far right
Video: Lab women’s spokesperson Dodds admits she/Starmer hadn’t contacted Abbott
Anneliese Dodds stammers when asked whether any Shadow Cabinet members had been in touch with Britain’s first Black woman MP, before admitting nobody had
Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s ‘Women and equalities’ spokeswoman, stammered and dodged her way through an interview on Sky News this morning, ultimately admitting that neither she, Keir Starmer, nor anyone else in Starmer’s shadow cabinet – nor apparently the party’s whips – had bothered to get in touch with Diane Abbott.
Ms Abbott, Britain’s first Black woman MP, has been in the headlines after racist and violent comments from the Tories’ biggest ever donor and has spoken publicly about how vulnerable she has felt as a result.
Dodds tried to excuse the lack of contact by claiming no phones are allowed in shadow cabinet meetings and then she had hurried to the Sky studio – as if mobile phones don’t work on the way to TV interviews. She also said that she wasn’t in charge of Starmer’s diary so couldn’t say when he would be in touch and could only say the party’s ‘whips’, who she said are responsible for MPs’ welfare, had been in contact with Abbott ‘for several months’, not since the news of the donor’s racist comments broke:
The interview sparked disgust among many who saw it:
Diane Abbott suffered racist abuse from Labour MPs regularly.. she gets abuse on here regularly, they are liars, bigotts and Annalieze Dodds should remember the WWW retains the information. she has suffered more racial abuse than anyone else https://t.co/JfuDhg9Oby they forget… https://t.co/ZFEjy5ozn5
— Isobel_Waby we NEED a COALITION (@Isobel_waby) March 12, 2024
I am shocked to learn on Sky News that Anneliese Dodds Shadow Secretary of State for WOMEN & EQUALITY has made no effort to contact her colleague Diane Abbott to enquire as to how she is feeling after her abuse by a Tory donor & should the police not take this up as threat tokill
— The man with no name (@Themanw86823082) March 12, 2024
Starmer and other Labour MPs – including Wes Streeting – have performatively condemned Frank Hester’s comments. However, Starmer has not punished the blatant racism – much of it directed at Diane Abbott – revealed in the leaked 2020 report on the conduct of senior party staff and confirmed by barrister Martin Forde’s investigation.
And Streeting was responsible for a 2018 ‘disgusting’ and ‘disgraceful’ verbal assault in Ms Abbott’s face in a Commons corridor, witnessed by other MPs and staff, for which he has never, at least publicly, apologised and which he threatened to sue Skwawkbox for revealing, a threat he did not carry out after Skwawkbox stood its ground:
Streeting has never been disciplined for his behaviour and was promoted by Starmer to Shadow Health Secretary.
Keir Starmer has presided over the targeting of a series of Black and Brown MPs and other elected figures, while ignoring others who faced foul racism – and his treatment of Diane Abbott, up to and including this latest incident, who has long suffered the most appalling racism of any MP, has been a disgrace that is only compounded by his hypocritical attempts to make political capital out of yet more abuse toward her.
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Video: ‘Goodbye Palestine’ – deranged US congressman wants Palestine erased
Republican Chuck Fleischmann’s ‘Israel forever’ rant
Republican US congressman Chuck Fleischmann has been caught on video in a deranged rant in which he tells a Palestinian-American ‘Goodbye to Palestine’, appearing – and not denying when asked – to wish for Palestine and its people to be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’.
Fleischmann was challenged by two anti-genocide activists about his support for Israel and began his rant that he will always support Israel before gesticulating in the face of one of the pair and telling them ‘I will never support the Palestinians. Never!’:
Fleischmann’s unhinged rant is a frightening window into the mentality of the US right – and the UK Israel lobby’s murderousness, which differs primarily in being less obviously expressed.
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Far-right Bannon endorses Starmer
Less than a week after Labour tried to use comments by BNP’s Nick Griffin to smear George Galloway, Starmer receives his own extremist – and criminal – endorsement
Last week, Labour talking heads and supporters tried to tarnish George Galloway’s landslide win in the Rochdale by-election by pointing out that the BNP’s far-right figure Nick Griffin had spoken positively about Galloway’s win. Galloway, known for taking no nonsense from interviewers, pointed out that he has no control over what people say, but this did not deter desperate Starmeroids from using the tactic.
