Galloway won a surprise stunning victory at Bradford West, where the ethnic/age profile of the electorate is not so very different from that at Rotherham. Ridley’s tweets indicate that she and Respect are using the same strategy, namely helping young first time Muslim voters to sign up with their help to vote by postal ballot for Respect. This strategy won in Bradford West.
@yvonneridley out on the stomp: “Just met some first time voters in Masbrough & they said they’ll vote #respect. Brill. ” #Rotherham
The Islamists associated with the Ramadhan Foundation and Mohammed Shafiq have also been pushing a candidate called Mahroof Hassain (one of their number) as an entryist Islamist Labour candidate. They’ve also been doing an Islamist advance on the local Labour Party. They weren’t successful but did a staged walk out when he wasn’t adopted. Here’s the narrative they’ll be spinning:
100 memberswalkout as @mahroofhussain not selected the only winner now likely tobe @yvonneridley another @respectpartyuk upset in the making
Here’s another line they and the Islamist support crew from all over the UK are going to be running in the campaign:
Ibrahim Hewitt @ibrahimhewitt56 @yvonneridley is standing for Respect in Rotherham by-election caused by resignation of Zionist Denis Macshane. Go for it Sis!
yvonneridley @yvonneridley It’s official. I’m standing as #Respect candidate for #Rotherham where thieving Labour MP Denis McShane was forced out. Great welcome today
I wonder how the Jihadis and Respectniks ardently campaigning for Ridley will square her present persona with her actual history? Her current Wikipedia entry will tell you that she’s been married twice; her first husband was a PLO intelligence officer, and her second husband a detective with Northumbria police.
But dig around finding some of the press coverage from 2001 of her capture in Afghanistan, and you’ll find this:
Ridley’s trip to Afghanistan was more than her mother, Joyce, could cope with.More unforgivably, Ridley put her nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, through a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Perversely, the Express and other papers madeDaisy the main story. “Give me my mum back,” said the Sunday Express front-page headline. Ridley wrote in her first report after her release, “Today I’m looking forward to Daisy getting cross with me because she didn’t know mummy had gone to Pakistan.”
What all this had to do with understanding Afghanistan’s people-Ridley’s motive for making the trip-was not clear. It certainly didn’t help the plight of her two Afghan guides who could be imprisoned for 15 years.
The British press did not to take kindly to Ridley. Alice Thomson, writing in the Telegraph, said: “By entering Afghanistan, she didn’t just jeorpardise herown life, she caused an extraordinary amount of trouble for everyone else.”
At first the Taliban thought she was an American spy. “Amreca! Amreca!” they cried, as she was paraded through the streets of Jalalabad. It wasn’t as wild an allegation as it first seemed.
The press were asked by the British ministry of defence not to report this, but up until three years ago, Ridley was a captain in the Territorial Army.
The most recent of her three ex-husbands, Ilan Hermosh, was less easy to silence. An Israeli citizen who runs a restaurant, he told Israeli Army Radio that he had”contacts with the intelligence services”. Besides, she had no passport or visa on her.
So, obviously, she is now single. (Ridley has been married three times: to Daoud Zaaroura, a former PLO officer and the father of her teenage daughter, Daisy; to a policeman; and to an Israeli businessman.) ‘No, I am actually married.’ For the fourth time? ‘Yes.’ She won’t tell me her husband’s name, though after a 20-questions-style routine, I find out that he is an Algerian she met ‘at various events’, and that he is ‘amazing … so far’. Under sharia, she was able to write her own wedding contract, in which she put down her hopes and expectations and even her exit strategy, were it to be necessary. What are her hopes and expectations? ‘For a happy, stress-free, committed marriage.’
Good luck with that…
It certainly helps your election chances with Respect on a ferociously anti-zionist ticket if you can forget that one of your husbands was an Israeli with, errm, contacts with Israeli intelligence, and on a ferociously anti-British-forces-in-Afghanistan ticket if you can also forget that you spent some years as an officer of the British Territorial Army….
Mind you, if she does get elected, will her fellow MPs have to address her as "the Honourable and Gallant Member for Rotherham"? It's a mind-boggling thought.
UPDATE
Helen Pidd in The Guardian reports the Great Walkout as if it was just some random group of members. This was in fact an organized display of intimidation by the Islamist entryists associated with Mohammed Shafiq and the Ramadhan Foundation, as can be seen very clearly from a look at Shafiq’s Twitter timeline, and those who retweet and exchange links and other tweeter names with him. Pidd presents the unsuccessful Islamist candidate Mahroof Jussain as just a very popular local Councillor who inexplicably failed to get selected. Where did she get her information about his popularity. Why didn’t she mention his connections with Islamist extremists?
She also fails to tell the Guardian's readers that this apparently dedicated popular local candidate also previously tried to get adopted as Middlesbrough's Labour candidate, supported on Twitter by the very same tweeters who were to go on and push Hussain as the popular choice at Rotherham.
What is mind-boggling is the dual involvement of the Ramadhan Foundation Islamist grouping in trying to insert and push Islamist candidates onto both the Labour and the Respect ticket. We all know about entryism, but this appears to be double-entryism. They are clearly organizing to get and recruit voting by Muslims, especially young first time voters, for Islamist candidates, and will push the emphasis wherever they think they are likely to win. They will also try and make the election debate at Rotherham a combination of capitalization on MacShane’s frauds and related “anti-zionism” plus Muslim grievances.
Shafiq is clever enough to try to go on playing his very successful role as the voice of moderate Islam and the Only Muslim in the Constituency to Speak Out against Child Abuse by Muslims. He now has a high profile for doing this in the mainstream press. They never look at what his remedy is– which is to induce Muslim men to adopt a fully Islamist lifestyle. He may well work with the Labour candidate in return for various promises about what his organisation will receive– and will be very careful to cover the links via the Ramadhan Foundation between Yvonne Ridley and the very nasty terrorist-supporting groups associated with them.
Labour in Rotherham has really got its work cut out. It may be tempted to stay silent about who and what lies behind Shafiq in return for his support. This is a path which is of course very tempting for Labour at national level.
It’s also worth remembering that Rotherham is part of a Euro MEP super constituency which voted in a BNP member (amongst others) on a very low turnout. It was the BNP that took the action that led to MacShane’s expenses frauds being acted on, and they are going to work very hard to capitalise on that in the by-election.
