Shame on you.

 Disgrace, Disgrace.

This is genocide and our government is complicit in this holocaust. Silence is complicity!

The lie that anti Zionism is anti Semetic.

 With acknowledgment to  Counterpunch for the following interview of a member of of Jewish Voice for Peace in which he outlines the enormous pressure that his organisation and others are coming under from Zionists in the USA to outlaw the activities of Jewish organisations in the country who oppose the far right government of Netanyahu and attempt to bring about the genocide of all Palestinians living in Gaza. Sadly the discredited definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance was foisted on the Labour Party by Keir Starmer on pain of expulsion from the party for any democratic attempt to question its legitimacy.

We have recently been hearing reports that JVP and other anti-zionist groups in the US are coming under attack by zionist groups. Could you tell us more about what’s happening and how you are dealing with this?

Sadly, attacks on pro-Palestine organizations have been increasing since Oct 8, 2023. The organized Jewish community in the US, with support and funding by the government of Israel, has portrayed our organizations as antisemitic and Jewish anti-zionists as self-hating Jews and worse. Building on false charges of antisemitism, many US states have passed laws making Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel illegal even though courts have ruled that these laws are not constitutional. Fundamentalist Christian zionists have been very active in supporting these efforts to censor our advocacy by conflating opposition to Zionism with antisemitism.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Christian-focused think tank that created Project 2025 to guide the Trump administration’s attacks on progressive values, has also produced “Project Esther,” which uses the lie that opposition to Israel is antisemitic to suppress all pro-Palestine advocacy in the US. Al Jazeera published an excellent analysis of Project Esther on Nov 15, 2024. This plan brings together and expands oppressive tactics used against our movement by zionist groups, both Christian and Jewish.drafted by 

What is the legal basis, or maybe legal pretext, used for such attacks?

These actions are built on the false statement that opposing Zionism is antisemitic. For a number of years zionist groups have focused on getting government and institutions to adopt the discredited working definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). By conflating Zionism with antisemitism, they are attempting to use alleged violations of civil rights to delegitimize our work. 

 

Atrocities that shame my country.

 Having been born into Great Britain many years ago my citizenship was decided but recently I have felt more and more detached from the country of my birth, whose government I did not vote for,  and whose policies make me ashamed to be British. The government has not only stood by as the Israelis have been committing genocide in Gaza but they have been aiding and abetting it in this illegal act by supplying the Israelis with aid and intelligence and may therefore be guilty itself of war crimes. On top of this it is prostituting itself to a corrupt regime in Kyiv and pitching at a disastrous European war.

 The country that I grew up in under Churchill, Atlee, MacMillan and Wilson has disappeared into the long grass where pygmies of the political arts stumble about from crisis to crisis shaming the name of Great Britain and meanwhile steer the sinking hulk to financial disaster. My country where art thou?

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

Sung by, in my humble opinion, the finest female vocalist we have ever produced who somehow fickle fame eluded  - POLLY BOLTON.

                                                            BRIEF ENCOUNTERS 

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The right to protest is being eroded as we more and more resemble a Soviet State

 Todays march against the genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel has police asking for members of the public to  hand over photographs of demonstrators supporting a democratically elected government in Palestine.. I seems that our government meanwhile is sharing intelligence and providing armed support to those committing genocide and running an apartheid regime in the Middle East. Shame on them.. I never thought that I would live to see the day in this country.

Israel’s War Crimes will only end when they have exterminated the Palestinian people.

 The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة, romanized: an-Nakba, lit. 'the catastrophe') is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine's predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighborhoods were depopulated, with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.

The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations. The Israeli national narrative views the Nakba as a component of the War of Independence that established Israel's statehood and sovereignty. Also, they negate or deny the atrocities committed, claiming that many of the expelled Palestinians left willingly or that their expulsion was necessary and unavoidable. Nakba denial has been increasingly challenged since the 1970s in Israeli society, particularly by the New Historians, although the official narrative has not changed.

Extracted from Wikipedia.

 Meanwhile succesive British governments have contributed to this slaughter by supplying Israel with intelligence and arms.

 Our present Prime Minister and his wife meanwhile busy themselves with accepting thousands of pounds worth of luxury clothes.

 Shame on them all. I am so mortified of this country’s policies in the Middle East that I no longer possess a British passport.

All of my heroes are dead.

 Pete Seeger was the last to go; Phil Ochs the first. I suppose it is the result of being very old myself and I,  certainly, won't be anyone's hero. The following extract is taken from "The Church Times" ( yes I am very catholic in my reading habits - no pun intended) and is taken from a review of a new biography on the subject. Any guesses from my two readers out there? Clue - he was not a folk singer.

Nevertheless, the author points to the many government reforms that civilised Britain in ways that we now take for granted. Among these were further regulations on racial discrim­­ination, abolition of capital pun­ishment and corporal punishment in prisons,  legalising abortion and same-sex relations, reforming divorce laws, and the creation of the Open University.

Further, the Government could be proud of its record on housing, social services, health, and its help for the poorest, promoting equal pay for women and attempting to end the stigma attached to those on state benefits by recognising that the re­­cipients had rights