zionism
Labour’s vote-share projection falls on today’s local results – and is lower than Corbyns/Miliband’s
Electoral expert says Labour overall has gone backward, despite Starmeroid spin
Keir Starmer and his spokespeople are spinning like crazy that today’s local election results are a sign of how well the public is receiving Starmer’s policy blancmange of nothingness (well, maybe they’re not using quite that terminology), while they point to a few areas where Labour had good results – such as in the Blackpool South by-election.
But Labour also did disastrously in other areas, such as on Teesside, where it failed to oust Tory Ben Houchen despite Houchen facing allegations of deeply dodgy land deals, in North Tyneside, where it lost control of the council, and in the West Midlands, where it expects to lose to the Tories.
And according to expert electoral analysts, Labour has gone backwards compared to last year, like the Tories:
Compared to polling claiming Labour’s Westminster vote share is as high as 47%, a 34% performance is disastrous – and is considerably lower that the shares achieved by Starmer’s predecessors Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband. Corbyn managed higher in 2018 and Miliband in 2012-13:
Independents, meanwhile, performed strongly, beating the LibDems in vote share and seat gains. The Greens also performed well.
With outrage continuing to grow over Starmer’s lockstep with the Tories in backing Israel’s genocidal regime, a nine percent lead does not look guaranteed to hand Starmer a parliamentary majority – and today’s results confirm it.
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Victorious smear victim takes aim at ‘antisemitism’ lawyer who misled court
Zionist Mark Lewis panned by James Wilson in series of Twitter posts
Earlier this month, university lecturer James Wilson won substantial damages from two so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’ who had foully smeared and endangered him and his family in their efforts to discredit him as an opponent of the ‘left antisemitism’ narrative that supporters of Israel have weaponised for almost a decade now against supporters of Palestinian human and political rights.
Now the victorious Wilson has taken aim in his social media feed at Zionist lawyer Mark Lewis, who at one time represented at least two of the defendants. Lewis, a pro-Israel activist who spoke about ‘unapologetic Zionism’ at the launch of a UK pro-Israel group considered by many to be far-right and boasted of wanting to make people whom he considered ‘antisemites’ homeless, has been lionised by the Zionist right for his pursuit of their opponents.
He has also been sanctioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for abusive conduct on social media – and wished a young Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour dead – and was heavily criticised by a judge in a different case for his conduct of the case and his lack of proper research on behalf of his clients:
a matter of very real concern that the Claimants put evidence before the Court, on an ex parte application, that was not true…
…he had simply failed to carry out sufficient (or any) research or to take adequate instructions from his clients.
And, as James Wilson has pointed out – alongside much more – Lewis was forced to apologise to the court for providing misleading information in Wilson’s suit about the financial health of one (by the time of the hearing, apparently former) client, Edward Cantor who, he had claimed, did not own property that could be sold to pay any penalty levied by the court:
As Luke Turner, who responded to Wilson’s posts, pointed out, Lewis’s distaste for ‘antisemites’ did not prevent him representing two extreme right-wingers – described by the judge in the case as bullying and ‘whiffing’ of antisemitism – when they wanted to sue Turner for posts about them:
The irony of that particular quote is really quite something, given who he was representing in my case, and the "whiff of threat and antisemitism" described by the judge in their "aggressive" course of "bullying" towards me. https://t.co/Dly6C3Aqwb
— Luke Turner (@Luke_Turner) April 20, 2024
And in a pair of posts showing screenshots of communications from Lewis, Wilson – himself a now non-practising solicitor – showed that Lewis demanded thousands of pounds, from the victim of the smear, to settle Lewis’s case against them, while expressing his and his clients’ expectation of victory in the case and repeating that Cantor owned nothing that could be used to pay any penalty. The tactic and the refusal to accept Wilson’s settlement proposal racked up enormous legal costs for the failed defendants:
I am worried about recovering my costs. I do not want to bankrupt Mr Mendelsohn or make Mr Cantor and his family homeless.
But if Mark Lewis @MLewisLawyer), Daniel Berke (@DanielBerke1) and Beth Grossman (@DoughtyStreet) refuse to pay my costs, then I may have no choice.— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 21, 2024
And Wilson concluded his posts – for now at least – by taking aim at Simon Myerson, a supporter of Israel and part-time judge recently sanctioned for abusive comments on social media. Myerson had shared a post calling Wilson the ‘scum of the earth’, which the judge in Wilson’s case described as:
abuse of the same dehumanising kind as was used of Jewish people by the Nazis in the 1930s.