Today, news has broken that Keir Starmer has been endorse by US far-right figure Steve Bannon, the architect of Trumpianism and a convicted criminal, who said he is ‘very impressed’ by Starmer. Right…
Bannon also infamously talked of Trump ‘declaring victory’ despite losing the 2020 presidential election – and appeared to allude to the storming of the Capitol by a right-wing mob:
Unsurprisingly, the so-called ‘mainstream’ media hasn’t leaped to the obvious conclusion that if Galloway is bad because a right-wing extremist spoke positively about him, then presumably Keir Starmer – endorsed by someone arguably far worse – is, too.
But grassroots commentators are enjoying much merriment at yet another smear blowing up in the face of Starmer and his acolytes – and with far more justification, given Starmer’s extreme affinity for police state laws, assaults on democracy and genocide.
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Corbyn starts legal action Vs Farage over antisemitism smear
Far-right figure’s comments on far right station lead to legal response
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has begun legal action against far-right stirrer Nigel Farage, after Farage accused him of believing that ‘the Jews run the world’.
Farage’s comments, on hard right TV station GB News, led to many calls for Corbyn to sue, and that wish has been granted. Farage has been accused by some who knows him of an aversion to testifying under oath.
If only Corbyn had acted in the same way over the antisemitism scam against him and the left when he was Labour leader, but better late than never.
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Israel supporters shamelessly smear Bushnell with ‘dead jews’ claim. It’s an outright lie
US serviceman whose self-immolation resonated around the world did not say ‘Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead’, as multiple pro-Israel accounts have claimed
Supporters of apartheid Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinian civilians have begun spreading a claim that Aaron Bushnell, the US serviceman who died this week after setting himself on fire outside Israel’s embassy in Washington, posted a comment to his Reddit account that ‘Palestine will be free when all the jews [sic] are dead’.
The image has been touted by accounts well known for dismissive and often racist commentary about Palestinians as a means of trying to justify Israel’s war crimes. ‘Comedy’ writer Lee Kern was one of the most prominent:
Kern not only propagated the fake claim but described the whole of Palestine as a ‘racist hate movement’
Kern described the whole of Palestine, not just a resistance group, as a ‘suicide death cult’
Writer Kern’s 2021 comment appears to have been deleted but was commented on as early as 2021 and he does not appear to have made a denial to the many times it has been thrown at him
A careful examination of Bushnell’s Reddit account by fact-checker Snopes, over a wider period than the two months ago that the image shows – including using a service that records deleted posts – showed that no such post had ever been made by Bushnell and the image is completely fake. A reverse image search also revealed no other instances before the image began to be circulated by propagandists.
Bushnell’s shocking protest has focused even greater attention on Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children. The attempt by supporters of the slaughter to divert from his aim in his terrible protest by posting an outright lie about him after his death is shameful and entirely unsurprising.
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New ‘Lab’ MP Egan married to former 8200 Unit Israeli ‘spy’ recruiter
Right-wing MP’s partner spoke of his ‘great experience’ on pro-Israel propaganda programme, to which he recruited former spies from unit that marks its headsets for every Palestinian it kills
New right-wing Labour MP Damien Egan is married to a former IDF soldier who recruited former members of the IDF’s ‘Unit 8200’ spy unit to the ‘Excel’ propaganda programme run by the ultra-Zionist ‘Birthright Israel’ group (BI).
In a 2017 Facebook post, BI boasted of Felberbaum’s ‘important role’ in recruiting ex-8200 supervisors for ‘Excel’ interns, which Felberbaum said was ‘a great experience for me’, before talking of the ‘technological world I come from’. The article does not say that Felberbaum was a Unit 8200 member during his service, although his role recruiting former members raises the question:
Unit 8200 is the IDF’s ‘cyber-spy’ unit. Whistleblowers from the unit have revealed that members sometimes wear ‘X’s on their headsets to mark assassinations their information has facilitated – and that it targeted Palestinians for extortion and blackmail to further the government’s aims.
