is linked to the...

The Congress this year of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), on 28-30 May, carried a motion put forward by its national executive committee : “Congress notes with concern that the so-called ‘EUMC working definition of antisemitism’, while not adopted by the EU or the UK government and having no official status, is being used by bodies such as the NUS and local student unions in relation to activities on campus. Congress believes that the EUMC definition confuses criticism of Israeli government policy and actions with genuine antisemitism, and is being used to silence debate about...

If the British National Party were tomorrow to issue a report saying that Israeli Jews were responsible for the “ritual slaughter” of a Christian priest — as part of an effort to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Christians — we’d probably not be shocked. The BNP are, after all, the legitimate heirs of the British Union of Fascists. If the ultra-right party of Jean Marie La Pen in France were to denounce the European Union Monitoring Commission's (EUMC) definition of anti-semitism – because it implicated them as racists — we’d expect that of them. Much of what La Pen has said over the years puts...

Click here to download article as pdf . In the 1970s the rulers of the USSR launched a sustained 'anti-Zionist' campaign, in fact anti-semitic. No surprise. But an examination of the publications from that campaign shows something much more shocking than the fact that the old Stalinist despots were ready to use any sort of reactionary prejudice for their own ends. It demonstrates that much of what many British and international leftists - even Trotskyists - say about Israel is an indirect and unwitting copy of the Stalinists' efforts at constructing a Marxist-sounding gloss on old anti-semitic...

Simon Pottinger on 'A wave of student militancy': From France to China to Spain to Mexico to Kazakhstan, big student mobilisations over the system of university entrance (France, Spain), democracy and press freedom (China, Kazakhstan), and fee rises (Mexico). Tom Rigby on South Africa: Trade union strength roughly doubling in South Africa, over the two and a half years from September 1984 to early 1987. John O'Mahony on "Perdition": "I think Jim Allen's play Perdition, about the massacre of the Jews of Hungary in 1944, should be produced. Those Jews who have campaigned against its being...

Of the many pithy formulae which members of the Socialist Workers’ Party use, one that seems to have a particular current resonance is that idea that “the road to Palestinian liberation runs through Cairo.” Or, as the headline to an article by John Rose in Socialist Worker (12 February 2011) puts it, “Answer to Palestine question is in Cairo.” What do the SWP mean by this? Rose’s article argues against any possibility for Palestinian liberation that does not involve “the rest of the Arab world” and asserts that “the outcome of the Egyptian revolution will shape the Palestinian leadership.”...