The judge also rejected the defence’s claim that Wilson’s correspondence with Myerson about his sharing of the abusive post demonstrated any kind of aggression or unreasonableness on Wilson’s part.
As Jewish author Michael Rosen, who was also targeted by some of the same people, pointed out, perhaps with his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek, it is noteworthy that the UK ‘mainstream’ press – which will run for weeks with any allegation against a left-winger or supporter of Palestinians – has shown no interest in covering the outcome of the Wilson case or the abusive conduct of those on the losing, pro-Israel, side:
However, Skwawkbox has covered the case in full and a timeline of it can be found here.
The case is not the first conducted by Lewis against supporters of Palestinian rights that ended poorly for his clients. In 2020 Jane Heybroek, a human rights barrister, won a stunning victory when actress Tracy-Ann Oberman and TV presenter Rachel Riley dropped their libel claim against her over an article retweeted by Heybroek criticising their behaviour and contributed toward her legal costs defending the action.
Mark Lewis was asked for comment about Wilson’s comments and analysis but had not responded at the time of writing. He was also ‘tagged’ by Wilson at the start of his Twitter analysis about Lewis’s involvement in the case:
Since one of the Defendants’ solicitors, Mark Lewis (@MLewisLawyer) of Patron Law (@LawPatron), is mentioned in the statement, I am tagging him here. If he wishes to reply, I’ll post his reply below my statement.
— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 13, 2024
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Video: Miriam Margolyes’s powerful statement on ‘vicious, genocidal’ Israel
Jewish actress posts no-holds-barred video supporting Jewish Council of Australia, attacked by Zionists for ceasefire call
Jewish actress and national treasure Miriam Margolyes, a joint UK and Australian citizen, has posted a video supporting the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) call for an immediate and permanent halt to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza – along with the imposition of sanctions and an immediate end to Australia’s military ties with Israel.
The JCA has been heavily attacked by pro-Israel groups for the call, with the attacks following similar lines to the dismissal in the UK of left-wing Jewish groups by right-wing nationalist organisations and politicians.
In her video, Margolyes says she has never been more ashamed of Israel – which she described as a ‘vicious, genocidal, nationalist nation’:
Despite the antisemitic representation by western governments and media as if all Jews support Israel, very many do not – and even many who have supported it are disgusted by Israel’s mass murder of, so far, more than forty thousand Palestinian civilians, overwhelmingly women and children, and the blockade and assaults it is using to starve two million more. The UK and Australian establishments continue their complicity in Israel’s war crimes.
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Fresh audio product: Israel expands its war, Zionists appropriate “safety” discourse, the shipping industry and the Baltimore bridge disaster
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 4, 2024 Trita Parsi explains why Israel is trying to expand its war to Iran and Hezbollah • Natasha Lennard analyzes the Zionist appropriation of leftish “safe space” discourse • Stefan Yong explores the structure of the global shipping industry in light of the Baltimore bridge disaster
In pictures: Liverpool turns out in force for Gaza
Large gathering dominates famous station frontage as crowd chants for an end to Israel’s genocide
Hundreds turned out on Easter Saturday to demonstrate at Liverpool’s famous Lime Street Station today to demand an end to Israel’s genocide and war crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza. The first real spring day did justice to the banners and flags and the large crowd was supplemented by passers-by as shoppers paused to find out more and then join in:
Liverpool Community Independents leader Alan Gibbons is a stalwart of the Gaza protests
Liverpool women hold ‘babies’ to symbolise Israel’s slaughter of Gaza’s children
The protest came in a week where a growing number of countries reinstated their support for the UN’s Gaza relief agency UNRWA – and as Ireland, the ancestral home of so many scousers, announced that it would formally join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.
According to human rights agency Euro Med Monitor, Israel has already killed well over 40,000 civilians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and has wounded and maimed at least twice that number, with the death toll now accelerating even further as the famine imposed by Israel on Gaza’s two million plus inhabitants bites. Israel continues to flout international law and is now ignoring the International Court of Justice’s orders to allow immediate, unfettered, mass access of humanitarian aid and has blocked UNRWA’s access to distribute and deliver, while allowing far-right Israeli groups to block shipments and using starvation as a weapon.