‘Excel’ is BI’s vehicle for taking US Jews on trips to Israel to reinforce their commitment to the occupying regime. In 2006, BI’s director of marketing said that:
[Israel] should be an integral part of every Jew’s identity
and criticised left-wing Jews who used the programme’s funding to go to help in Palestine, whom he said were weeded out if their ‘hidden agenda’ identified before going:
It is taking advantage of the Jewish money that sends people to Israel, exploiting this money to promote an agenda which is not the agenda of the people who funded Taglit
Felberbaum is not the only connection between Unit 8200 and Keir Starmer’s Labour. Starmer employs former member Assaf Kaplan as his ‘Social Listening and Organising Manager’, believed to be involved in monitoring members’ and others’ ‘online conversations’ about the party – and potentially finding information that can be used to expel anyone at odds with the regime. Kaplan removed mentions of the unit from his online profiles. He was also a ‘Facebook friend’ of disgraced Israeli embassy employee Shai Masot, who was sent home from the UK after being exposed organising campaigns against MPs Israel considered troublesome.
Egan himself is a member of the right-wing so-called ‘Jewish Labour Movement’. Unit 8200 has reportedly targeted gay Palestinians for blackmail and coercion.
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Mass protests target German AfD as far right on the rise
About 1.4 million people marched across Germany at the end of January against the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.
The country has been rocked by revelations that leading AfD politicians secretly met open Nazis to discuss organising mass deportations, targeting millions of migrants, asylum-seekers and German citizens of foreign origin.
This meeting was not the first of its kind and signals the increasing confidence of the racist far right. The German political world has reacted with an outpouring of rage. The political mainstream, such as German Premier Olaf Scholz, have condemned the AfD as leading “an attack against our democracy”.
However, it is mainstream parties like Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (similar to our Labor Party) who have helped legitimise such disgusting racism through their willingness to make concessions on refugee rights. This has ranged from allowing the suspension of family reunification rights to signalling support for the outsourcing of asylum applications to African countries.
Last October, in response to pro-Palestine protests in Germany, he was quoted as saying, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”
The policies of neoliberalism and austerity which have been pursued by successive German coalition governments have given oxygen to the AfD, which has attempted to capitalise on the discontent. The current government has doubled the military budget, raised fuel prices and is failing to reach even its own climate targets.
The AfD is currently polling more than 20 per cent of the vote, making it Germany’s second largest party. It has 78 seats in the national parliament and 40,000 members. The party has an organised hard right wing including leading figure Bjorn Hocke with direct links to Nazis.
Rising far right
What has led to the rise of a European far right with so much legitimacy? The mainstream parties’ commitment for decades to austerity policies combined with the rising cost of living has produced deep bitterness with the political system.
Mainstream electoral parties have also increasingly embraced anti-refugee policies and racist and Islamophobic talking points. This has only legitimised and fuelled the far right.
Suella Braverman, the former British Tory Home Secretary, openly used racism to label asylum-seekers a threat, characterising them as an, “existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West”.
Similarly, Italian fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has struck a deal to process asylum-seekers rescued at sea in offshore detention camps in Albania, after a green light from the European Union. Left-wing critics such as the leader of the More Europe party Riccardo Magi have described this as an “Italian Guantanamo”.
The far right is still on the rise across Europe. Geert Wilders, who was sentenced for hate speech after advocating the ethnic cleansing of Moroccan-Dutch people in 2017, won the Dutch elections in November with his PVV party on a platform of explicit Islamophobia, calling for the removal of “Islamic schools, mosques and the Quran”.
In Slovakia recently elected Prime Minister Robert Fico said in 2016 he wouldn’t accept “one single Muslim” migrant.
In France Marine Le Pen’s National Rally looks set to come first in this year’s European elections, with the total vote for far right parties at 37 per cent, and could win the next presidential election.
The resistance by the European mainstream liberal, centre and centre-left parties has been weak at best and cravenly opportunistic at worst.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a desperate attempt to avoid being outflanked by Le Pen, has engaged in his own Islamophobic and anti-migrant policy decisions, recently passing a racist and controversial law making it harder for migrants’ children to become citizens and cancelling residence permits on vague grounds of opposing “Republican values”.
This passed parliament only due to the support of the fascist National Rally, which claimed the bill as “an ideological victory”.
French student activists have protested and blockaded universities and union leaders have condemned the law. A few workplaces were able to hold anti-racist strikes but the union leaders failed to mobilise action on the scale needed.
