A Few End of Year Eyebrow Raisers

(Anti-Israel) Welsh Greens politician Pippa Bartolotti's apparent enviable powers of persuasion with Al Beeb's gatekeepers, at least on one issue:

If only friends of Israel were so lucky!

Anti-Israel blogger Robert Cohen, a darling of the anti-Christian Zionist crowd, spruiking the antisemitic site Mondoweiss:

A wee glimpse into the machinations that have ended 70 years of Australian bipartisan agreement on Israel with the Australian Labor Party's recent pronouncement that a future Labor government will recognise Palestinian statehood:

A small taste of the mindset of certain followers of Baroness Tonge, in a recent Facebook post of hers  excoriating Jonathan Hoffman for his forthright pro-Israel activism, which resulted in the White Rocks Hotel in Hastings cancelling her talk scheduled for 24 January, a cancellation which has led to many slurs on the intrepid Zionist activist by furious enemies of Israel on that same thread:

And on another post by Tonge that links to this report:

Importantly, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) demonstrating yet again why it's so dangerous, with, as I've mentioned before,  its easily facilitated  manipulation of impressionable UK schoolchildren:

..

From The Times of London  (29 December):

'A Labour activist has been dismissed by the GMB union after claims that he accused Israel of “inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”.

Pete Gregson, a union official at NHS Lothian, says that blog posts attacking “Israeli apartheid” and activities including signing a petition stating “Israel is a racist endeavour” were not antisemitic.

Mr Gregson says that he will fight the dismissal in court and challenge the accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, resisted calls to accept the IHRA definition for months because it could suppress legitimate criticism of Israel, but it was adopted as party policy in September.

The following month Labour started an investigation into Mr Gregson’s activities.

GMB Scotland said that it would never seek to suppress legitimate debate but said that Mr Gregson “did not adhere to the standards we would expect in taking forward any point for debate”.

Jim Lennox, its president, said: “The committee does find the materials you have written and promoted as being antisemitic in nature, not least accusing Israel of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust. For ourunion, Holocaust denial or claiming the Holocaust was exaggerated is simply unacceptable.”

Mr Gregson was also rebuked for ignoring decisions and policies of GMB authorities, and circulating internal documents to the media.

Mr Lennox added: “You have acted against the best interests of the GMB, you have acted against policy and we believe your antisemitic comments are racist in nature.”

Mr Gregson has had his union benefits withdrawn and been suspended from holding office or taking part in any union business. The committee will urge the central executive council to permanently exclude Mr Gregson from the union.

Mr Gregson said: “I will appeal to the general secretary, but of course that will fail. Therefore it looks like to beat this it needs to go to court for a judicial review . . . The IHRA has never been tested properly in the courts.

“If we can beat this thing, we can stop anyone being expelled from Labour for saying Israel is racist, and stop people being sacked by public authorities or kicked out of college.”'

Meanwhile,

'More than 120 Jewish leaders from around the world attended the Conference on Countering Antisemitism and the Boycott of Israel held last week by the World Zionist Organization in collaboration with the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

The conference took place between December 14–16, 2018 and was held in central London for the second year in a row. Among the many participants were prominent community leaders, representatives of federations, community activists and students from 16 different countries.

The conference began with remarks by Vice Chairman of the World Zionist Organization Yaakov Hagoel and Chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland Paul Charney. They discussed various challenges facing Diaspora Jewry and how to combat Antisemitism.

Mr. Hagoel explained the need for Jewish education, the importance of studying the Hebrew language, and Israel’s relationship with the Diaspora. He stressed  the obligation of reporting Antisemitic incidents to the proper authorities and heads of Jewish communities as part of the struggle against the phenomenon.

The conference unveiled the publication of an extensive survey conducted by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency which shows a growing trend of Antisemitism. “The most disconcerting to me,” said Hagoel, “is the continued failure to report incidents, whether verbal or physical Antisemitism or hatred of Israel. Almost 80% of respondents who said they were affected by Antisemitic attacks did not report the incidents to law enforcement authorities, local rabbis, communal leaders or family members. This alarming figure is a slippery slope as Antisemitism continues to rise and Jews continue to feel a lack of security,” he stated.

“We are witnessing a situation in which Mezuzahs on doorposts are being removed, not by Antisemites, but by the Jewish homeowners themselves for fear of identified as Jews. This is equally as concerning because it leads to loss of Jewish identity. Let us not bury our heads in the sand...."

Read more here

The BBC's Adams's Apple's Not Far from Parental Tree

Courtesy of the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, a video report on those uniquely hereditary refugees, the Palestinian Arabs Palestinians, now into the fourth generation of refugee status.

Of course, their fellow-Arabs could have absorbed the "first generation" that left Eretz Israel in 1948-49, but preferred to use these unfortunate people as pawns in their rejectionist struggle against the Zionist Entity.

Paul Adams skims over such essentials, in a report that is essentially context-free.

More polished than Bowen and Donnison, and I dare say more intelligent, he nevertheless descends into propaganda, in contravention of the Corporation's Charter.
 

Lack of context is rather a hallmark of Mr Adams's reportage on Israel and the Palestinian Arabs Palestinians, as Hadar Sela of BBCWatch so ably pointed out here and here

So please bear in mind the following, as I noted in a comment on the first of those BBC Watch posts cited above (emphasis added):

'Paul’s father was Michael Adams, foundation director of CAABU. Below is an extract from what I wrote about him in one of my blog posts re the BBC-pro-Arab nexus, in which I identified Keith Kyle as the first openly anti-Israel BBC journalist:

Shortly after Israel’s stunning victory [1967], the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) was set up in London in order to coordinate Arab and pro-Arab opinion in the UK…. Funded by Arab governments, CAABU could afford a secretariat, and its director was Michael Adams, who had worked for the BBC early in his career but had later joined the Guardian. It was owing to his articles in that paper that a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) observed: “It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each morning.” (That writer would certainly vomit daily if he read the Guardian nowadays!)