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A Barely-Disguised Genocide
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/d3f93b8233bda302c4487d1c60858bbc/href
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I just read a New York Times piece about the bodies that are trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza which said the Gaza Health Ministry estimates that there are 7,000 people listed as missing, but adds that that figure “has not been updated since November.”
November. There is no chance that any of the numbers we’re getting out of Gaza are up to date, including the death counts. Their infrastructure is shot and the scene there is just too chaotic. Nobody can keep track of anything anymore.
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ISIS keeps attacking the enemies of the US and Israel for some strange and mysterious reason while funding for the main humanitarian group in Gaza gets cut due to completely unevidenced claims of Hamas affiliation. Re-fund UNRWA; de-fund ISIS.
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It’s funny to see the US proposing a fake UN “ceasefire” resolution which doesn’t actually demand a ceasefire when it’s public knowledge that the US could single-handedly create a ceasefire by telling Israel it will stop receiving US weapons if it doesn’t negotiate one right now.
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Ben Shapiro just cancel cultured Candace Owens out of a job for saying Palestinians are human beings and Alex Jones has condemned Israel’s genocidal atrocities before most Democrats on Capitol Hill have. American right wing punditry is a trip, man.
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It sure is a crazy coincidence how all this stuff about difficulty with food distribution, collateral damage, human shields, the need to eliminate Hamas etc just happens to combine to create a situation that looks exactly the same as committing a genocide against an undesirable population.
They’re just doing a horrible thing they’ve wanted to do for ages and then using narrative to cover it up. Oh noes, it turns out it’s really hard to get food and medical supplies to this undesirable population! Oh noes, it turns out the bad guys are hiding in the hospitals and the civilian infrastructure! Oh noes, it turns out the bad guys are hiding behind large numbers of women and children! Oh noes, it turns out we’re going to need you all to move off of the land we’ve been coveting for generations!
It’s a sick joke that not even a child would fall for, but you see western government officials and major news outlets treating it seriously every goddamn day. It’s a barely-disguised genocide happening right out in the open, and the people responsible for telling the public what’s going on in the world are pretending it’s actually a very unfortunate series of highly convenient coincidences. There’s an elephant in the room wearing a cardboard crown as a disguise, and they’re all calling it Your Highness and telling everyone the king has come to visit.
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Israel routinely massacres civilians who are waiting for food, attacks hospitals, picks off civilians with drones and snipers, and is deliberately starving the frailest and most defenseless people in Gaza to death, but the western political-media class keep calling this a “war”.
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People who wish to conflate Zionism with Jewishness often argue that most Jews are Zionists, but so what if they are? Most westerners are propaganda-addled imperialists, but if I didn’t believe westerners can and do snap out of that worldview I wouldn’t be doing what I do here.
In any system where people are being indoctrinated at mass scale by the powerful you’re going to see the majority of that population buying into the indoctrination, but conflating the people with the political ideology they’re indoctrinated with serves only to confuse and distort. If people had conflated “Nazism” with “Germany” that logic could have been used to justify exterminating every German after WWII, but because that distortion wasn’t made it opened up the possibility of de-indoctrinating the nation from that pernicious worldview.
Betting on the possibility of a better future means drawing a distinction between the people and the unhealthy worldviews they’ve been indoctrinated with, whether that’s Zionism, western imperialism, or anything else. We can only have a healthy world when the people snap out of their propaganda-induced coma and shake off the power-serving worldviews of this diseased civilization.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image via Alisdare Hickson (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DEED)
Black Lambeth councillor quits Labour after suspension over Gaza vote
Sonia Winifred quits Labour in disgust and says she has no confidence in leadership
Cllr Sonia Winifred
A Black councillor in London’s Lambeth borough has quite the Labour party in disgust after being suspended for voting for a ceasefire motion put before the borough council in January.