The cowardly opportunism of the French centre under Macron, and the troubling rise of the right as well as the normalisation of its policies and rhetoric, points to the need to build the grassroots anti-racist struggle urgently.
The political mainstream of Europe has both made concessions to the racist rhetoric of the far right and failed to build a fighting alternative on the streets.
It is therefore up to rank-and-file workers, together with left-wing activists and students, to build the mass anti-racist struggle needed.
By Jack Stubley
The post Mass protests target German AfD as far right on the rise first appeared on Solidarity Online.
Labour ‘set to suspend’ Rochdale candidate despite grovelling apology to Israel supporters
Labour in chaos, accused of ‘throwing’ campaign to avoid fallout if they lose to Galloway
Labour has been accused of throwing the Rochdale by-election to minimise political damage, after rumours that it is about to suspend its candidate Azhar Ali over his social media posts about the 7 October raid, despite a grovelling apology.
Ali’s posts accusing Israel of complicity in the Hamas raid were leaked to hostile press, triggering an abject apology to ‘the Jewish community’:
Ali’s claim that Egypt said it informed Israel of the raid well before it happened is entirely true. However, his willingness to stand for a party led by Keir Starmer, who has supported Israel’s ‘right’ to commit its war crimes against the Palestinians has already seen videos posted of him being ordered to leave doorsteps during his attempts to campaign. Such has been the contrast with the reception given to Workers Party GB leader George Galloway, a firm supporter of the Palestinians, that Galloway’s odds to win the by-election have been slashed from 16-1 to 2-1.
Suspending Ali would effectively end Labour’s campaign in the by-election, with no possibility to stand another candidate less than three weeks before polling day. Cynics have pointed out that the political fallout from exiting the election would be less damaging than Galloway beating Ali in a fair fight and accused the party of engineering the default. What is clear, however, is that Labour is once again in complete chaos.
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Labour loses half its support among Muslims who voted Labour in 2019
Support for Greens surges
Support for Labour has collapsed among Muslim voters according to a new poll commissioned by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN), with a huge majority citing Keir Starmer’s support for Israeli genocide as a decisive factor.
In the 2019 general election, 86% of Muslims voted Labour – but that has now dropped to 43%. 85% of those surveyed said that Palestine was either very important (70%) or somewhat important (15%) in deciding how they will vote at the next general election. The poll showed support among Muslims for the Greens, who have made clear calls for an end to the slaughter in Gaza, has rocketed by 900%.
LMN has repeatedly identified huge issues with the rampant Islamophobia in the party under Starmer and reported in 2022, long before Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza, that more than two thirds of Muslims don’t trust Labour to sort out its anti-Muslim bigotry. The group said of the latest survey results:
For decades the Muslim community has been amongst the most loyal Labour supporters anywhere in the United Kingdom. The findings of this new opinion poll shows a startling collapse of this electoral and communal relationship.
This is a crisis point for the future of the relationship between the British Muslim community and the Labour Party.
These findings come in the context of over 100 days of Israel’s continuous assault on Gaza. Over 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 10,000 of whom are children, and the Labour Party’s response has been unacceptable and deeply offensive to Muslims across Britain. Muslim voters have been watching and are now sending a clear message – they will not support any political party that does not fervently oppose the crimes committed against the people of Gaza.
The Labour leadership must change paths now or risk losing the support of the Muslim community for a generation.
There is no sign of anything but token attempts to camouflage the contempt of Starmer and his faction for Muslims, while their support for Israel’s war crimes appears absolute.
The most astonishing thing in the survey is that Labour voting intention among Muslims has not disappeared entirely. It would surely do so if Muslims had a clear alternative, instead of the two main parties being one group with two rosette colours.
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Video: Starmer claims racism ‘really rare’ in football – as incidents hit record high
He couldn’t be worse if he was actively trying
Keir Starmer has yet again showed how hopelessly out of touch he is – and apparently how desperate he still is to pander to the hard right – during an interview with Sky Sports.
Starmer told his interviewer that racism in football stands is ‘really rare’, but in fact it rose last year by a staggering 65.1% – to a record level:
Starmer couldn’t be worse if he was actively trying to be – and won’t stop pandering to racists and bigots by telling them they’re not racist or bigoted.
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