There is very little time for Labour to organise. The Islamists have been organizing themselves for such opportunities for a long time.
Nobody, but nobody dreamed that Galloway would take Bradford West. Everyone of course was wise after the event.
There is plenty to attack Labour with apart from MacShane. Getting the vote out may be correspondingly difficult.
These are a relevant couple of Livingstone’s lies that most incensed me, not least because I heard him telling them in person at the London Jewish Forum meeting on 24th April:
Anti-semitic attacks
67. Claim: “In each year I was mayor, anti-semitic attacks [in London] declined” (Guardian, March 26; when pressed about his poor relationship with the Jewish community)
Reality: The London figures, from the Community Security Trust’s annual reports, are as follows (reports before 2003 are not readily available online):
2003: 215 2004: 311 2005: 213 2006: 300 2007: 247 2008: 236 As will be seen, the number of anti-semitic attacks in London rose substantially – by up to 45% – in two of these years.
Hosting extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi
84. Claim: “All I knew about Qaradawi when he came was that the Sun had praised him as a true voice of Islam.” (Newsnight 4 April)
Reality: Livingstone had actually been furiously lobbied by liberal, Jewish and gay groups not to host Qaradawi. A Labour Home Office minister, Fiona McTaggart, pulled out of the City Hall event with the hate preacher, urging Ken not to meet him and saying that “a perfectly good cause had been hijacked” by Qaradawi and his supporters. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, asked Ken not to give Qaradawi “the oxygen of publicity.” When Qaradawi touched down in the UK, the Sun in fact proclaimed: “The evil has landed.”
The video clip I've included with this post shows that so many of Livingstone's present aims, especially that of establishing London as a city-state go back to the Trotskyist programme of the Socialist Action group coterie who were his highly paid enforcers when he was Mayor, and whose Simon Fletcher is the head of his campaign team today.
What a stain on the record and reputation of the Labour Party. I heard Miliband parroting Livingstone’s election promises to slash fares and restore the EMA on BBCR4 a few days ago, claiming he’d be the best Mayor for London. As they say, the fish stinks from the head.
At 3:35 into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone make the astounding anti-semitic claim that Orthodox Jewish laws of religious conversion are racist and that they originate from the same late nineteenth century German racist exclusivist ideologies that culminated in Nazism.
You wait apparently forever for some unambiguous evidence that, yes, Ken Livingstone really has uttered anti-semitic statements, despite his pious denials, then three eye-popping bits come along at once.
Thanks to the hard work of Joseph K published as a comment on this post yesterday, here's a transcript of the context and the key words used by Livingstone in the course of chairing this 2010 Press TV broadcast reviewing a polemical anti-zionist book on zionism:
Is not the problem here that when Zionism was conceived of back in the 1880s, the world was one that accepted racial division… The Germans talked about anyone of German blood, even if it had been a thousand years since they left, able to come back. The world broadly accepted this racism at all levels, and that was the origin of Zionism – ‘every other group is racially selective, we will do it’.
We see that today in this ridiculous situation that that whereas Christianity and Islam massively goes out there to convert people to its [sic] faith, it’s very difficult to convert into Judaism. I think it’s a real problem, there’s this racial exclusiveness that has its origins in that dreadful time… 1880s, when all nations suffered from it.
As ignorantly wrong about the history he claims to be drawing on as he is about the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, Livingstone targets Judaism as a different religion that is racist and intolerant, unlike Christianity and Islam. His “history” of the conversion rules of Judaism being based on nineteenth century German racial exclusivism is a total and malign fantasy calculated to represent Judaism and Nazism as having the same roots. Equating zionism and Nazism are central features of anti-semitic anti-zionism.
Making Judaism difficult to convert to goes back to Talmudic times, not long after the period of Rabbi Hillel and Jesus of Nazareth and although the Rabbis made it more difficult in the centuries following the Jewish Diaspora, has nothing to do with the rise of political zionism in the mid to late nineteenth century.
Judaism is not interested in race. A child is Jewish if he or she is the child of a Jewish mother, whether he or she is black, like the Jews of India, Ethiopia and many parts of the Maghreb, or pale skinned, blond haired and blue eyed, like some of the Jews of Poland and Russia, frizzily dark haired and curved-nosed like many of the Jews of Germany, or has the characteristic skin colour and eyes of the children of Jewish converts who came from Japan and China. Anyone can convert to Judaism, provided they are not the children of a sexual union ruled illicit in the Torah, such as an incestuous union. All shades of zionist movement (of which there are many, both secular and religious, socialist and economically conservative), have always accepted that anyone born or converted according to Orthodox Jewish rules is eligible for citizenship of the Jewish state, wherever they live in the world.
Religious zionism however goes back to the first Psalms of the first period of Jewish exile to Babylon, which yearn for the return by the entire people to the homeland, both the land of Israel, and Zion-- the City of Jerusalem. They have been sung and chanted by religious Jews everywhere in the world as part of the prayers which accompany every meal they ate for almost two thousand years and continue to this day. Every orthodox Jewish wedding going back to the earliest exile days has begun with an invocation to "Let us go up to Jerusalem" taken from the Song of Solomon and other Hebrew Bible texts
Each and every Orthodox Jewish prayer service is suffused with repeated scriptural readings and prayers which long for the return of the whole people to”our Land” and to Jerusalem, which the Jews have always prayed to be granted “speedily and in our days” and continue to pray for today.
Small groups of religious Jews, including some of the most renowned Jewish Rabbis of history such as Maimonides and Rabbi Yitzchak Luria continued to make pilgrimages to and even settle in various areas of present day Israel and the West Bank, particularly the Old City of Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron going back many hundreds of years. The birth of modern political zionism is manifestly not a copying of the emergence of proto Nazi racism in the 1880s, but a complex series of movements which first started being articulated in the wake of the Enlightenment and the 1848 revolutions.
Modern political zionism first became a mass movement not because of German ideology but because of the rise of new post Enlightenment state-organized forms of persecution of assimilated and unassimilated Jews alike across European countries from republican France to Tsarist Russia. But all were in their different ways rooted in Jewish scriptures and traditions of study leading to action.
There was always a minority orthodox religious current in political zionism that sought to persuade Jews to return to Zion so that they could more fully observe Jewish religious practice, including the Torah religious obligation to live in the land of Israel and the range of religious commandments that can only be observed in Israel and Jerusalem.
