Racism
Protest planned in Tottenham as location of Starmer’s latest ‘pledge’ leaks
Starmer’s ‘equality’ promise is a farce after years of unpunished racism in the Labour right – and Starmer’s support for Israel’s genocide
Keir Starmer and local MP David Lammy will appear in Tottenham between 1pm and 3pm on Monday for what is expected to be Starmer’s announcement of his latest ‘pledge’ – this one promising equal pay protection for ethnic minority groups.
Starmer’s record shows that any ‘promise’ will be worth nothing and jettisoned as soon as convenient – but his decision to stage his blether in one of London’s most diverse boroughs, while he continues to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has not even mentioned the International Court of Justice’s binding orders on Israel to stop the slaughter, has prompted outrage and a planned protest:
Starmer’s regime has constantly ignored racism, misogyny and abuse from the right-wing faction that has destroyed the party as a meaningful opposition, often protecting alleged perpetrators – even paedophiles – and covering up even the most serious allegations, while doing nothing to act against perpetrators exposed by the Forde Report. His latest disposable pledge is clearly a feeble attempt to con diverse groups that he cares a jot about their best interests – and his decision to hold it at the centre named after Labour’s first Black MP, who would no doubt have regarded him with contempt, adds insult to injury.
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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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Norwegian Foreign Minister warns weapons-exporting states of complicity in Israeli genocide
UK, US and other supporters of Israeli apartheid and oppression are enabling slaughter of Palestinians
Espen Barth Eide, the Foreign Minister of Norway, has warned the UK, US and other states exporting weapons to Israel that they risk prosecution for participating in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.
Eide said:
States exporting weapons to Israel should reassess whether they are effective partners in the genocide in Gaza Strip or not.
The news was reported by the Syrian Arab News Agency but has, as usual, been ignored by the UK ‘mainstream’ media – just as most ignored or minimised the International Court of Justice (ICJ) finding last week putting Israel on trial for genocide – or even helped Israel’s attempts to spin it away – and the court’s order to prevent the killing of any more Palestinians, an order that the apartheid state has already flouted.
Eide has also announced that Norway will continue to fund UNRWA, after the UK, US and others cut funding because of unsubstantiated allegations by Israel that twelve UNRWA employees participated in the 7 October kibbutz raid:
The Agency represents the lifeblood of millions of people suffering from tragic conditions, both in Gaza Strip and in the region as a whole.
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Video: Webbe challenges govt over support for Israel already flouting ICJ ruling. Meaningless reply
Leicester East MP continues strong record on Gaza and Palestinians, challenging government to say what it is doing to obey ICJ when Israel is already murdering hundreds more civilians – and government continues abject collusion
Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe has been one of the few MPs to stand up strongly for Palestinians and to challenge the government over its complicity in Israel’s genocide and other war crimes in Gaza. In Parliament today, during urgent questions, she asked the Tories what they are doing to protect Palestinians when Israel is already killing hundreds of Palestinians a day and intensifying its genocidal incitement despite the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) explicit order to take every measure to prevent them being killed.
The answer was utter, meaningless platitudes:
In fact, the UK continues to aid and abet Israel in its wanton slaughter of innocent Palestinians and to impede the arrival of desperately needed food, fuel and medical supplies – while attempting to accelerate then death rate from hunger and disease still further by smearing the UN relief agency UNRWA. The UK, like the US, has cut off its funding to the vital relief organisation on which millions of desperate Palestinians are relying, despite Israel’s long record of blatant and already-discredited lies to excuse its actions – and the prospect of a change of government sometime this year promises more of the same, as so-called ‘Labour leader’ Keir Starmer is just Pavlovian in his support for the apartheid colonisers.
Few MPs bothered even to turn up to the ‘urgent question’ session.
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Israeli ministers speak to extremist conference about clearing Gaza for settlement
A day after the ICJ’s damning verdict that found Israel’s genocidal acts as fact, government ministers call for more war crimes
Around twenty Israeli government ministers and Knesset members have attended a right-wing extremist event demanding the clearing of Gaza and the replacement of the indigenous Palestinian people with Zionist settlers.
Security minister Itamar ben Gvir, communications minister Shlomo Karhi, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at, and a string of other members of the Netanyahu government and government parties attended, the event – titled “Conference for the Victory of Israel – Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria”.
Ben Gvir – himself an illegal settler – told the far right gathering of the imperative to ‘voluntarily’ move the Palestinian population out of Gaza:
We need to find a legal way to voluntarily emigrate [Palestinians] and impose death sentences on terrorists.