One of CAABU’s first actions had been to send Adams, while he was still employed by the Guardian, on a funded trip to the Middle East, from whence he sent a series of articles biased against Israel. The Guardian had printed them without explaining that they had been subsidised by Arab money. There was also a despatch from Cairo which talked of the “forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza”. In fact, those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to Israel’s security, as the Guardian grudgingly acknowledged the next day. Adams also used the offensive term “final solution” to describe Israeli policy.

It was shortly after this that Adams became CAABU’s director…

The BBC’s Keith Kyle was not slow to identify openly with CAABU. He was a keynote speaker at one of its first major rallies….

[In 1969] on the BBC’s Panorama, Michael Adams spewed out vitriol about “nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure” – in other words, a certain lobby.

In one of his platform appearances Adams – foreshadowing the avoidance by Al Beeb and the Guardian of the T-word – rhetorically enquired why the British press referred to “Arab terrorists”: ‘I can’t remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France “terrorists”‘, he continued. (In 1999 his son, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Paul Adams, used the prescribed Al Beeb term “Islamic militants” of suicide bombers. It was Paul Adams, when diplomatic correspondent, who in 2007 appeared to admit to BBC bias when he described Alan Johnston’s job as “to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip”.)’

How Brits View Arabs

In its own words, CAABU (the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding),

 "was founded on the terrace of the House of Commons back in 1967 after the Six-Day War. Since then it has grown to become one of the most active NGOs working on the Middle East in British Parliament and working to build an understanding of the Arab World in Britain.". 

Needless to say, this organisation, which from the beginning was "in bed", as it were, with the BBC, promotes the undermining even in schools of British support for Israel.

CAABU has just released a press statement, as follows:

'The majority of Britons agree with racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and 69 percent think the UK should take in fewer refugees from Syria and Iraq, an Arab News / YouGov poll has found.

The wide-ranging poll of 2,142 adults found that UK residents have strong feelings about key Middle East issues — including the fight against Daesh (the so-called Islamic State) and war in Iraq — but 81 percent admitted to knowing little or nothing about the Arab world.

One of the main findings of the poll, which was conducted in conjunction with the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), was that 55 percent of Brits agree with racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims for security reasons.

The “UK attitudes toward the Arab world” poll, which was conducted in mid-August, illustrates a disparity in UK public opinion on the Arab world.

Seven in 10 believe the UK should take in fewer refugees from Syria and Iraq, rising to 91 percent among those who voted for the UK to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. More than six in 10 of the respondents feel that Arabs who migrated to the UK and Europe have failed to integrate in Western societies.

But 72 percent also point to the problem of rising Islamophobia in the UK, with 70 percent saying anti-refugee statements from politicians and others risk sparking more hate crimes.

The poll found that 53 percent of respondents believe the UK should recognize Palestine as a state. Most Brits are dissatisfied with UK foreign policy on the Arab world, with 57 percent saying it has been largely ineffective in upholding human rights and promoting global security. More than half of those polled support Britain’s current military intervention against Daesh, while eight in 10 Brits believe going to war in Iraq in 2003 was wrong.

Despite holding strong views on these key topics, most Brits admit to knowing little or nothing about the Arab world, and 41 percent say they would never travel to the region.

“The poll results strongly suggest that the UK public is dissatisfied with British diplomatic intervention in the Arab world, but that Brits also lack knowledge about some of the complexities of the region,” said Faisal J. Abbas, the Editor-in-Chief of Arab News.

“The Arab world is home to some of the poorest countries in the world, yet nearly a third of Brits associate it with being wealthy. One may ask what impact such perceptions might have on aid decisions made by Western governments.”

Chris Doyle, Director of CAABU, said the apparent lack of a broader awareness in the UK about the Arab world was cause for concern.

“Considering the enormous importance of the Arab world to Britain, it is alarming that 81 percent of the British population say they know little or nothing about this vital region. Whilst a third want to learn more, a massive 41 percent would not visit the region,” he said.

“At a time when mutual understanding is more needed than ever, this chasm must be addressed — something we at CAABU intend to do.” ...'

More here

D'ye Ken Why British Jews Distrust the Labour Party?

So the wily and egregious Ken Livingstone's in trouble (slap on the wrist stuff) with the Labour Party, and a number of usual suspects have hot-footed it to his aid.

It's not as if the antisemitic ex-Mayor of London and Greater London Council chief has been expelled from the party: he's been suspended for another year (on top of the year just passed), and can still attend branch meetings and vote in ballots.

Hence the tweet above from Luciana Berger MP.

To quote London academic David Hirsh here:

Last year

'Ken Livingstone has been suspended from Labour membership for two years, counted from last April, when he said on the radio that Hitler "was supporting Zionism - this was before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews"....Livingstone keeps on repeating that his Jewish friends agree with him; and there is indeed a small but noisy coterie of Jews ready to bear witness against the Jewish community and to whitewash their hero....

Livingstone is not a jolly, harmless old bloke who is basically on the right side and who supports the Palestinians; he has spent much of his life crafting antisemitic discourse for mass public consumption.  

Last year

There is a bigger problem of political antisemitism in the Labour Party than Livingstone; the leadership of the party itself is implicated in the kind of politics which cultivates it.

And now, Labour is not even able decisively to distance itself from Livingstone by expelling him.  No doubt, Livingstone will still be invited to do media work and he will still be treated as a respectable and experienced political leader; because even now, that is how he is seen by many.'

There's an online petition afoot, denying that Red Ken (as he used to be known) is an antisemite.

I don't very often repeat guest blogposts of mine on other websites, but I feel compelled to repeat one I wrote about a year ago for Elder of Ziyon.

Apologies if you've read it before.

I include copies of recent eloquent tweets by Wales-based academic Dr James Vaughan, whom I mention in the following:

Regarding the current crisis in the British Labour Party regarding the pestilential antisemitism lurking in certain cliques on the party’s Left, British journalist Nick Cohen has observed with his customary insight  

“Challenging prejudices on the left wing is going to be all the more difficult because, incredibly, the British left in the second decade of the 21st century is led by men steeped in the worst traditions of the 20th.

 When historians had to explain last week that if Montgomery had not defeated Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt then the German armies would have killed every Jew they could find in Palestine, they were dealing with the conspiracy theory that Hitler was a Zionist, developed by a half-educated American Trotskyist called Lenni Brenner in the 1980s.