Livingstone however strives to smear zionism as a monolithic racist movement explicitly derived and descended from the very same racially exclusivist roots as Hitler’s Nazism. That's anti-semitic enough. But then to smear the ancient Talmudically rooted laws of conversion to Judaism as having the very same roots originating in the same period is on an altogether more malignant form of anti-semitism, falsely smearing Judaism as racist and the racism concerned sharing its origins with Nazism.
That fits very comfortably with the ideologies of the current Iranian regime which Livingstone has professed himself to be so much as in opposition to.
Yesterday, a post on Harry's Place featured this video of Livingstone addressing a meeting of Londoners to organize against the EDL.
He claimed to be speaking against ethnic and religious division, but his speech airbrushes out the inheritance of Judaism, seeking to place the Jewish Talmudic Sage of Israel, Rabbi Hillel in what he refers to as what we like to think of as Palestine, by which he in fact means the present day state of Israel where Hillel lived and studied.
Livingstone then talks of Jesus, likewise of Ancient Israel, also without mentioning that he was an observant Jew who regarded himself as such, as coming along several hundred years later than Rabbi Hillel. In fact, they were virtually contemporaries drawing on identical Jewish scriptures and traditions and there are far more similarities in their religious teaching and practice than there are differences. Livingstone claims that Jesus of Nazareth never once uttered a single sentence of intolerance of anybody. He seems not to have come across these quotations of the words of Jesus from the Christian Gospels which include some of those most at variance with rabbinical Jewish teaching :
“Then shall he also say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting FIRE, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
“It would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he was cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.”
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’
“For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 3and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
The implications of both this talk and the Press TV one, is that while Christianity to some extent, and particularly Islam (based centrally on one small extract from Mohammed's final sermon, and ignoring some more problematic issues with different interpretations of Mohammed's teachings as a whole by some groups of its followers) are exemplary in teaching racial tolerance, Judaism is not, and incorporates Nazi-style racism in its very conditions for joining the religion.
If we do want to look for some shocking examples of religious bigotry born of ignorance and malice which Livingstone decries in his talk to the Unite meeting, we need look no further than Livingstone himself speaking on Press TV just a year earlier and in this talk.
There are many who swear that Livingstone is not anti-semitic, notably Ed Miliband, who famously declared, albeit meaninglessly, that he "does not have an anti-semitic bone in his body". Actually, I am inclined to believe that were there three or four million Jewish voters in London and Israel owned the oil supplies of the western world and the Islamic countries had none, he might be regularly heard courting Jews and actually learning something about Judaism. Maybe.
In fact the question of whether Livingstone "is" anti-semitic or not is not as relevant as the fact that he chooses to use anti-semitic tropes and smears for political purposes,just as he is currently uttering the expression of believers' piety for the Islamic prophet Mohammed, "peace be upon him". Only in the case of his anti-semitic utterances, his reasons for doing so are malign and utterly discreditable, and over the last few years they seem to run very closely parallel to the anti-semitic views and eliminationist "ideals" central to the politics of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.
In October 2007, the Evening Standard published a list of the 25 most influential people running London.[1] Livingstone headed the list which contained the names of 13 other individuals who worked directly or indirectly for the mayor, four of the people on the list were Livingstone's closest mayoral advisory they have also been members of a tiny Trotskyist party which has worked closely and discreetly with Ken Livingstone for more than 20 years.
Socialist Action is an organisation so discreet and secretive that it does not even admit its own existence and its members will not confirm they have ever belonged to the group. When I interviewed Ken Livingstone about Socialist Action for this book, he pressed me for evidence at first, before acknowledging its existence and the importance of the role played by those who had been associated with it . It has a website and it has a printing press and those who have been associated with it have enjoyed great influence over London.
By my calculation, at least five of the mayor's advisors are or have been members of Socialist Action, and there are several others who do work for the mayor or organisations with which he is associated. In 2007 they includedthen : Simon Fletcher, the mayor's chief of staff; John Ross, then Greater, then director of economics and business for the Greater London Authority (GLA); Redmond O'Neill, then GLA director of public affairs and transport (he subsequently died); Mark Watts, GLA climate change advisor; and Jude Woodward, senior policy advisor.
Others have included Atma Singh, the former advisor on Muslim issues and Professor Alan Freeman, who became prominent in the Unison branch at City Hall, and also runs the Venezuelan Information Centre - a propaganda organisation of which Ken Livingstone is president. The concentration of power by Socialist Action is the more astonishing when according to Ken Livingstone, it has probably had no more than 120 members in the last decade.[2]
On the face of it, Livingstone appears to have drawn much of his political talent from a comparatively small political gene pool. Livingstone's close association with Socialist Action is an integral part or his story. Under his patronage, the group has become probably the most successful and influential revolutionary Marxist organization in Britain. Socialist Action has long been Livingstone's guiding light, his foot soldiers, his mentors, and his political family.
It is clear that from 1985, Socialist Action set out to make itself indispensable to Ken Livingstone and to seek control, or 'hegemony' over the forces and groups making up the Labour Left. It has proved phenomenally successful. Socialist Action has made remarkable attempts to cover its tracks and even disappear altogether as an organisation, as part of the deep entryist policy adopted in the mid 1980s to protect members from any potential Militant-style purge. In part it has derived its power over the years from its secrecy and its deniability.
As far back as 1983, the group resolved to disappear from public consciousness, or as one internal document put it at the time, to bring about 'the dissolution of the public lace'.[3] Leading members of Socialist Action are unquestionably talented and highly able but they blundered in thinking they could make their organisation invisible because they have left a paper trail a mile wide. .....
John Ross was at the forefront of the internal struggle to ditch the industrial strategy and get all IMG members to join the Labour Party en masse and then seek to control the Left bloc within it. Supporting Ross was another key figure in Livingstone's political career, Redmond O'Neill. At the December 1982 conference, Ross carried the day and over the next few months IMG members joined the Labour Party. A minority who disagreed with the policy of 'deep eritryism' split away and formed its own party, the International Group which became a political irrelevance.