I turn to you, PM Netanyahu: this is time for brave decisions.
Smotrich, according to Israeli paper Haaretz, said:
We are rising, we have a nation of lions [and many children] are returning there as combat fighters. We must make sure they return there as settlers to protect the people of Israel.
Karhi clarified what a farce all talk of ‘voluntary’ migration is:
‘…voluntary’ is at times a state you impose [on someone] until they give their consent.
Katz added, in chilling language:
Today, after 18 years [from disengagement from Gaza], we have the opportunity to rebuild and expand the land of Israel. This is our final opportunity.
The conference came just a couple of days after another far-right event titled ‘Victory Convention: Conquer and Colonise Gaza’.
Israel has continued to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its interim ruling, despite being ordered by the court to take all measures to prevent any Palestinians being killed. Now, after the court found as fact the genocidal language used by Israeli government figures, others are piling the evidence still higher.
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Ignore Israel’s spin: ICJ HAS ordered a ceasefire – and much more than a ceasefire
Desperate damage control by genocidal regime can’t hide the facts – the ICJ has gone well beyond a mere ceasefire: Israel has been ordered to protect Palestinians in Gaza, not just stop shooting at them
In the wake of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) historic verdict that officially put Israel on trial for genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s spin doctors, apologists and mouthpieces have desperately been trying to spin the court’s crushing judgment as some kind of victory on the basis that the ICJ did not ‘order a ceasefire’.
Unfortunately, some supporters of Palestine have fallen into the trap – but in fact, the ICJ went way beyond merely ordering a ceasefire. As the president of the court announced, Israel has not just been ordered to stop shooting at and bombing Palestinians.
It has been explicitly ordered to protect them by preventing anyone killing them, inflicting psychological harm on them, preventing reproduction or any other means:
A ceasefire is an agreement to cease hostilities between two countries engaged in a war – in a genocide, the murderous party is ordered to stop the genocide, but the court went further and told Israel it must prevent the killing of Palestinians, as well as pursue any who try to do so and to ensure evidence of such war crimes is not destroyed, as Israel has routinely been doing.
Craig Mokhiber, who resigned as a UN genocide expert last autumn because the UN was failing to prevent Israel’s ‘textbook genocide’ against the people of Gaza, agreed in an interview on Friday night:
Of course Israel will ignore the ruling and the orders that come with it – decades of impunity have instilled such an arrogant sense of entitlement in Israeli politicians that they will flout the ruling. But – vitally – Israel’s backers and enablers are now explicitly breaking international law every single time they provide materials, funding or practical assistance, or political cover, for Israel’s mass murder. And in a month, Israel has to come back to the court and detail its compliance or lack of compliance with the court’s order.
And every country that wishes to uphold international law will be able, and even obliged, to use their own jurisdiction – granted to them by the ruling – to issue warrants for the arrest of anyone committing or complicit in the genocide, in addition to the vast political damage those complicit, criminal regimes will be doing to themselves.
And the UN General Assembly, if Israel and its backers flout the ruling, will be entitled to remove Israel from the UN community of nations and even to refuse to recognise Israeli passports, as was done to apartheid South Africa.
The extent to which this damages Israel and its international standing can be seen in the outraged, petty, desperate and clearly coordinated reaction of its mouthpieces.
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Event: ‘Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide’
Register for this webinar here. An organiser wrote:
The slogan Never Again symbolised the determination of anti-fascists and the labour movement that after the Holocaust, genocide must never happen again – that no one should be annihilated because of an accident of birth and who they are.
Six million Jews, a million Gypsy Roma, half a million mentally and physically disabled, to say nothing of the millions of prisoners of war, Poles, Russians and other people who were exterminated by the nazis between 1939 and 1945.
Zionism however drew different conclusions from the Holocaust. As Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and the Rector of the Central European University wrote in Ha’aretz, in ‘The Need to Forget’ in 1988:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim (arose). In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
The Holocaust played an important part in the establishment of the State of Israel yet it was because of the Nakba, the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homeland, that a Jewish State was formed. A series of massacres accompanied the Nakba which were aimed at ‘encouraging’ the flight of the Palestinian refugees.
In our Public Meeting we not only have Professor Ilan Pappe, the foremost historian of the Nakba, who has written The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine but Ghada Kharmi, a British Palestinian doctor who was expelled by the Zionist militias in 1948 from her home in Jerusalem.
Also speaking are Stephen Kapos and Suzanna Weiss, two child survivors of the Holocaust who were hidden from the fascists in Budapest and France, along with Tony Greenstein who has written Zionism During the Holocaust .
Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting
Saturday 27 January 7 pm
Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide
Register in advance for this webinar here. Event details are here.
Rishi Sunak Stumbles as he Takes the Knee to the Culture Warriors
There was a curious moment at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions when Rishi Sunak appeared to suggest that Keir Starmer’s decision to publicly show solidarity with black victims of racism was somehow unBritish.
“He [Starmer] talks about what… Britain values. This from a man who takes the knee", Sunak told the chamber.
The implication here was that Starmer’s decision a few years ago to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter’ protesters by taking the knee somehow put him out of step with ‘British values’.
It’s unclear why this should be the case, given that at the time of the protests, Sunak himself said that he had “enormous respect” for those taking part in them.
More recently he has also been keen to express his “solidarity” with victims of antisemitic racism following events in Israel and Gaza.
Yet for some reason he now appears to believe that Starmer’s decision to show solidarity with black victims of racism is somehow derisory.
Following the session, I put this to his Press Secretary directly.
Asked if the Prime Minister believes Starmer was wrong to take the knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protestors, she told me that “I think the Prime Minister's view is that politicians are there to you know, to lead, not to, not to sort of do a virtue signalling move.
“So as far as he's concerned, like, you know, from our side we have a very diverse cabinet and we're very comfortable in, you know, in that, but I think it was a bit of virtue signalling on his behalf.”
Yet when asked whether the PM believes white footballers were also “virtue signalling” on the issue when they took the knee, she replied that he did not as they were “doing it for their teammates”.
After further pushing on the issue it remained unclear why the PM believes that some people taking the knee in solidarity with those protesting against anti-black racism is deserving of “enormous respect” while other people taking the knee in solidarity with those experiencing anti-black racism is deeply unBritish and derisory.
An Unconvincing Culture Warrior
The exchange highlights the absurd tangles the Prime Minister has got himself into in recent months with his belated conversion to the world of GB News style culture wars .
This unconvincing conversion has obliged Sunak to both pretend to be someone who cares about fringe issues such as the 15-minute city conspiracy theory, while indulging in ‘Great Replacement’ rhetoric with Italy’s far right PM, at the same time as claiming to be a sensible centre ground steward of the nation. The result is that he fails to make a convincing impression of being either.
Sunak's latest comments come in the same week that Starmer himself sought to distance his own party from the era of culture wars, describing the Prime Minister’s own attempts to indulge in them as “desperate”.
“In its desperation to cling on to power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect", Starmer said in a speech on Monday.
Whether or not a Labour Government would be successful in moving British politics away from its focus on such topics remains to be seen, however.
Over recent years an entire political/media cottage industry has been created on the basis of importing exactly these kinds of US culture war tropes to the UK.
That it has so far been largely unsuccessful, with polls showing voters overwhelmingly remain much more concerned about core issues such the economy and the NHS, has not stalled these attempts.
Indeed, it is likely that should Starmer become Prime Minister, that certain parts of the media, and the Conservative Party itself, will see its appetite for such subjects only growing further.
Yet, what Sunak's rather clumsy attempts to ignite a culture war with the Labour Leader have shown is that those trying to wage such wars often end up doing far more damage to themselves and their own reputations than they ever manage with their actual targets.
Agrarian Populism
Farmers’ protests are being embraced by the far right. The precedents are chilling.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th January 2024
When environmental activists calling for less pollution sit in the streets, across Europe they are now abused and attacked, arrested and handed extreme and draconian sentences. When farmers contesting pollution rules block entire city centres and major roads, set light to haybales, filling the highways with smoke, and spray manure on government buildings, the authorities sit and wait for them to go home. Few, if any, are prosecuted, and those who are receive small penalties. The promise of equality before the law has seldom looked emptier.
The hard right and far right demonise people who challenge the status quo, and valorise those who seek to restore it. Governments and police forces across the rich world have proved all too responsive to their demands.
I understand the sense of threat felt by farmers, as environmental rules are belatedly enforced. In some cases, attempts across Europe to make farming greener, reducing its release of nitrogen, cutting diesel subsidies, limiting water abstraction and banning some pesticides, have been clumsily introduced and badly implemented. I understand that life is tough for many farmers, as it is now for workers in almost every sector. Like all of us, they have a right to protest. And other people, as in all cases, have a right to scrutinise their protests.