When Jeremy Corbyn defended the Islamist likes of Raed Salah, who say that Jews dine on the blood of Christian children, he was continuing a tradition of communist accommodation with antisemitism that goes back to Stalin’s purges of Soviet Jews in the late 1940s.

 It is astonishing that you have to, but you must learn the worst of leftwing history now. For Labour is not just led by dirty men but by dirty old men, with roots in the contaminated soil of Marxist totalitarianism. If it is to change, its leaders will either have to change their minds or be thrown out of office.”

The torrid abuse on social media (Twitter and Facebook) directed at anti-Corbyn Labour MP John Mann (pictured left, in an abusive Twitter post by an antisemite last year), a blunt honest Yorkshireman who exemplifies what is fair and honourable in the Labour tradition, has been a bulldoggish champion of Jews and foe of antisemitism  and who has had the grit and integrity to tell fellow Labour MP Ken Livingstone just what is odious about the latter’s outburst regarding Hitler and Zionism, illustrates the antisemitic ratbaggery which infests many of the party’s present rank and file.

From a current pro-Ken petition!

That rank and file has of course been swelled by far leftists of the Israel-hating breed who joined the party in 2015 in order to elect Corbyn as its leader.

For, of course, Corbyn’s anti-Israel activism goes back a long way, not least in lending his name to a defence group for the London-based Palestinians Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, post-graduates who, angry at what they foresaw as a peace deal, used their scientific training to make car bombs that exploded outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington and outside a Jewish charity in Finchley (The Times, 12 December 1996) – and also his championship of Mordechai Vanunu, the convicted Israeli nuclear secrets traitor who is on record as declaring that Judaism is a “backward religion” and that “efforts should be redoubled to create a Palestinian state rather than a Jewish one.  There shouldn’t be a Jewish state.” (The Times, 20 April 2004).

The Labour Party’s infiltration by far left elements hostile to Israel began in the 1970s.  (I was working at the London School of Economics and remember the era well, including how pro-Israel material left on notice boards would be torn down virtually as soon as posted.)

At that juncture the Labour Party, with a few exceptions (notably MPs Christopher Mayhew – who in a BBC interview referred to Jewish MPs as “the Israeli army below the gangway” and

who in 1970 told the Institute of Race Relations “I would like the Institute to consider the proposition that Mrs Golda Meir is most unlikely to have ancestors who once lived in Palestine, and far less likely to have such ancestors than Yasser Arafat” – David Watkins and Andrew Faulds) was still very much pro-Israel.

Anybody with a serious interest in the topic of Labour’s relations with Israel and the pernicious influence of Mayhew and the gang should read the article “’Mayhew’s Outcasts’: anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson's Labour” by Dr James Vaughan, a lecturer at what is generally considered  the foremost International Relations Department in Britain, the long-established one at Aberystwyth University:

In order to illuminate what I write below, let me quote an extract from Dr Vaughan’s article (with footnote references omitted):

'An early sign that LMEC [Labour Middle East Council, founded after the Six Day War to counter “Zionist” influence in the party] and CAABU [the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding] were developing contacts with more radical pro-Palestinian groups can be seen in their members’ association with the Free Palestine newspaper in the 1970s.  Free Palestine had begun life as a ‘violent and crudely written’ newsletter in 1968 and indirect links to CAABU were established when Claud Morris agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969.

That business relationship proved to be short-lived but the newspaper continued to cultivate links with British MPs and activists.  Its editor, Louis Eaks, brought his own connections to the Young Liberal ‘Red Guard’ faction, and Free Palestine received political support and journalistic contributions from LMEC regulars like Mayhew, Watkins and Faulds.  Morris later claimed not to have been aware of Free Palestine’s links to Arafat and the PLO when he agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969.

Those connections, however, are not especially difficult to uncover.  A February 1975 editorial stated that Free Palestine’s line was ‘determined by the political and strategy decisions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Al Fatah’ whilst asserting that ‘this newspaper is not funded by either of these organisations.’  In 1981, inviting Andrew Faulds to join the editorial committee, Eaks claimed that Free Palestine was ‘independent of any specific Palestinian organisation’ although he noted that the newspaper was ‘committed to the Fatah/PLO line.’

Andrew Faulds?

A closer look at the newspaper’s parent company, Petra Publishing, however, reveals that among the firm’s directors was Khaled al Hassan (Abu Said), a founding member of Fatah and one of Arafat’s closest advisers. Another director was Saleh Khalili, who was also a member of Free Palestine’s editorial committee.  Khalili has been identified by Alex Mitchell as a London-based agent of Abu Jihad, head of the PLO’s military operations. 

According to Mitchell, Khalili’s job as the PLO’s ‘man-at-large in London’ brought him into collaborative liaison with Gerry Healey’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), whose publications were subsidised by Libya’s Colonel Gadhaffi, and, through the WRP, to the Lambeth Council leader, Ted Knight, who sat alongside Ken Livingstone on the editorial board of the Labour Herald newspaper.  Mitchell has even claimed that Knight met with Arafat, Abu Jihad and Khalili in Tunis and succeeded in soliciting a £15,000 donation to the Labour Herald from the PLO.

Whatever the truth of that, it is certainly clear that much of the Labour Herald’s content was, in its anti-Zionism, scarcely distinguishable from that of Free Palestine.  Free Palestine was also connected to the Palestine Action group, founded by Ghada Karmi in June 1972.  It was Eaks who first informed Andrew Faulds of plans to establish ‘an anti-Apartheid type of organisation’ to lobby on behalf of the Palestinians ‘within the Labour, Communist and Liberal parties’ in April 1972 and the new group’s political platform included support for:

1. The restitution of all the rights of the Palestinians, especially the right to return to their homes.

2. The creation of a unitary, secular, democratic Palestine in which all citizens have equal rights irrespective of race or creed.

