Hat On, Gloves Off: A London anti-Israel activist's antisemitic rant

Anyone who has looked regularly at MrAlexSeymour's YouTube channel will probably be aware of a pretty lady with a penchant for pretty headgear.

The lady in question is hardly going to be mistaken for an admirer of Israel.

 She sometimes appears in the videos he makes and posts that show

not-so-pretty demos in London demonising Israel.

Here are a couple of stills from his videos in which the pretty lady strikes a charming pose while surrounded by some decidedly non-charming placards.

 Recollect her now?

Well, anyway, this past week (hat tip – no pun intended – Reader P) the lady has been posting, as is her right and her wont, on social media.

In the process of revealing the various bees under her bonnet she has unwittingly bought in to that perennial chestnut about a "Palestinian" football team that played in Australia in 1939, the team which, as I've blogged a few times (including here), was an initiative of the Yishuv under the Mandate, the team consisting entirely of Jews:

That just evokes a small sigh and a giggle.  But look at what else the pretty lady posted on Facebook the same day.  The "anti-Zionist"/"pro-Palestinian" brigade are normally so very careful to deny that they are antisemitic.  Yet the lady, with this message, pulls no punches:

Despite (or perhaps because of) the antisemitism inherent in that post, it's now got 45 "Likes" (ten more than when Reader P screenshot it and sent it to me.

Among those who have "liked" it is the person who has since posted the following filth on the pretty lady's Facebook wall:

Also posted to that wall is ordure such as this:

Sad to say, such examples of dung have their "Like" button pressers.

It is certainly instructive to discover what "anti-Zionists" really think ...

The Hand That Rocks Wikipedia ...

Among the more eyebrow-raising of the referees enlisted by peripatetic – recently in South Korea, he's since been on a lecture tour of Algeria – anti-Zionist crusader the Reverend Stephen Sizer, to convince his diocesan bishop  that, contrary to perceptions by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (among others), he's not antisemitic, is retired aerospace engineer Tony Gratrex.

Mr Gratrex wrote in part in his letter to "Dear Bishop Christopher":

"In the late 1960's I lived close to Dachau whilst working in Munich. This gave me the opportunity to visit the concentration camp there many times.

Each time I visited the camp I would a[l]ways ask myself the same question; what were the Christian Church leaders in Germany doing at this time? The answer was, keeping their heads down most of the time.

Then I found out there were some few like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who didn't. In the early 1980s I was living and working in Israel. It was only then that I became aware of the history of what happened to the Palestinians....

For me Stephen Sizer is another Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but I pray there will be a better outcome.

Oh! the ironies of history."

It hardly takes a Mensa IQ to recognise, and reject, the repellent analogy implied.

A blogpost on Harry's Place stated, inter alia, a couple of years ago,

"Gratrex is an organiser for the Reading Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Reading PSC [which unlike many if not most PSC branches does not shrink from linking on its website to overtly antisemitic material, causing concern even to a prominent anti-Zionist Jew, as seen in this JC blogpost  dating to 2010 and its comments] keeps tabs on the Viva Palestina convoys, and is very supportive of their work.Gratrex has also been a guest speaker at Oxford PSC, attended a branch meeting at Bristol PSC, and was affiliated with the Bristol Convoy of Viva Palestina....

 Here is what Gratrex thinks about “the Jews”, in a comment addressed to Jenny Tonge:

I admire the work you do and am in agreement with virtually everything you say except for your attitude regarding the media.

You state that the jews do not control the media but that it is under self censorship. This is patently wrong and only a cursory glance using the internet will show that a majority of the media is jewish owned or controlled.

During the interview you use the expression “who pays the piper calls the tune” and that is precisely the problem when one considers who controls the international banking system.So Jews control the media, global financing, and the world. [Emphasis added here and below]

Gratrex left the comment on the blog of Alan Hart, a 9-11 truther.

Here’s Gratrex on reading about the Holocaust in an article about an Israeli spy in Germany:

With the mention of the holocaust in this article I can only think again of Norman Finkelsteins book; The Holocaust Industry (Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering). How much longer is Israel going to continue to blackmail the world?"

 Another blogpost on Harry's Place, by a different author, subsequently added:

'In the original report, Harry’s Place revealed who Gratrex thought controlled the media and international banking ....