Despite becoming Labour members, the Ross majority still remained organised as a separate political organization. They decided to rebrand themselves as the Socialist League, and to establish a newspaper called Socialist Action. Like Militant, the group became known by the name of their paper rather than as the Socialist League. 'The.next steps towards a revolutionary party comprise a fight for a class struggle within the Bennite current,' said one discussion paper at the time. 'For this a new newspaper is necessary - one that is seen as the voice of revolutionary socialists within the Labour Party and which can thereby give political expressions to the mass struggles of workers and youth who in the next period will seek overall political answers within the Labour Party. '…
Socialist Action will fight for leadership within the Bennite Current.'[12]
The Socialist League/Socialist Action met for the first time as a central committee at the Intensive English School in Star Street near Marble Arch for the start of a two-day conference on Saturday, 22 January 1983. The official launch of Socialist Action took place the following morning[13] and it first appeared on 16 March. The group's old paper, Socialist Challenge, ceased to exist.[14] The group's overall revolutionary objective did not change, only the strategy to bring it about, as an internal document in January 1983 made clear: '...
Socialist Action believes that it will be impossible to make the transition to socialism without incurring the armed resistance of the ruling class and thereby the necessity for violent self-defence by the working class.'[15] From the outset, Ken Livingstone was clearly an important force within the 'Bennite current' for Socialist Action. John Ross and comrades identified two Bennite wings: the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, a left-wing coalition within the Labour Party comprising Chartists from Briefing, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, CLPD. Socialist Action identified the second wing 'crystallising around forces such as the Campaign Group of MPs, Livingstone, the left of Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (LCND)... and the constituency left...'[16] Its slogans were now: 'Deeper into the Labour Party!', 'Deeper into the trade unions!', 'For a new newspaper!',[17] 'Defend socialist policies!', 'Stop the witch-hunt!', 'Remove the right-wing Labour leaders!'[18]
In September 1983, Socialist Action took the decision to disappear from public view. This meant closing down the Other Bookshop and taking extreme security measures to guarantee invisibility and deniability. Two months after the decision, Socialist Action's leadership drew up a document entitled The dissolution of the public face'. It said: 'This is a historical fact - namely that the public face dissolved itself. This requires no public announcement but all bodies of the [Trotskyist] world movement must be informed and act accordingly.'[23] Some members disagreed with the decision; one wrote: 'The September meeting took a momentous decision. It voted 23 for and one against to formally dissolve our public organisation. The decision was taken on the basis of a false prognosis: that following the Labour Party conference there will be an immediate witch-hunt of our supporters within the mass organisation.'[24]
Although the purge stopped at Militant, no one at Socialist Action was taking any chances. The paranoia was evident in a Socialist Action document marked 'top secret', and called 'Practical implementation of the new security measures in the centre'.[25] The note warned that Socialist Action had to be on its guard against any unexpected visits from the media, and that 'any undesirable material should be kept out of sight'. In addition the print shop must be just a print shop and the bookshop just a bookshop,' it added. There had to be checks on anyone entering both buildings. 'This is important,' continued the note cryptically, 'because these areas have outside visitors, although some the most sensitive visitors at present (i.e. GLC) come UPSTAIRS frequently.'[26] (← p. 261)
One big problem was the post office box number used Socialist Action, it was the same box number as for the bookshop, the newspaper and its youth wing, later called Youth Action: P.O. Box 50, London N1 2XP. 'We cannot continue with sending everything out with the same box number,' according to the security document. 'Moreover, the box number is in the name of an organization.' Comrades were instructed to consider security even when writing memos and other documents: 'It is possible to write them so they appear to those not in the know that they do not necessarily originate from an organization - i.e. writing in the third person, using more of a commentary style etc… If documents are written with security in mind, there should not be so many problems.'[27] It also meant being extra careful about what was thrown out: 'We have a real problem in that we have no idea what happens our rubbish when it is taken away by the bin persons… 'The only solution is to make the rubbish safe before it is takers a way which means we have to get a shredder.' [28]
A new cleaning rota was instituted; leading figures, in Socialist Action, including John Ross and Redmond O'Neill, took it in turns to clean HQ. [29] Leading members now started using pseudonyms: Redmond O'Neill was 'Lark', Jude Woodward was 'Lee', while another member, Ann Kane, was 'Swift' [30] Alma Singh, who was 'Chan' says, 'The reason was secrecy so as not to let people outside know who was doing what' [31] After the closure of the bookshop, members met in rooms above pubs in the local Hackney/Islington area, namely, Cedar Room pub in Islington, the Cock Tavern in Mare Street, the Lucas Arms in Grays Inn Road and Tylor's in Shacklewell Lane near the print shop. The witch-hunters did not come for Socialist Action, but secrecy and security became second nature to the group over the next quarter of a century.
During the mid to late 1980s, the group did successfully ingratiate itself with the Labour Left, For a fee, Socialist Action put its printing press at the disposal of many left-wing groups, including the CLPD and the Socialist Campaign Group for MPs. [32] At one stage, Socialist Action was losing an average of £762 a week and the press was vital for earning extra income. [33] It experienced money anxieties throughout the 1980s. .....
Trotskyist parties always inflate their membership numbers with their sense of self-importance but by the mid 1980s;.it is clear that about 500 people belonged to Socialist Action. This is made obvious in an internal document which stressed the importance of selling 4,000 copies of Socialist Action a week: 'This means an average of eight per comrade.'[34]
Later, Socialist Action members would be encouraged lo give 10 per cent of their pay to the party.' [35] Its members acquired a reputation for being intelligent, hard-working and even subservient to powerful left-wing figures, which meant they were often despised by other voices on the far left. Gerry Healy's News Line was one: 'This is how they [Socialist Action] see themselves: the chosen few, the brains trust, the-intellectual elite, the bright people with all the smart answers who are just waiting for the poor old working class to catch up. [36]
Certainly, Socialist Action considered Ken Livingstone to |be influential and clearly took time to cultivate him. In a rather convoluted reference to Livingstone's importance, one paper from John Ross showed that 'an intelligent reformism of the Livingstone type can incorporate elements of support for the oppressed. Socialist Action of course welcomes such support. But it does not represent intelligent reformism as the answer to Kinnock.' [37] Livingstone remembers being paid a visit by John Ross shortly after his falling out with the Chartists and the others on the far left over rate capping. 'He was the first in to say this was a temporary setback,' remembers Livingstone. Ross grew in importance, particularly after Livingstone became an MP. He had always felt vulnerable dealing with balance sheets, finance and economics,'[38] as Reg Race had observed at the GLC.[39] With a first class economics degree from Oxford, Ross proved to be a valuable teacher for Livingstone, who says; 'When I became an MP I employed John Ross to teach me economies, basically to be my economics advisor, and he'd turn up three times a week and we'd go through what was happening in the British economy and the world economy. He'd explain the theories behind it. This went on for two years.
