Welcome To Zelo Street!

This is a blog of liberal stance and independent mind

Monday 16 December 2019

Tory Attack On Anti-Semitism … Is Anti-Semitic

The day before last week’s General Election, the Guardian told readersBoris Johnson has invoked some of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic stereotypes in a book he wrote when he was a Conservative shadow minister. He describes ‘Jewish oligarchs’ who run the media, and fiddle the figures to fix elections in their favour”. There was more.
Eric Pickles

He portrays a Jewish character, Sammy Katz, with a ‘proud nose and curly hair’, and paints him as a malevolent, stingy, snake-like Jewish businessman who exploits immigrant workers for profit … Johnson has form when it comes to anti-Jewish hatred [Taki is mentioned] …  Even now Johnson continues to cosy up to Donald Trump, despite his rhetoric about Jewish disloyalty and support for neo-Nazis”. How to counter this?

Simples. Tories declare that they, with alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel’s backing, are hot on anti-Semitism. So it was that Conservative Friends of Israel declared “To rapturous applause in Jerusalem, [Eirc Pickles] expresses pride that new incoming [Conservative] Government under [Boris Johnson ]will make it illegal for any public body to engage in any way with BDS. ‘BDS is antisemitic and should be treated as such’”.
Who better than Eric Pickles, the man who knows exactly when to call out opponents for alleged racism, to make the declaration? But then several problems enter, not least that he made his declaration at the King David Hotel, scene of a terrorist attack before the creation of the state of Israel, which killed more than 90 people. Sensitive of Pickles, then.

Moreover, Pickles’ supposedly impeccable anti-racism was marred by his support for unrepentant racist Ray Honeyford, whose incendiary article “Education and race - an alternative view” eventually saw him removed from the headship of Drummond Middle School in Bradford. And then there is the claim that BDS is “anti-Semitic”.
That claim has been made previously (see HERE), but what Pickles is doing - conflating “[all]Jews” with “Israel” is in fact an anti-Semitic trope. Worse, as the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which the Tories urged Labour to adopt without exception, states unequivocallyHowever, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. What that means is not difficult to understand.

If boycotting the state of Israel is an act performed in the same way as boycotts of other countries - which by definition are not majority Jewish states - then it falls into the IHRA category which “cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic”. The IHRA definition contains eleven examples of anti-Semitic behaviour; criticism similar to that levelled against other countries is not one of them. And it is not in the gift of Eric Pickles to make it so.
Moreover, True Torah Jews have asserted “There are many Jews who identify as Anti-Zionist because we care about other Jews. Zionism is an atheistic movement that hijacked the name of Judaism to gain legitimacy. Jews are not proxy citizens of Israel and it is anti Semitic to suggest otherwise”. The Irgun, who bombed the King David Hotel, were Zionists. The term does not mean the same as “Jews”.

The Tories have opened their mouths to proclaim another great policy announcement. And in doing so, they have not at all elegantly inserted boot therein. No change there, then.
Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I doubt that tub of melted lard Pickles has put his foot in his mouth. The disgusting fat twat hasn't seen his penis - if he has one - in years. So the physical contortion is beyond him.

Sam said...

The racism genie is out of the bottle and off and running. And the blame lies with Jewish so-called "community leaders", groups like the CFoI and others like the right wing media. We have Melanie Phillips now ramping up hatred for Muslim groups in the Jewish Chronicle. Pritti Patel muted separate laws a few months ago for Romany Gypsies & Travelers in a dog whistle that could have been straight out of Heinrich Himmler's notorious pamphlet 'Combating The Gypsy Plague". Not one Jewish representative or even the Chief Rabbi raised an eyebrow or if they did, it was in private. Considering the Nazis decided to put the Romani aside for the moment while they dealt with the more pressing "problem of the Jews" first before eventually murdering Travelers en masse, you would think the Jewish community may have raised a complaint. But no. It's like these fanatics seem to believe that real racists will somehow discriminate and perhaps be able to recognize who are the "wrong or self hating" Jews as a journalist found just the other day as a group of yobs got on London bus and starting chanting "Jews get off".
It's going to get a lot worse.
# There is always hope for rehabilitation though. The King David atrocity was done with the approval and aid of the Haganah another British deemed terrorist organization of which one prominent member was an unskilled Frank Lowy who eventually emigrated to Australia (but would never have been allowed in under the current much loved by Boris "points system) became the countries richest man with his giant Westfield Shopping Centres and who was knighted by The Queen in 2016.
Perhaps there is a Re-Education Camp Jeremy Corbyn can be sent to in Israel for "readjustment"

David said...

Pickles continues his attack on local government. No surprise to those who remember his tenure in Bradford.

One mistake, though. A letter in the Guardian pointed out Johnson's anti-Semitism. The Guardian itself has not veered from the Party line that anti-Semitism is only to be found in the Labour Party.

Unknown said...

"Begin carried out that threat on 30 July. That day the Irgun announced that it had executed two British sergeants, Cliff Martin and Mervyn Paice, whom it had kidnapped a fortnight earlier as they walked home from a bar. A communiqué it issued parodied British legal jargon, stating that the two dead men had been found guilty of ‘illegal entry into the Hebrew Homeland’, of membership of a ‘criminal terrorist organisation’ – namely, ‘the British Occupation Army in Palestine’ – and of ‘illegal possession of arms'. Propaganda the group devised soon afterwards aimed at ordinary British soldiers noted that when, on previous occasions, they had kidnapped officers, the British had swiftly commuted or postponed death sentences, but when it was only sergeants’ lives at stake, they had not bothered. The tactic worked. The British carried out no more executions in Palestine. The two sergeants’ bodies were found hanging in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya the following day, and before they were retrieved the press was allowed to photograph them. The Daily Express ran its photograph above the caption, ‘Hanged Britons: Picture That Will Shock the World’. The ground beneath the hanging corpses had been mined so that there was an explosion when they were cut down. One body was mangled and blown twenty yards; small pieces of the other were found as far as two hundred yards away. Press reports of the gruesome discovery and the aftermath of the booby traps triggered rioting in more than a dozen towns and cities across Britain during the first week of August."
This is the atheist Zionists who run Israel. I can only commend James Barr's book 'A Line in the Sand', from which the above quote comes and which goes a long way to explain the mess that is the Middle East.