Here’s another comment, not in the original report, that Gratrex left on an overtly anti-Semitic blog:

 Not all adherents to the Torah are enemies of humanity. You are forgetting the Neturei Karta Jews

 Aside from the obvious anti-Semitism of calling all but a tiny handful of Jews “enemies of humanity”, one wonders what attracted Mr Gratrex to this particular blog…'

Reader P, who's supplied me with several screenshots of Sizerisms in the past, has sent me this recent screenshot from Facebook:

Gratrex was commenting following fulminations by Stephen Sizer about changes to his own biographical entry on Wikipedia and on Wikipedia's editing policy:

"I am really sick of the way some people are manipulating my Wikipedia entry. I would be very grateful if some balance could be restored and some of the innuendo, slander and just plain nastiness could be removed or put more constructively ["That unmistakeable odour of Zioslime," commented one of his followers]."

A pro-Palestine activist from Worcester advised that, in response to that lament, he'd logged into Wikipedia to edit Sizer's entry, only to have what he'd written removed:

'....I added information at the end of the "censorship incident" section. I wrote the following:

"Less widely reported is the fact that [Joseph] Weissman’s attacks on Stephen Sizer were conducted from behind multiple anonymous identities and that in addition to his offensive blog (he falsely accused Stephen Sizer of “supporting terrorist activity against Israel”). Weissman himself sought to censor Stephen Sizer’s views, writing letters to organisations hosting Stephen Sizer “demanding that they cancel his appearances”

I used the following two references:

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/.../english-cyberbully.../

 http://seismicshock.wordpress.com/.../richard.../

I have just been back to the page and my addition has gone. I found an edit history section in which it appears that the person who I presume has removed my submission has put a comment alongside the record of their edit as follows "(Are you joking? No, this can't be included)".

Do I simply put it back? Do I complain? What is my next step? Any advice warmly welcomed.'

 Sizer:

"Yes put it back. This is how the Zionist Lobby try to make Wikipedia their private tool of propoganda [sic]."

Reply:

'So I have just seen! The latest message  – accompanied by a warning triangle with exclamation mark.

" Please stop adding unreferenced or poorly referenced biographical content, especially if controversial, to articles or any other Wikipedia page. Content of this nature could be regarded as defamatory and is in violation of Wikipedia policy. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing "....'

 Sizer:

'Take it up the food chain. Threaten to have her blocked for arrogance...

I know of some heavyweight 'friends' about to engage with Wikipedia –  watch this space..." 

Reply:

"My addition has been reinstated again as indicated previously to the censor in a message. I note that she is a very active Wikipedia contributor and so if she were to be blocked herself then I suspect that might hurt. I will pick this up again tomorrow...."

Sizer:

"'Very active Wikipedia contributor' that's how you exert influence - like being a generous donor to a university until they invite a Palestinian guest speaker..."

Sizer again:

"....[E]very initiative puts the Lobby on the defensive. Every proactive step, however small, challenges their position and forces them to be reactive – and remember they are reading this too. Among those who 'follow' me are some known to be working for the Lobby."

Reply:

'I have been back to your wiki entry, Stephen and added the Anthony Julius quote which acknowledges that you reject "any position that threatens the territorial integrity of Israel as a sovereign nation" and describes your work as having “the merit of clearly setting out the issues that divide the two sides, and furthermore doing so without the rancour or sheer nastiness of tone typical of the polemics in the conflict". It might not undo all of the poisonous lies and distortions that have been spewed out but I think it does represent a rational and credible alternative perspective to some of those cluttering up the page.'

Alas and alack!

The official publication date of Anthony Julius's magisterial tome on antisemitism in Britain, Trials of the Diaspora, was May 2010.  Since that date (if not before), Sizer has left on record at least one statement undermining the claim that he 'rejects "any position that threatens the territorial integrity of Israel as a sovereign nation"':

Here's a screenshot:

 Oy!

I wonder why Wikipedia, being allegedly in thraldom to "the Zionist Jews," has so far neglected to add an amendment pointing that out ...

Simon's Story Upsets The Israel Bashers

I must admit that I was never a particular fan of Anglo-Jewish historian and television personality Simon Schama until I read his review of Shlomo Sand's abominable treatise:

"Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

Sand’s sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history, especially the “exile which never happened”, has been suppressed in the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to put it mildly, is a stretch.

To take just one instance: the history of the Khazars, the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism and which Sand thinks has been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic converts. But the Khazars were known by every Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Greenery and further flung parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded.

For Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, the antidote to a national identity based on what he argues are fables, is to shed the fancy that there is any such thing as a shared Jewish identity independent of religious practice.

By this narrow reckoning you are either devoutly orthodox or not Jewish at all if you imagine yourself to have any connection to Israel past or present. Sand confuses ethnicity – which, in the case of the Jews, is indeed impure, heterogeneous and much travelled – with an identity that evolves as the product of common historical experience. Rabbinical arguments may rest on an imaginary definition of ethnicity, but the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland does not. Ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity, about which Sand has nothing to say.