And after about 18 months to two years we were asked to do a debate at a fringe meeting about the way forward and we went through it and I knew I was on top of the brief.' [40] By 1985, according to Atma Singh, a former long-term member of Socialist Action, Livingstone was possibly the most important figure on the Left; the group considered both Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn to be spent forces. 'They supported Ken Livingstone to make him as powerful as possible,' says Singh. 'Socialist Action understood that what they were after was some political power. If they couldn't see a way of getting political power, they just wanted to be the most powerful; the term they used was [to achieve] "hegemony over the Left". So they wanted to be the main group to dictate what was going on in the Left.' [41]
Socialist Action became increasingly powerful on the left of the Labour Party. Members of the group were elected to important positions in key left-wing bodies and campaigns, including CLPD, Labour CND and various student bodies, including its own, Youth Action. Socialist Action stood for many of the same issues as Livingstone: equality regardless of race, gender and class, troops out of Ireland; unilateral disarmament. It was for the miners and the Greenham Common Women, Fidel Castro and so on, and against Kinnock and his witch-hunt and pretty well everything else for which be stood.
Atma Singh says that Socialist Action was 'instrumental' in getting Livingstone elected on to the NEC in 1987 and 1988. [42] ..... Wadsworth claims that Ken Livingstone and Socialist Action now colluded to get rid of him because he would not do what they wanted, 'Socialist Action thought they could impose decisions on me including how we focused on the Stephen Lawrence campaign,' says Wadsworth. 'When I refused to go along with that they said, OK we're going to get rid of you.'
Through late 1993 and early 1994, the ARA deteriorated rapidly. A former Socialist Action member of the ARA insists Wadsworth's strategy was wrong, both in terms of the Lawrence campaign and towards the BNP by-election victory in the East End: "The correct response was to have a demo in the East End and Marc didn't want to do that so he was increasingly separating himself out from the most important issues that were going on in racism in order to pursue his own things.' [58] On 17 March 1994, Livingstone chaired a meeting of the ARA executive. [59] During the four-hour 'rowdy meeting' in a House of Commons office, Wadsworth threw a punch at Livingstone. He says: 'It was at one of these crazy meetings where he was making these rulings and telling me to shut up that I launched at him. I didn't actually hit him. I hit his hand. I was going to hit him. This had gone on for months and he treated me like a boy sitting next to him.' [60]
At another meeting, on 30 March 1994, Livingstone and the Socialist Action contingent failed by only one vote to persuade the executive to dismiss Wadsworth on grounds of professional misconduct. [61] The infighting continued for another six months as Livingstone and Socialist Action attempted to wrest control from Wadsworth.
On 23 September 1994, the Anti-Racist Alliance issued the foil towing statement: 'Ken Livingstone, supported by a faction called Socialist Action and a handful of unprincipled and unrepresentative members of the executive committee, has been waging relentless campaign to sack the national secretary. This behaviour is undemocratic and has led to unnecessary divisions in the ARA which the chair has made even worse by his repealed attacks on national office staff.' [62] (← p. 268) 'When they come for you they are incessant and they are like pit bulls,' Wadsworth says of Socialist Action. 'It's just incessant obsessive politicking.' On 30 September 1994, Livingstone went to the High Court to determine voting rights for the delegates to the ARA's forthcoming annual meeting and an out-of-court settlement was reached. At the meeting on 15 October 1994, both Livingstone and Wadsworth stepped down; Wadsworth gave way to Kumar Murshid, a future Livingstone mayoral advisor on race but not a member of Socialist Action. Murshid walked away from the job after turning up at the ARA offices to find that Wadsworth had changed the locks. ARA co
llapsed rapidly after unions including the Transport and General Workers Union withdrew support. By February 1995, the National Assembly Against Racism, or NAAR, had been established largely by Socialist Action members, namely Redmond O'Neill, Jude Woodward and Anne Kane. [63]
Former member Atma Singh says that Socialist Action was so used to splits and sectarianism that 'breaking one organisation and creating a new one is nothing dramatic for them'. [
64] Lee Jasper, who became Livingstone's senior mayoral policy advisor on equalities, was its first secretary. He had also been one of the few non-Socialist Action opponents of Wadsworth on the ARA. In 2007, the NAAR was one of Britain's biggest anti-racism groups with several subsidiary organisations, all supported strongly by then-Mayor Livingstone. Members of Socialist Action would continue to work closely with Livingstone throughout the 1990s. But they would come into their own when Livingstone became the first directly-elected mayor of London.
When I was first approached about the project I still believed Livingstone was an essentially benign figure. Like many on the left, I had been shocked when he extended the hand of friendship to the radical Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an ideologue of the extreme religious right. But I assumed this could be explained by a combination of the Mayor's ignorance of the politics of the Muslim world and a characteristic desire to shock conventional opinion.
In fact, it was a self-defeating act of political grandstanding that fatally undermined his claims to be a progressive politician. Pictures of the Mayor standing next to a man who has supported female circumcision, the execution of homosexuals and the killing of innocent civilians by suicide bombers will haunt him forever.
The more work I did on the Mayor's office and its only incumbent, the more I realised there were serious problems with the way the institution was being run. Many of these lay with the institution of Mayor itself, which was designed to be run as a personal fiefdom. But there was more to it than that: Livingstone's personal style and his tendency to surround himself with cronies from the revolutionary left on six-figure salaries meant that, in many ways, he was the very worst person to leave with such untrammelled power.
Livingstone once told me at a lunch for the City business leaders he has learned to love that he surrounded himself with people he could trust with his life and that Gordon Brown should do the same.
This is an understandable strategy for a politician with as many enemies as Livingstone. But, as Hosken explains in scrupulous detail, many of these people emerged from one tiny Trotskyite splinter group, Socialist Action. The leader of this group, John Ross, was the Mayor's chief adviser on economics who prepared himself for helping run London by working in Moscow for most of the 1990s. He returned in 2000 to join up with his deputy, Redmond O'Neill, who had been running the faction in his absence. O'Neill now advises the Mayor on transport and Islamic issues. Each is paid more than £100,000 a year. Other SA advisers included Livingstone's de facto deputy in City Hall, Simon Fletcher, and his race adviser, Atma Singh, who was purged after he objected to the cabal's dalliances with radical Islam.