3. The struggle of the Palestinians for the liberation of their homeland.

LMEC considered the desirability of cooperation with Palestine Action at a meeting of its Executive Committee in October.  Evidently, there were doubts about the wisdom of a formal association and, noting that ‘an approach had been made to LMEC to support the newly formed Palestine Action group’, it was ruled that ‘no official support should be given to this movement.’ However, whilst LMEC resolved to keep its distance from Palestine Action, there were no such restrictions upon individual members.  Indeed, Andrew Faulds, a member of LMEC’s Executive Committee since January 1973,became far more than a passive supporter of Palestine Action.

In December 1973, Karmi wrote to Faulds to confirm that ‘you have been elected President of Palestine Action at our AGM’; an honorary position that Faulds happily accepted. Faulds played a key role in a major breakthrough for Palestine Action at the BBC.  It came in the form of a television programme, ‘The Right to Return’, broadcast on 26 November 1976 as part of BBC 2’s ‘Open Door’ series. Faulds presented the programme, overseeing guest appearances from David Watkins and the anti-apartheid campaigner and Young Liberal chairman, Peter Hain.

A few days after the broadcast, Karmi reported that no less a PLO luminary than Abu Lutof (Farouk Kaddoumi) had praised the programme as ‘the best film he had ever seen on the Palestine issue’ and CAABU’s John Reddaway also congratulated Faulds for making ‘a notable contribution towards the exposition and defence of Palestinian rights.’”

You wouldn’t know it from his Wikipedia entry, but former British Labour MP and Cabinet minister Peter Hain (once touted as a future prime minister and now ensconced in the House of Lords) was the Peter Hain mentioned above, an anti-Israel activist of intemperate views.  See my post here

As I note there,  the Jewish Chronicle (5 September 1975) reported:

“Calls for the destruction of Israel as a state and for British Government recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation were made by more than 1500 pro-Arab supporters who marched from Speakers’ corner to Downing Street on Sunday while the Jewish rally was in progress.” 

Flanked by some 500 police officers, marchers included Communists, Marxists, Young Socialists, Young Liberals, as well as hundreds of Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis and other Arabs. Hain called on “radicals on the left-wing in Britain” to fight for the Palestinian cause.

(As will be seen in that blogpost of mine linked to above, Hain a few years ago attempted to put the “one state solution” – entailing the eradication of the sovereign state of Israel – back on the political agenda, but his views were disowned by the then party leadership.)

On 16 September 1978 The Times reported “growing concern” that the ANL had been infiltrated by, and was increasingly beholden to, the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), which of course is so notoriously represented in anti-Israel protests today.

The 16,000-strong Federation of Conservative Students had accordingly dissociated itself from the ANL, and Dr Jacob Gewirtz (d. 1996), head of the Research Department of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, ‘says he is convinced that the league was the brain-child of the SWP and that party has “other fish to fry”’.

In a letter published in The Times on 25 September 1978, concerned reader George Mandel stated:  

“The leaders of the ANL could dispel our doubts if they were to state publicly whether or not they believe that Zionism is fundamentally racist.  If the answer is no, many Jews will be reassured.  If it is yes, they should explain (not only to us but also to their own supporters) why they are inviting unrepentant racialists to join them.”

Disclosed a Jewish resident of Hove, Sussex, J. [Jack] Garnel, in a letter in The Times (27 October 1978):

Hain the Pain

‘I am able to quote a reply to part of Mr. Mandel’s question.  It was given to me by Peter Hain, who describes himself as the Press Officer of the Anti-Nazi League.  In November 1977, I wrote to Hain protesting about an anti-Zionist article of his published in Free Palestine ...'  In his reply, dated November 11 [1977], Hain declared: “I believe Zionism to be a racist creed”. I agree with the decision of the Jewish Board of Deputies not to affiliate to the ANL.  As a supporter of the right of Israel to exist, I am like most Jews classified as a Zionist.  In combatting neo-Nazism, I have no desire to rub shoulders with anti-Zionists who support the PLO, which has been rightly described by Begin as a “Nazi organisation” and whose covenant is regarded by Israeli Jews as an Arabic Mein Kampf.’

On 1 November The Times carried a response from Peter Hain and the Jewish actress Miriam Karlin (whose name was misprinted as Karling at the foot of the letter), describing themselves as “Steering Committee, Anti-Nazi League”.  Their letter began:

“The Anti-Nazi League has been subjected to a number of specious criticisms in your columns recently.  First, J. Garnel … attacks the League because some of its members are opposed to Zionism.  But many others involved in all levels of the league are pro-Zionist.  Indeed, the signatories to this letter disagree on this matter.” 

(That will certainly come as a surprise to those who remember the late Miriam Karlin as a leftist Israel basher and member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians; I suppose the alleged contrast between her and Hain suggests just how extreme Hain’s position was and seemingly still is.)

The letter continued:

“The only criterion for membership of the Anti-Nazi League is opposition to the Nazi activities and racist ideas of the National Front.  We have no policy as an organisation on other political issues and our neutrality on the question of Zionism has been accepted by the Jewish Chronicle, which endorsed the League in an editorial last week…”

That assertion elicited a clarification (The Times, 3 November 1978) from the Jewish Chronicle’s acting editor, David Nathan:

‘In a leader last week the Jewish Chronicle suggested that there might be opportunities for the Board of Deputies to “loosely cooperate with the ANL in those areas of anti-racialist endeavour where the Board can satisfy itself that there is no political gain to the Socialist Workers’ Party or other anti-Zionist forces …. That is very far from blanket endorsement of the ANL.’   

Also worth reading, by anyone interested, is the joint letter from Hain and ANL Organising Secretary Paul Holborow in The Times of 21 September 1978, and the joint letter in the same issue from Neil Harvey and Ian Harvey of Birmingham.

In response to the former letter, Graham Smith, Research Department, National Association for Freedom, observed that in the Socialist Worker of 27 May 1978 Holborow had appealed for funds for that paper in the following terms:

“The [ANL] has won support from people coming into politics for the first time.  We must ensure that many of these people are won to the Socialist movement… We need to have Socialist Worker leading the way in this important job …. Any regular donation to the SWP will not only help to get rid of the Nazi rats, but to begin to get rid of the capitalist sewer that encourages them to breed.’