... Sand appears not to notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.

There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your patience. Scholarly consensus now places the creation of the earliest books of the Old Testament not in the 6th or 5th centuries BC, but in the 9th century BC, home-grown in a Judah which had been transformed, as Israel Finkelstein has written “into a developed nation state”. The post-David kingdom of the 10th century BC may have been a pastoral warrior citadel, but the most recent excavations by Amihai Mazar have revealed it capable of building monumental structures. And the Judah in which the bible was first forged, its population swollen with refugees from the hard-pressed northern kingdom of Israel, was a culture that needed a text to bring together territory, polity and religion. It was a moment of profound cultural genesis. And don’t get me started again on the Khazars. No one doubts the significance of their conversion, but to argue that the entirety of Ashkenazi Jewry must necessarily descend from them is to make precisely the uncritical claim of uninterrupted genealogy Sand is eager to dispute in the wider context of Jewish history.

His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been shown by those who think they know what “real jews” should look like. Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical...."

Now I think he's rather wonderful.

And what a wonderful series Schama's BBC2 documentary series "The Story of the Jews" promises to be, as the first episode, screened on 1st September, shows:

Already, Israel-bashers are up in arms.  The notorious Israel-born Israel-hater Gilad Atzmon rants and raves here.

And a gang of well-known Israel-bashers (Sarah Colborne, Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Daud Abdullah, Middle East Monitor; Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, British Committee for the Universities of Palestine; Abe Hayeem, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine; Ismail Patel, Friends of Al Aqsa; Diana Neslen, Jews for Justice for Palestinians) have written an Open Letter of protest to the Controller of BBC2, Janice Hadlow, dated 3rd September, that says in part:

".... In an interview in the Radio Times (31 August-6 September), Schama describes himself as an ‘historian-Zionist’ and says he will be making ‘the moral case for Israel’ in the final episode of this five part series.

We find it alarming that the BBC is giving a platform to an openly pro-Israeli commentator to make the ‘moral case’ for Israel. Schama’s views will go unopposed, unchallenged and unanalysed. This is a far cry from the balanced and impartial broadcasting that the BBC claims to champion...."

 Read more here

Incidentally, talking of television programmes this week, there was, on Aussie multicultural public broadcasting channel SBS yesterday, a new episode from the BBC ancestor-hunt series "Who Do You Think You Are?" featuring rock singer Annie Lennox.  She, of course, is an artist known for sounding off about Israel, as, for instance, during Operation Cast Lead.  This recently uploaded video, in which Professor Richard Landes makes mincemeat of her arguments, is in fact a riposte to all such critics of Israel (Enjoy!)

"Yet Again, British Justice Fails British Jews": Zionist Stalwart Hoffman On A Vile Verdict

This short and snappy indictment by the prominent Anglo-Jewish communal figure Jonathan Hoffman of the verdict of a British court in the case of maths lecturer Ronnie Fraser versus the University and College Union regarding its stance on Israel is cross-posted from the JCBlogs.

Writes Jonathan Hoffman:

'Ben Cohen has it right, here

Paragraph 156 of the Judgment:

    "When a rugby player takes the field, he must accept his fair share of minor injuries. Similarly a political activist accepts the risk of being offended or hurt on occasions by things said or done by his opponents (who themselves take on a corresponding risk)."

Jaw-dropping. The Tribunal sees fighting antisemitism as akin to participating in a sport with the 'teams' evenly balanced and the contest played according to some kind of rulebook!

What planet do they live on?

Would they dismiss black or Muslim victims of racism – or female victims of sex discrimination – as mere players in a game?

Paragraph 150:

    "Belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel ... is not intrinsically part of Jewishness ..."

Is it really possible that Judge A M Snelson, Mr A Grant and Lady Sedley could have sat through 20 days of the hearing, done their post-hearing due diligence and STILL failed to appreciate how Israel came into being and the centrality of Israel to the Jewish people?'

I would add that there is already plenty of evidence, on social media and elsewhere, that the heinous judgment is giving that aid and comfort to the enemy that Ben Cohen in his must-read article identifies as the inevitable outcome:

"The lesson of the Fraser debacle is simply this: a single employment tribunal in the United Kingdom has created a precedent which will be invoked by every Jew-baiter around the globe; namely, that when Jews raise the question of anti-Semitism in the context of visceral hostility toward Israel, they do so in bad faith. That such a bigoted principle can be established in a democracy famed for its enlightened judicial methods is, perhaps, the most shocking realization of all."

Read Ronnie Fraser's personal statement regarding the hearing and the judgment here