As Hosken explains, Singh has since revealed that this deranged group was still planning a 'bourgeois democratic revolution' for London when Livingstone first came to power in 2000. They believed they could set up a city state, independent from the rest of the country.
In extraordinary comments, he told the Standard he will use “amazing charm and subtlety” to get New York-style independence for the capital. Mr Livingstone, 66, added: “I would actually declare independence and run the whole city. They can’t even run hospitals in London. Everything government does in London it gets wrong. If you look at the city of New York, the mayor runs the benefits system, some of the prisons even, and the healthcare and schools. “I’ve watched all my life, irrespective of which government... ministers trying to run hospitals from Whitehall. It’s just too big, too complicated. I’m in favour of devolving everything — not just in London. I think you should have strong regions as well.” The former Mayor added: “I would always say, to this government and also the next Labour government of Ed Miliband, devolve more down. I’d like to take over our NHS immediately. I would like to take over a major house-building programme, I’d like to run the benefits system.”
I think Tony Blair was the best PM this country has had in the last 50 years, and I certainly won’t be voting for the Tory candidate for the London Assembly for my area, the repulsive, arrogant Brian Coleman, so I’m not a tribalist Tory, or indeed any other sort of Tory. The vast majority of votes I’ve cast since I was 21 have been for Labour candidates. But I won’t be voting for for anyone endorsing Livingstone.
I voted for Boris Johnson in 2008 and here are the things I think he’s achieved that have made a big difference to me:
No Council Tax rises for the whole-London part for the whole 4 years he’s been Mayor. Under Livingstone, they rose every single year by socking amounts. And as my work pension is around £1,000 a month, that’s made a big difference.
No Congestion Charge imposed on West London, which Livingstone was set to do. That would have cost me £8 or now £10 every time I visited my mother (who had advanced dementia)– and on my income it would have made a difference.
Drinking abolished on Tubes and buses by Boris as one of the first things he did after being elected. As an older woman, I find drunken louts particularly repulsive and intimidating, and especially so in the confined area of a Tube carriage. I’ve really noticed the difference that’s made.
Extension of the bus pass to being able to travel on it even first thing in the day. As I most usually use mine to get to exhibitions and galleries when they first open and so avoid long queues, that’s hugely added to my ability to afford more of the blockbusters.
Ending of the stream of Jew-baiting and divisive gesture politics which Livingstone ran throughout his time as Mayor, including branding the Board of Deputies of British Jews as an arm of Mossad, the insults to the Jewish reporter, the hugging and kissing of Qaradawi who strongly supports suicide bombing of my family members in Israel, moderate wife beating of Muslim wives and the murder of gays everywhere. Ending of the need to endure Livingstone’s stream of defiance, faux-naive “he’s never said anything homophobic to me”, out-and-out lies and equivocation around his defence of such outrages till they’ve come right back onto almost daily prominence because of his candidacy.
Ending of wasting of our Council Tax money on gesture-politics festivals and events which enabled Livingstone to pour money into the maws of far left and Islamist groups and their shills in the name of promoting cultural diversity and equality. That includes the total waste of money on an event called “Simchah on the Square”, supposedly a celebration of Jewish culture which the Jewish community never asked for and which was not a “simchah” in any real sense of the word.
Ending of wasting of our money on such matters as: totally futile legal challenges to the Labour government, of which Livingstone still boasts; the notorious freesheet distributed to every London home, boasting of his achievements and the relentless “cult of personality” branding of his mug on almost every poster and visual produced by the Mayor’s office.
Ending of the use of our tax money to pay huge unwarranted sums to give jobs and huge payoffs to his Trotskyist cronies in Socialist Action and other far left and “community activists”whose main talents consisted of their tendency to dish out still more of our money out to their buddies whilst making loudmouth statements about their speaking for the black and ethnic minority communities of London. Lee Jasper was just the tip of the iceberg. Livingstone’s chief of staff in his campaign is Simon Fletcher of Socialist Action, so it’s clear enough what will follow if Livingstone gets elected, except that this time, he’ll be supporting the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime instead of the black radicals of Brixton.
Boris showed he had the guts and determination to get rid of Sir Paul Stephenson as head of the Met, hardly the action of a bumbling buffoon. It’s early days yet, but I think Hogan-Howe may make a difference. Including to the elimination of bribery and racism in the Met.
So I’m certainly voting for Boris Johnson when my postal vote arrives.
This morning I revelled in listening to an almost totally deadpan documentary in the BBCR4 "In Living Memory" series-- on the origins of the Section 28 legislation in the furore over the publication of "Jenny Lives with Eric & Martin". This hilarious bit of tendenz literatur was read aloud, complete with the bit where nice, liberal Mr Jones transformed the homophobia of his wife, grumpy Mrs Jones, to the gay male couple with daughter living next door by the simple expedient of explaining to her that he had once loved a man, but decided that he loved her better and married her. Don't try that one at home, folks.
a couple of whom appear in the equally wonderful documentary on the seventies/early eighties Angry Wimmin of the clip above.
Today's programme included a priceless soundbite from one of the more plausible of them, who got herself elected as a councillor in charge of running (and presumably playing some role in recruiting the staff of) the Lesbian & Gay Unit. She proclaimed that the opposition to the circulation of propaganda books about happy gay male couples bringing up daughters represented anxiety that if knowledge of gayness as a valid lifestyle became widespread, it would threaten the continuation of capitalism.....
Tory grandees and foamers at the mouth were also given lots of past & present soundbites, the latter mostly shamefacedly recanting of their then attitudes.
The World at One is usually one of the less contentious of BBC Radio 4's news programmes. It does offer the standard BBC world view of most matters but as far as I'm aware has rarely featured on blog sites as a source of some of the most outrageous examples of media bias presented as impartial reporting.
On Wednesday 25th February, however, its reporting of the arrival in Britain of "Bishop" Richard Williamson was astounding in the way it presented a notorious anti-semite and Holocaust denier activist Michele Renouf as no more than "a woman supporting Williamson".
It did so on its web page and at the beginning and end of the five minute respectful interview it offered her, handing her an extended opportunity to put over her polemics at length. She was also referred to as in the course of the interview as "Lady Renouf, a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany". Nowhere in the interview or the related World at One web page was any hint given of her extremist racist activism. It is as if Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party had been introduced as "a politician". Not that the BBC would be at all likely to offer Griffin five minutes gently managed airtime to put his views on a self-acknowledged Holocaust denier across.