To quote Dr Vaughan again

‘The cry of ‘Israeli apartheid’ soon became a staple feature of British anti-Zionism.  Writing in Free Palestine under the headline “Palestine must win”, Peter Hain likened Harold Wilson’s views on Israel to “statements rationalising and condoning racialism by right-wingers returning from South Africa”.  The radicalism of Hain’s position at this time can be gauged from his rejection of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and his assertion that “the case for the replacement of Israel by a democratic, secular state of Palestine must be put uncompromisingly” …. The tactic of equating Zionism with Nazism was another distasteful feature of the emerging language of anti-Zionist activism…. 

 Such imagery was not itself new … but there was something more calculated about the use of Nazi imagery as a means of delegitimising Zionism in the 1970s.  Mayhew certainly flirted with the analogy, writing in 1971 that “Germans who massacre Jews are tried and executed. Jews who massacre Arabs are elected to political leadership” …. Free Palestine pioneered visual representations of the Zionism-Nazism analogy.  The front page of its April 1975 issue was adorned with the image of a Palestinian prisoner reaching out from a prison cell window, the bars of which formed the shape of a swastika. Ken Livingstone’s Labour Herald newspaper adopted the “Zionism equals Nazism” trope with equal enthusiasm in the 1980s; perhaps the most notorious example being the 1982 cartoon which, under the caption “The Final Solution”, depicted Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin in SS uniform, standing atop a mound of bloodied corpses, making a Nazi salute.’

In The Times (31 May 1984) regular columnist Bernard Levin drew attention to a campaign against Freemasons instituted by the Labour-majority Council of the London borough of Brent – “which was marked down by Mr Ken Livingstone for his prospective parliamentary pocket-borough, [and] has long been in the forefront of extremist local government politics…. In March, the previously subterranean campaign against Masons broke surface [in the borough]….”

To people who denied the analogy between the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Freemasons on the grounds that “a Jew cannot help being a Jew but a Mason does not have to be a Mason”, Levin pointed out scathingly that in a free society a person is entitled to belong to whatever group he wishes until such time long as an associated wrongdoing is involved, and added:

“Secret membership...”  Thus do the kissing cousins of anti-semitism jusfify the new bigotry and discrimination … But I know a good many people who, though Jewish, go under an assumed non-Jewish name and do not admit their origin.  Are they, too, unfit to serve on, or under, the Brent Council?  And if I pass their names to a gossip columnist of The Guardian, will he, as he did with Masons, print a daily Jew-list, exposing them as doubly sinister, first because they are Jews and second because they conceal the fact?’

Levin went on: “anti-Semitism in Britain became socially and politically unacceptable when the world learnt just what it could lead to.  But the bacillus was not altogether eradicated, and it has now found another potential group victim.  And a group, so far from being safer than an individual, is more vulnerable, because it has no individual human identity, and can thus more easily be portrayed as truly diabolical.”

The Times of 7 March 1985 carried an article entitled “Why Labour is Losing its Jews” which is eerily pertinent to the present situation.  I assume the author, Peter Bradley, described there as a member of the executive committee of Poale Zion, is none other than the Peter Bradley who from 1997 until 2005 sat as a Labour MP.

Mr Bradley began by observing that whereas in the immediate post-war years perhaps 75 per cent of Anglo-Jewry supported the Labour Party, the figure was now around 40 per cent.

Acknowledging that “many complex factors” underlay this downward trend, he held that one of them was “the fear that certain extreme forms of anti-Zionism are tainted with anti-semitism”.

After citing Shadow Defence Spokesman Denzil Davies’s contention at the 1984 Labour Party conference in Blackpool that an “antisemitic strand” was running through some parts of the party, Bradley gave two more recent examples of antisemitism.

One was the outburst of Sheffield Labour councillor George Moores, chairman of the South Yorkshire Police Authority, who said of Home Secretary Leon Brittan:

“I don’t know how to describe him.  But if I did, I’d be accused of being a racist.  There are too many of his ilk in Parliament.  It’s worth looking into, that, even though there are quite a few of them who are Labour.”

 Bradley remarked: 

“In past decades such crudities might have served as isolated, proverbial exceptions to the rule of Labour tolerance, humanity, and, indeed, philo-semitism.  But the apparent establishment of anti-Zionism as a cornerstone of Labour-left ideology has contributed to a significant change of atmosphere within the Labour movement which many otherwise tough-skinned Jewish socialists are finding altogether inimical.”

Of Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council, he wrote:

'In an interview with the Israeli trade union paper Davar, he seemed to go out of his way to cause offence to Anglo-Jewry.  With what has been described as an “ignorance matched only by his own insensitivity”, he [Livingstone] alleged that the Board of Deputies of British Jews is “dominated by reactionaries and neo-fascists”.  He [Livingstone] went on: “Progressive Jews support me; only Jews who hold extreme right-wing views oppose me” ….

 What really stung Jewish members of the Labour Party was Livingstone’s claim that Jews had traditionally supported Labour “not necessarily because they were socialists, but because the Conservative party was anti-semitic.”  Nothing could have been calculated to offer greater insult to Labour’s Jewish activists …

The implication is clear: only that small number of Jews who subscribe to Livingstone’s kind of anti-Zionism can properly call themselves “progressive”; to be acceptable Jews must repudiate the cause that is central to Jewish secular life, Zionism, and must subscribe to a socialist triumphalism which asserts that Zionists are racists because they subscribe to a national liberation movement (while Palestinians who support their own are not); which identifies Israel’s leaders with the Nazi architects of the Final Solution … The list of campaign groups, sects and caucuses in which Zionists, and by extension Jews, are no longer welcome is a very long one.

 Is it really surprising, many Jews are asking, that the Jewish attachment to the labour movement is becoming tenuous?  For in almost all sections of the “progressive” Left, Jews claim they are being made to feel they are welcome only if they are at least non-Zionist, and preferable sufficiently anti-Zionist to be paraded as token Jews who dispel all suspicion of anti-semitism …’  (Emphasis added]

 Update (hat tip: Jonathan Hoffman):

 Tom Watson, the deputy Labour leader, has released an extraordinary statement about the party’s decision not to expel Ken Livingstone. He says it is “incomprehensible”. Here it is in full.