There are good reasons to do so. Farmers’ movements in several European nations are being influenced or exploited by political forces in ways that have chilling historical precedents. Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats, Fidesz in Hungary, the Brothers of Italy, the Dutch far right and similar groups across the continent are cynically using farmers’ plight and protests as a means of building support. Farmers, some of these groups claim, embody the soul of the nation, but they are being uprooted by “globalist” forces, seeking to “replace” them with immigrants. The far right’s resurgence in Europe is fuelled to a large extent by what used to be called “agrarian populism”.
There are similar trends in the US. The Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters, two of the militias that led the attack on the US Capitol building in January 2021, consolidated around an agrarian revolt against state and federal authorities. After the rancher Cliven Bundy was ordered to remove the cattle he had illegally herded on to public lands in Nevada, harming the brittle desert ecosystem, these militias arrived to defend him. In an armed confrontation on the freeway, they forced federal agents to back down. Then they stalked, harassed and threatened to kidnap officials: several had to flee the region and hide in safe houses. Though they committed crimes that in other circumstances would have been treated as terrorism, few were prosecuted or even arrested. Their impunity in Nevada is likely to have encouraged their attack on the Capitol.
As they did a century ago, these political movements exploit genuine crises: the accumulation of wealth by the few and impoverishment of the many, the erosion of workers’ rights and the stagnation of wages, public austerity and the multiple failures of public provision, the restriction of political choice as major parties cluster round neoliberalism, the destruction of small businesses – including small farms – by large ones, the environmental disasters now hammering many communities. They then use these crises as weapons against the very people seeking to address them: leftwing and environmental parties and protest movements.
Among their tactics are lurid conspiracy fictions. While, a century ago, similar political voices raged against “aliens” and “cosmopolitans” (Jews and other supposed “outsiders”), today these movements rage against “immigrants” and “globalists”. While demonising two plutocrats (Bill Gates and George Soros), today’s groupings align openly or tacitly with others, such as Elon Musk, Charles Koch and Donald Trump. A selective approach to financial power (demonising “Jewish bankers” while receiving funds from supportive plutocrats) was also a feature of 20th-century fascism.
It all looks horribly familiar. As the historian Robert Paxton points out, “It was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency.” Not all agrarian populism was right wing. In Russia, the US, France, Spain and Italy, there were socialist and anarchist strands. But while some progressive forms remain, the dominant varieties gravitate once more to the far right. And other agrarian strains, promoting conspiracy fictions, begin to sound like it.
In a podcast in 2021 with the anti-vaxxer and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr, with whom she has long campaigned, the celebrated agrarian advocate Vandana Shiva claimed that first Gates “locked us all in for one year”; now he is “taking all this to the next step”, to “create starvation and hunger through lockdown, so that there is no food”. At one point, she says Gates will “make the right to good food a crime”, and at another says he has a plan to “empty out” people’s minds “by mining data and patenting it and turning everyone into zombies”. There are solid reasons to criticise Gates – we don’t need to make stuff up. Of global financial institutions such as the World Bank, she says, “That’s how the Shylocks of the world work: get you into debt and then want the pound of flesh.”
The grimmest themes in European history are being shamelessly disinterred at or around the farmers’ protests. At the tractor blockade in Berlin this week, some people displayed the flag of the Landvolkbewegung, a 1920s antisemitic agrarian movement. It troubles me that so much has fallen down the memory hole: the disgusting race politics of Rudolf Steiner, who developed biodynamic farming; Germany’s Lebensreform movement, which claimed that Jews were “injecting putrefying agents into the nation’s blood and soil” (ours is not the first age in which bucolic and anti-vaccine sentiments have merged); the Artaman League, which sought to restore an imagined agrarian past, on which the Nazis built their blood and soil politics; and nostalgic British farming movements led by fascist sympathisers such as Rolf Gardiner and Jorian Jenks.
It’s also troubling to see how few people in the 2020s are prepared to confront the far right’s new agrarian populism. Those who should contest these politics cringe and cringe again: there seems to be a moral forcefield surrounding farmers’ protests, defending them from criticism. As the left seeks to avoid a clash with supposedly “authentic” and “rooted” movements, the far right exploits this timidity. George Santayana’s famous maxim haunts our days. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Why does the ‘march against antisemitism’ look so much like a National Front rally?
Far right is a strong presence at both
A pro-Israel ‘march against antisemitism’ and a National Front march – but which is which?
The latest ‘march against antisemitism’ – code for a gathering of those who support Israel despite or because of its apartheid and its genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – bears a strong resemblance to National Front marches and rallies.
Wonder why that might be – well there’s the pervasive presence of the far-right at both. At a recent such march, members of the demo protested against the removal of right-wing extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson – and the links between pro-Israel hardliners and the far right have long been well established, if largely ignored by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media.
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