Michele Renouf is not just any old anti-semite and Holocaust denier. She is a leading activist who tirelessly organizes and propagates the cause of such front line convicted Holocaust denial historical fraudsters as Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson and David Irving. She raises money to bankroll convicted British racists to try their luck at seeking asylum from British justice in California. She runs a web site and produces DVDs in their various causes. The web site is also extensively devoted to representing "the Zionist lobby and its allies" as a sinister controlling group, and to representing mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish political commentators and leaders as engaged in related conspiracies to suppress and twist the truth about their sinister machinations.
All this is presented by her as being campaigning in favour of human rights and free speech. It's the same grotesque inversion adopted by President Ahmadinejad and his regime, who defended his Tehran conference to "investigate whether the Holocaust happened" in the name of open-minded enquiry. So it's hardly surprising that Renouf herself was one of the people who took part in that conference.
The point about why debate with Holocaust deniers is inappropriate is not because there is any attempt to suppress genuine historical enquiry, let alone conceal truths about what the Nazi regime did to Jews and its other enemies. Nor is it,as is often represented, out of a wish to avoid giving offence, whether to the surviving victims of the Holocaust or to the dead and their families.
It is inappropriate because all Holocaust denial is invariably based on deliberate historical fraud. It cannot be otherwise, because the evidence that the Holocaust took place as an act of deliberate Nazi policy is so vast, so readily validated by innumerable incontrovertible evidence sources.
The reason Zundel, Faurrisson, David Irving and other Holocaust deniers like them have been convicted is because their supposed evidence has been based on fraudulent and falsified documentation, well established in trial after trial in courts across the world. Any "debates" the Holocaust deniers seek to invoke are invariably founded on the same recycling of fraudulent evidence and falsified historical data, as has been most devastatingly documented in the work of Professor Richard Evans, and in the judgement against David Irving given by Mr Justice Gray in April 2000.
You can hear the interview presenter Sean Ley of the World at One gave her by accessing the Wednesday edition here. It'll be available until 2:00pm GMT on Wednesday 4th March. It starts at around 23 minutes into the 31 minute clip. Ley begins by detailing the reasons for Williamson's notoriety, through the interviews he's given in which he called the Holocaust "lies, lies, lies", his repeated assertions that no gas chambers were used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, and that at the most some hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in other ways.
Lady Renouf is a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany. She told me he should not be called a Holocaust denier.
It's an absurd propaganda term and in any case no-one denies anything....If there's any denial going on, it's debate denial that goes on, and that should be objected to by all of us because the concept that we cannot debate and that there is no respect for debate flies in the face of our own civilization.
Isn't it that the debate he chooses to conduct in denying the existence of the gas chambers that killed so many Jews is one that causes profound offence to many people, Jewish or otherwise?
Well, I don't think offence should be part of an investigation into history. I think that is emotional blackmail that has nothing to do with an investigation.If for example your child was murdered and you didn't want to hear about it, you cannot debate whether there should be any investigation or court cases about that. You may not want to read about it, but you cannot say that there may be no investigation because your sensibilities will be hurt. That is an absurd situation.
Let me ask you about the Bishop's position now. His excommunication was lifted by the Vatican but the Vatican has now demanded that he should retract the views he expressed in that television interview and the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said he cannot be in full Communion with the Church until he does so. Is he prepared to do so?
There is something extraordinary going on. The idea of the Holocaust as some sort of thing that [if] one speaks about it and commits some sort of blasphemy in whole or part is the UN resolution. You may not query the Holocaust legendin whole or part. There is no such situation in normal historical debate and rational argument in any other field, and it should be normal for a review of history without exception and I think when the Bishop was asked by the Swedish TV,it was actually to stitch him up because it was later used to try and undermine the idea of this reconciliation with the pre-Vatican II society. And so I think it's actually aimed at preventing the priests who query the Vatican II from their being allowed back into the body of the Vatican.
This grotesque view of Holocaust denial as the attempt to restore suppressed normal historical debate to an area from which it is said to have been excluded went unchallenged by Sean Ley. He did not pick up on her definition of the Holocaust as "legend", despite the fact that she claims to be speaking for open enquiry and rational argument and that she proclaims herself on her web site to be an "actress and model" with no academic background in historical research.
Part of the reason for this is that Ley himself confined the issue of historical denial to the giving of offence and did not concern himself with the evidence of Holocaust denial being based on fraud, suppression of mountains of evidence or both, demonstrated in trials and judgements against all the leading Holocaust deniers.
The only riposte to Renouf's proclamation of the Holocaust as "legend" came from a subsequent telephone interview with Lord Janner, presumably on the grounds of his being Chairman of the Holocaust Trust, who also proceeded to discuss Holocaust denial primarily in terms of its offensiveness to survivors and to assert that he knew the Holocaust had happened because members of his own family had been murdered. Lord Janner has a long and mostly distinguished history on representing various Jewish community concerns, but he is not now at the centre of dealing with Holocaust denial propagandists. His answer here was utterly inadequate.
Why did the World at One team choose to give such a front line Holocaust denier as Michele Renouf a platform? Why did they choose to conceal her background and activism in this field and in promoting anti-semitism?
Who on the World at One team decided that the issue of Williamson's Holocaust denial was to be handled as one of actual or potential offence? Why did they not call one of the impeccably reputed historians who would have been able to show that her claims that the Holocaust is "legend" and that Williamson seeks "debate" are pernicious nonsense?
Quite apart from the outrageousness of giving a platform for Holocaust denial, this particular news treatment is most concerning because it suggests that truth of the Holocaust is coming to be relativised in public debate by being seen as one related to "offence", for the reason that it is seen as needing to be treated as an analogue of Muslim offence over portrayals of Mohammed and of Islam in general. It is another instance of something in British political discourse relating to Jews, and particularly to anti-semitism and Israel needing by definition to be "balanced" by being analogised explicitly or inexplicitly to Muslim concerns. Indeed, one of the reports in the Daily Telegraph to which I've linked refers to "Bishop" Williamson and his fellow Holocaust sceptics, an apparently innocuous terminological shift which reduces the reality of the most documented events in history to a matter of political opinion, analogous with membership of the European Community.