Sonia Winifred announced her resignation on her social media this afternoon, saying that in voting for an immediate ceasefire she was representing her constituents in ‘wonderfully diverse’ Knights Hill:
Former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black woman MP – also suspended by Keir Starmer – responded with an unfavourable comparison of Labour’s current Stalinist and imperialist regime to the party that stood against South African apartheid a few decades ago:
Shocked to hear that you have been disciplined because of your position on Gaza. On that basis not a single Labour councillor would have dared breathe a word about apartheid in the 80s.
— Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) March 7, 2024
Solidarity with Sonia Winifred, Diane Abbott and all those hounded by Starmer’s red Tory regime for standing up for justice and humanity.
Israel has so far killed at least 40,000 civilians in Gaza, maimed twice as many and is inflicting starvation and disease on more than two million innocents, half of whom are children.
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Genocide apologist deletes ‘Jew-hater’ smear after legal threat from Galloway
Pro-Israel hardliner gets the Galloway treatment
Hardline Israel apologist Ben Freeman has deleted a tweet smearing new Rochdale MP George Galloway, shortly after Galloway responded to the smear with a legal threat.
Freeman – whose Twitter feed is full of rants against peaceful anti-apartheid activism and smearing marches against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as ‘hate’ and ‘racist’ and who has defended Israel’s blockade of Gaza and described antizionism as ‘post-Holocaust Jew hatred ‘propagated by the USSR’ – smeared Galloway as a ‘virulent Jew-hater’ and the votes that gave him his landslide election victory as a ‘dark day for British democracy.
And Galloway responded promptly to tell him to ‘remove this immediately or face the legal consequences’:
Sure enough, the tweet promptly disappeared:
Galloway has a consistent record of taking no nonsense from those who attempt to smear him and has already terrorised a number of journalists who tried to trap him with government lines and bias. And he has a long track record of successfully suing, for large amounts of money, people and organisations who smear him, for example the Daily Mirror group in 1992, the Telegraph in 2004, winning £150,000 in damages plus £2m in legal costs, radio station Jcom in 2008, pro-Israel Guardian hack Hadley Freeman in 2015, who deleted rather than fight, and Twitter – after which its designation of his account as ‘Russian-affiliated state media’ was removed.
As one commenter put it of his interaction with Ben Freeman, Freeman got ‘the Galloway treatment’. Other politicians could learn much from his approach:
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150 British Jews tell Met top cop: you’re racist assuming we all support Israel
Letter from anti-racist Jews denounces Establishment’s treatment of anti-genocide marches as antisemitic
One hundred and fifty British Jews have written to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley denouncing the police (and government) treatment of marches against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as if they are antisemitic. The letter reads:
We Reject Your Insinuation That The Marches Against Genocide in Gaza Represent a Threat to Jews or the Jewish Community and Suggest that It Is Not the Business of the Police to Intervene in Ongoing Political Debates
We the undersigned, being Jewish, wish to support and join a complaint against the Metropolitan Police, for their racist and anti-Semitic assumption that all Britain’s Jews support Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
We further believe that the decision of the Metropolitan, Police to delay the starting time of the March Against Genocide in Gaza on 17 Feb. 24 from 12.00 to 1.30 pm ‘to accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route’ is lslamophobic, based as it is on the assumption that the large numbers of Muslims taking part pose a threat to Jews worshipping in congregations nearby.
Your decision to delay the start of the march rested u~on the assumption that there is something inherently anti-Semitic about supporting the Palestinians and that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.
The Met’s decision ignores the fact that many thousands of British Jews have already taken part in such marches without feeling threatened in any way. Indeed the march has started from Marble Arch on at least two previous occasions recently without any anti-Semitic incidents.
We are tired of the Police’s racist and anti-Semitic assumption that to be Jewish is to support Zionism and Israel’s racist and genocidal treatment of the Palestinians. There are many thousands of Jews who are active in the Palestine solidarity movement and we resent your assumptions to the contrary.
The letter is signed by:
The letter’s publication comes amid a flurry of racist and Islamophobic comments by government and opposition politicians, with the help of their media allies, aimed at smearing those who object to mass murder as racist – and the arrest of three left-wing protesters in Newham on the nonsensical basis that booing and hissing a supporter of Israel is antisemitic.
The Establishment is determined to suppress free speech against Israel and its war crimes, and to ignore the blatant racism involved in the assumptions it uses to try to justify those attacks. Anti-racist Jews in the UK and the US know better.
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