'I find it incomprehensible that our elected lay members on the disciplinary panel found Ken Livingstone guilty of such serious charges, and then concluded that he can remain a member of the Labour party.

When I read the words of chief rabbi Mirvis, who says that ‘the Labour party has failed... the Jewish community, it has failed its members and it has failed all those who believe in zero tolerance of anti-semitism’, I can’t disagree with him. I wish I could, but I can’t. I am ashamed that we have allowed Mr Livingstone to cause such distress.

It isn’t just Jewish people who feel disgusted and offended by what Mr Livingstone said and by the way he has conducted himself over this matter, and it isn’t just Jewish Labour members who feel ashamed of any indulgence of his views anywhere in the Labour party. This shames us all, and I’m deeply saddened by it.

Mr Livingstone’s unrepentant media appearances in recent days have continued to discredit the party I love. His current behaviour is still bringing the Labour party into disrepute. It is hard not to conclude that his use of inflammatory language to dismiss the fully justified outrage of the Jewish community and others will incite further distortions of the Holocaust in our public discourse.

My party is not living up to its commitment to have a zero tolerance approach to anti-semitism. I will continue the fight to ensure that it does, and I will press my colleagues to do so too.'

CAABU, In The Beginning (Spot The BBC Connections!)

CAABU (Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding), began life as an Arabist rather than a radical ratbag organisation like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), but, with many names drawn from the top echelons of business, politics, and academia, it has been perhaps all the more dangerous for that.   Nowadays, given a common purpose and despite their diffferences of emphasis and personnel, the two organisations appear to be hand-in-glove in efforts designed to undermine support for Israel among the British public: witness the ruthless targetting of British schoolchildren with anti-Israel propaganda, about which I blogged here.

Funded by Arab money, CAABU was established in the immediate wake of the Six Day War:

"We believe that the need for mutual understanding and sympathy between the people of Britain and the people of the Arab world was never more vital than at the present time.

Britain and the Arabs have a long tradition of respect and friendship; they have much to admire in each other's way of life and the principles to which both people's adhere.

We have sympathy for the aspirations, achievements and rights of the Arab peoples, especially the Arabs of Palestine, for whose administration Britain was responsible until 1948, and whose case must not be permitted to go by default."

In the following words, Christopher Mayhew (1915-97; created a life peer as Baron Mayhew in 1981),a  Labour MP until 1974, and from then a Liberal, began a speech on 27 July 1977 in a committee room at Westminster to mark the tenth anniversary of CAABU's foundation. 

"Those who founded CAABU, at a meeting here in the House of Commons ten years ago, took on a formidable task - to challenge the deeply held beliefs about Palestine of the overwhelming majority of the British people.

An opinion poll just published by the Sunday Times had shown that only 2% of the British people supported the Arabs.  It was almost universally agreed that the 1967 war had been planned and started by the Arabs with Russian support; that the Arabs were racialists who aimed to drive the Jews into the sea; that the Palestinian refugees had left Israel in 1948 and should resettle elsewhere in the Arab world; that the refugee camps were kept in being by the Arab Governments as a political weapon against Israel; that Israel, a small country surrounded by numerous enemies, had no designs at all on Arab territory unless, reasonably enough, to secure her own security; and that, in general, after the appalling sufferings of the Jewish people, Israel was entitled, on moral, legal and historical grounds, to the wholehearted support of the civilised world.

To make things worse, these opinions were shared at that time by almost all newspaper proprietors and editors, almost all the directing staff of the BBC and ITV, almost all MPs, and almost the entire publishing and film industries.

They were also supported, with enthusiasm and sincerity, by the great bulk of Britain's large, lively and influential Jewish community, many of whose members were totally dedicated to Israel's cause and were willing to make great sacrifices of time and money to support it.'

Mayhew, whose talk was entitled "CAABU - The First Ten Years (it was followed by one from Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian Ambassador to the Court of St James, on the topic "CAABU from the Arab Standpoint") went on:

 'It was in those unpromising circumstances that a few individuals, sharing a quite different conviction about Palestine, came together, first in a provisional executive committee, and then at a formal constituent meeting, and founded our Council.  My researches suggest that the honour of actually starting the ball rolling belongs to Elizabeth Collard, but she was supported right from the start by Ian Gilmour and Colin Jackson as co-Chairmen of the provisional executive, and also, among others, by six members of our present executive committee Michael Adams, Hugh Norris, Doreen Ingrams, Dennis Walters, Anthony Nutting and myself....

To spread the truth about Palestine, CAABU has published large numbers of pamphlets, helped to produce several films, written of promoted hundreds of letters to the press and has produced articles - or material for articles - not only for provincial or national newspapers, but also for university publications and even parish magazines.  Our members have spoken at innumerable meetings all over the United Kingdom, including many meetings organised by Jewish societies and University debating societies ...

 CAABU members were discusssng and stydying the feasibility of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza as early as March 1969....

In fact, CAABU has undoubtedly helped to create the remarkable international consensus which has now emerged on the best way of achieving a just and peaceful settlement.....'

Mayhew went on to observe:

"None  of the founders of CAABU, I feel sure, expected to enjoy the experience of challenging the Zionist lobby ... but it was plainly a job that had to be done by someone.  Moreover, there are always compensations in supporting wildly unpopular causes.  To begin with, nobody joins you for a beer, so that your companions tend to be people of genuine conviction.  Moreover, in a situation where everyone desperately needs mutual encouragement, personal relations tend to flourish.  There have been notably few resignations or quarrels in CAABU during the past ten years. Sadly, death has removed some of our most vauled colleagues.  We remember, for example, Arnold Toynbee, Tom Little, Will Griffiths and Nevill Barbour."

Who were the people that Mayhew specified in his speech?

Calcutta-born, LSE-educated Elizabeth Collard (1911-78), a socialist and anti-colonialist, had latched onto the Arab cause following the fruition of her previous consuming passion, India's independence from Britain, and in 1957 she had founded the Middle East Economic Digest.