It's interesting that "Bishop" Williamson himself has now issued an apology for "offending" people by his stance on the Holocaust. But as has been widely recognised, not least by the Vatican, this does not deal with his actual denial that Jews were gassed by the Nazi, or that more than two or three hundred thousand were actually murdered.
The image above appeared in this week's edition of "The Jewish Chronicle". It shows a Mardi Gras carnival float in Germany last week. It's a particularly vivid representation of how today's Germany may understand much more acutely that "Bishop" Williamson may represent not just some bizarre sideshow of the backwoods of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but shaking hands with the devil of anti-semitism.
Will the World at One team recognise they've gone beyond shaking hands with the devil when, without acknowledgement, they put the voice of Holocaust denial in front of the microphone to send its message to the worldwide BBC audience?
And still it falls, and the sky is that solid muddy grey that signals another thick blanket ready to descend.
Here's my road, with a bunch of teenagers out enjoying their day off school and the unprecedented opportunity to toboggan down the middle of the road on a tea-tray.
Out on my deck, there's an almost silence. Usually I can hear a distant constant humming, the sound of the North Circular, the busiest road in London. Now, there's almost nothing. Just wind sighing in the trees and the occasional flop of a fistful of snow falling off a vine.
I've only seen one intrepid milk float on the road since eight this morning. Nothing else on the move. All the buses cancelled. Almost all the schools shut.
Last night, I drove home through a blizzard. I emailed my daughter to say that was the first time I'd done that since the time I lived out in rural Berkshire, before she was born. Then at half past one in the morning, she emailed back to say she and her husband (both aged 23) and a bunch of their friends had just come in from being out playing in the snow. Cambridge snowbound at midnight. It must have looked stunning.
I do realise this must make Canadians and most northern USA folk laugh their socks off. Five inches of snow can be almost guaranteed to shut everything down in the UK.
There was our Mayor, Boris Johnson, on Radio 4 at 1pm, valiantly inventing new verb conjugations to convey the frantic intensity of the London gritting team's unsuccessful efforts to get the roads cleared:
We gritted, we grat, we grut, he said. But when you get that much snow, there's just nowhere to put it.
Sending up the notorious "leaves on the line" British Rail apologies for the regular breakdowns of service every time the first major Autumn storm brings the fall, he also said
This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities
You have to give the man credit. He'd actually cycled all the way from Highbury to his mayoral office. And the dreaded Red Ken would never have carried off that apology for failure with such charm and good humour.
Hmmm. Weather forecast on Radio 4 just said we're due for another foot of snow in the next few hours.
The Students' Union at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), one of the UK's highest ranked university centres for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has voted to demand the cancellation of a lecture series organised to mark the centenary of Tel-Aviv.
The series has been organized by SOAS' Professor Colin Shindler, the UK's first professor of Israeli Studies, who has also been a friend of mine for over twenty years.
The students of SOAS include a very large number of from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries and others who are passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause. But SOAS during most of the recent history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has also been a place where those students and those from its Hebrew and Israeli Studies centre attend lectures on the Middle East conflict and the history and culture of zionism and discuss the issues in a spirit of scholarship and free enquiry.
Ironically, the Students' Union website carries a constitution proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its absolute commitment to opposing discrimination. That was voted in in 2006, after a previous history of attempts by some student groups to intimidate Jewish students in the name of anti-zionism. Throughout that history, the SOAS directorate firmly opposed such action and subsequently adopted a "Freedom of Expression" code which all who are members of the School are expected to sign up to.
But this latest action has been taken by the Students' Union in the name of boycotting Israeli academics in response to the current Gaza conflict, because they are amongst those who have been invited to lecture in Colin Shindler's Tel-Aviv centenary series.
Here's an even greater irony. The series started last term (and resumed for the current term on Monday night, despite the Student Union banning vote). Amongst the speakers were the Palestinian Authority ambassador, who was formerly a well-respected academic at Bethlehem University, as well as an anti-zionist Israeli academic.
Here's Colin Shindler's statement, issued before the vote was taken, demonstrating his impeccably and consistently sustained record of peace activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Our lecture series
‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of
lectures that we organise around a theme each year.
Professor Joachim
Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his
academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador,
Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on
‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an
anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic
literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to
speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and
music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of
Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.
It is therefore
terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided
with the terrible events in Gaza.
Any call for
cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the
centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the
attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of
their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British
government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.
Academic institutions
rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos
is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On
a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a
minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.
I have never called
for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not
to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a
recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.
In the ten years that
I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of
their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.
I hope that colleagues
will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine
conflict they do not agree with.
These are difficult
times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share
my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases
this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.
Last night, I was at SOAS to hear presentations by Colin Shindler and Dr Emmanuele Ottolenghi on Israel and the Gaza War. The lecture theatre was packed. The presentations were excellent. The post presentation questions and discussions were courteous and attentively listened to. Amongst the SOAS student respondees at the end was a woman in Islamic dress who said she deplored the Student Union vote, and strongly supported free speech. And there was also the ardent pro-Palestinian activist who demanded to know why the Palestinian perspective had not been included. But then, as Colin Shindler pointed out, this was a special event presentation on Israel and the Gaza War. And the activist had spoken as if there was one single Palestinian perspective, although the presentations had discussed the ample evidence of the strongly divergent politics of different Palestinian parties, particularly Fatah and Hamas.
Clearly, the issue is not just about attempting to ban Israeli academics, though that's appalling enough. It's a clear cut attempt to boycott any public academic presentation about Israel, however unrelated to the Gaza conflict, or even the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's also about an attempt to impose a one-story Palestinian account, despite the academic evidence of a divergent, complex politics amongst Palestinians and their allies.
So much for the SOAS Students' Union. Sources at SOAS also tell me that Colin Shindler has been put under a great deal of pressure to cancel the series by leaders of the SOAS branch of UCU, the academic staff union, of which he is a member. Will SOAS UCU now act in favour of or against free speech?
My mother may have severe dementia, but she still knows who Diana was. And this bit of 1981 royal wedding kitsch sits by her bed
It's wonderful to be able to blog from my iphone while sitting in first a cab then a car repair centre in Willesden.
The downside is that the very pretty Typepad iPhone app doesn't seem to have a "save post" option.
It's publish or nothing.
So I'll have to publish as is when they bring my car round and demystify you as to what I'm on about later.
Clue: It's about an unexpected side of the normally ultra-rationalist male bloggers who include founders and leading signatories of the Euston Manifesto.