Ian Gilmour, PC (1926-2007; succeeded to father's baronetcy 1977; created life peer as Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, 1992), ex-Eton, Balliol, and the Grenadier Guards; he was a barrister, a Conservative MP from  1962-92, and proprietor (1954-67) of The Spectator, which he edited from 1954-59. He was Secretary of State for Defence in 1974 under Edward Heath and Lord Privy Seal, 1979-81, under Margaret Thatcher. A pro-Europe "wet" who opposed many Thatcherite policies, he was a prominent pro-Arab and from 1993-96 was president of Medical Aid for Palestinians, a post later held by another Conservative "wet," the present chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris (Lord) Patten.


Colin Jackson (1921-81), a barrister by profession, was Labour MP for the West Riding constituency of Brighouse and Spenborough (1964-70 and 1974-79).

Michael Adams (1920-2005), a journalist, was CAABU's inaugural director.  He'd worked for the BBC early in his career (his son Paul is its chief diplomatic correspondent) but had later joined the Guardian.  As I observed here:

'It was owing to his articles in that paper that a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) observed: "It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each morning." (That writer would certainly vomit daily if he read the Guardian nowadays!)

One of CAABU's first actions had been to send Adams, while he was still employed by the Guardian, on a funded trip to the Middle East, from whence he sent a series of articles biased against Israel.  The Guardian had printed them without explaining that they had been subsidised by Arab money.  There was also a despatch from Cairo which talked of the "forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza".  In fact, those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to Israel's security, as the Guardian grudgingly acknowledged the next day.  Adams also used the offensive term "final solution" to describe Israeli policy.

It was shortly after this that Adams became CAABU's director. The Guardian continued to offend.  In August it carried an advertisement from an Arab source that made "untrue and repulsive allegations about Israel's treatment of Arab civilians in the occupied territories" and in a report alleged the "collective shooting of civilians" by Israeli troops in the occupied territories as well as the discovery of "mass graves".  Yet overall it seems that with Adams's departure, and that of  leader writer Frank Edmead, the Guardian's coverage of Israel became more evenhanded - until it descended again into the travesty of truth and fair play that is its hallmark today.

The BBC's Keith Kyle was not slow to identify openly with CAABU.  He was a keynote speaker at one of its first major rallies.  The Jewish Chronicle (29 November 1968) noted "the intense anti-Jewish feeling generated in the CAABU audience - and among some of the speakers - by the very existence of the Jewish State, referred to as the Zionist State" as well as the way pro-Israel Jewish questioners were mocked and shouted down.

One of the worst features of Kyle's pro-Arab stance (apart from its infringement of the BBC Charter, of course) concerned the hijacking of an El Al aircraft at Zurich in February 1969.  Through his Arab contacts he had learned of the plan, but had not disclosed the information "to avoid Israeli retaliation against it".

In the same year he presented a series of programmes on the Middle East highly slanted against Israel and replete with gratuitous comments of his own.  Aghast, a  Jewish Chronicle columnist (9 May 1969) observed: "The casual viewer will doubtless have been fooled into believing that the Israeli occupation of Arab territories is barbaric and ruthless."

And that summer, on the BBC's Panorama, Michael Adams spewed out vitriol about "nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure" - in other words, a certain lobby. 

In one of his platform appearances Adams - foreshadowing the avoidance by Al Beeb and the Guardian of the T-word - rhetorically enquired why the British press referred to "Arab terrorists": 'I can't remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France "terrorists"', he continued.  (In 1999 his son, the BBC's Middle East correspondent Paul Adams, used the prescribed Al Beeb term "Islamic militants" of suicide bombers.  It was Paul Adams, when diplomatic correspondent, who in 2007 appeared to admit to BBC bias when he described Alan Johnston's job as "to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip".)'

Hugh Norris had been married since 1965 to Cairo-born London-based clinical psychologist Fawzeya Makhlouf, a leftwing activist in the Arab cause who would vehemently decry Sadat's peace treaty with Israel.

Doreen Ingrams (1906-97), the daughter of barrister and politician Edward Shortt, Home Secretary under Lloyd George, was the wife of a British colonial administrator, Harold Ingrams (1897-1973), who'd been stationed in Zanzibar, Hadhramaut, and southern Arabia, dressing like the locals.  Her diaries of their travels formed the basis for her book A Time in Arabia (1970).  Like Michael Adams, she had worked for  the BBC (as we read in her obituary in the Independent authored by none other than Adams himself) and it would be reasonable to suppose that, again like Adams, she promoted CAABU's agenda via her contacts there :

'Doreen Ingrams spent 12 years as a Senior Assistant in the Arabic Service of the BBC, where she was in charge of talks and magazine programmes, especially programmes for women. Gathering material for these, she travelled widely and after her retirement in 1967 she kept closely in touch with developments in the Arab world.

In 1972 she made use of little-known archive material to produce a work of lasting historical significance in Palestine Papers 1917-1922 with the subtitle Seeds of Conflict, pinpointing the responsibility of British ministers and officials for the subsequent tragedy in Palestine. She was a founder-member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) and served for many years on its Executive Committee. At a reception in her honour in 1994 the members of the Arab Club in Britain presented her with a silver tray as a symbol of "her outstanding contribution to the promotion of Arab-British understanding"....'

(Sir; knighted 1988) Dennis Walters (1928-    ), Conservative MP for Westbury (1964-92), chaired CAABU from 1970 until 1982.  To push the Arab cause within his party he founded the Conservative Middle East Council in 1980 and served as it chairman for the next twelve years.  He was also an office-holder on the Conservative Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, chairman of the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association and founder/director of Middle East International, a political journal that ran from 1971 to 2005.which provided news, analysis and commentary on the Middle East from 1971 until its closure in 2005.

Diplomat (Sir; succeeded father in baronetcy) Anthony Nutting (1920-99), a well-born Foreign Office Arabist with a fondness for foxhunting, was one of the first politicians to display enthusiasm for Britain's relinquishment of the vestiges of Empire and membership of the European Economic Community.  Thanks to family connections he became Conservative MP for Melton in 1945 when only 25.  Talked of as a future prime minister, he negotiated with Nasser, in 1954, the withdrawal of British troops from Suez.  He accordingly resigned as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and soon afterwards lost his seat in the Commons.  His views on Israel were outspokenly intemperate and obnoxious. On 12 November 1969 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported:

'The Foreign Ministry confirmed yesterday that it has barred the entry to Israel of Anthony Nutting, a former British Minister of State who is now a journalist, because of "hostile" remarks he was reported to have made while visiting Arab countries. A ministry spokesman said the British Embassy in Tel Aviv was advised that Israel considered the proposed visit by Mr. Nutting undesirable.

The former Conservative MP said in Amman, Jordan today that the decision to bar him from Israel showed "how arrogant the Israelis' attitude is toward anyone who criticizes them." Mr. Nutting attributed the Israeli ban to his remark that the Israel-occupied West Bank was "one large prison." adding that they "must have something terrible to hide."

An Israeli spokesman said yesterday that Mr. Nutting would have been welcomed to visit the West Bank and see conditions for himself. He was barred because of a speech he made to students in Beirut several days ago in which he reportedly said that the Palestine question can be solved only by force and that it was up to the Palestinian guerrillas to impose such a solution. The spokesman called those remarks inimical to Israel's security. Mr. Nutting said he would not try to force his way across the Allenby bridge and preferred to remain in Amman with "my friends."'  [Emphasis added here and below.]

The other members of the Executive Committee (not mentioned by Mayhew) were:

Nevill Barbour (1895-1972), an Oxford-educated Arabic scholar from Northern Ireland, was another CAABU activist with influence at the BBC.  He had lived in Tangier and then Cairo for some years before moving to Palestine in the 1930s with his wife and children, acting as local correspondent for The Times, and editing the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society.  Following the outbreak of the Second World War he returned to Britain, joining the BBC in 1940 as Arabic Public Relations Officer.  He launched the magazine Arabic Listener and subsequently became Assistant Head of the BBC's Eastern Service, retiring in 1956.  The best-known of his publications, Nisi Dominus: A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, was published by Harrap in 1946.
James Belgrave, an Arabist military officer's son who in Bahrain published the English-language newspaper Gulf Mirror;
Sir Geoffrey Furlonge KBE, CMG (1904?-84), who read oriental languages at Cambridge before starting his diplomatic career in the Levant; he authored a biography of Musa Alami entitled Palestine is my Country;
Will Griffiths (1912-73), Labour MP for Manchester Moss Side;
Frank Hooley (1923-    ), a Sheffield Labour MP;
Nicholas Hyman (his particulars evade me);
Peter Mansfield (1928-96), who'd resigned from the Foreign Office over Suez, was a journalist who edited the Beirut-based Middle East Forum and wrote regularly for several newspapers including The Economist and The Guardian, and was from 1961-67 Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times. His books as author or editor include The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey, Who's Who of the Arab World, Nasser's Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The Arabs, and A History of the Middle East;
Richard May, whose details also evade me;
John Reddaway CMG, OBE (1916-90; Director of Administration); a diplomat, he was (1960-68)  Deputy Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and proved a tireless, high-profile representative of CAABU;
Miss Manuela Sykes, a Liberal Party activist and would-be MP who in the 1950s had chaired the Young Liberal International Committee.

Halachically a Jew, though not prone to say so!

The rest of the General Committee comprised:

John Allegro (1923-88),  famous as a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who in 1970 caused a  furore with a book alleging that Christianity orginated in a "sex-and-mushroom" cult;
Dan Awdry (1924-2008), an Old Wykehamist who went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, served in the Hussars, and became a solicitor and Conservative MP for Chippenham, Wiltshire;
Colonel Sir Tufton Beamish MP (l917-89; a prominent Tory backbencher (the inspiration for Private Eye's buffoonish Sir Tufton Bufton although he was never as rightwing as his persona suggested) made a life peer as Lord Chelwood in 1974), halachically a Jew, though he seems not to have volunteered the fact (his father was a non-Jewish admiral but his mother was the sister of Sir Ernest Simon and his maternal grandmother was an active shul member in Manchester and a Zionist, no less!), he had been outspokenly hostile to Israel's creation, and later formed a pro-Arab pressure group within the Tory Party);
Nicholas Bilitch, who appears from his writings to have been an economic libertarian and anti-statist, though how that connected with support for the Arabs is unclear;
Lord [Fenner] Brockway (1888-1988), a former Labour MP who was well-known for his attachment to socialism and anti-colonialism;
(Sir) William Connor (1909-67),  the leftwing columnist "Cassandra" of the Daily Mirror, who became a household name for the libel action brought against him by Liberace;
Major Derek Cooper MC, OBE (1912-2007), who had served as a policeman in Mandate Palestine and in 1969 awarded the OBE for his work among Palestinians in the disputed territories. In the 1970s he and his well-connected wife Pamela undertook surveys of conditions facing Palestinians for Oxfam and for the International Committee for Palestine Human Rights. They worked for Oxfam in Beirut in 1982, through the summer of 1982, and in 1984 founded Medical Aid for Palestinians (see Gilmour, above);
George Currie MP (1905-78), an Ulster Unionist who was a barrister by profession and had served in the Royal Air Force;
Kenneth Diacre, evidently a decorated major in the Army;
James Dickens MP (1931-2013), a member of Labour's leftwing Tribune Group, represented the marginal seat of Lewisham West from 1966-70 and in 2003 left the Labour Party in protest at its support for the War in Iraq;

A. D. [(Sir; knighted 1973) Douglas] Dodds-Parker MP (1909-2006); was an anti-Suez Conservative MP (Banbury, 1945-59; Cheltenham, 1964-74), who was  Educated at Winchester and Oxford, he was a former member of the Sudan civil service, and was an undersecretary for foreign affairs (1953-54 and 1955-1957).
Alistair Duncan; he authored The Noble Sanctuary: Portrait of a Holy Place in Arab Jerusalem.
Robert (Bob) Edwards MP (1905-90), a former chairman of the Independent Labour Party (ILP); he was a Liverpool-born trade unionist who sat as a Labour MP from 1955-74, first for Bilston and latterly, briefly, for Wolverhampton South-East;
Andrew Faulds (1923-2000), a larger than life character with a big voice and beard and an ego to match, was an actor by profession, and the son of a Prebysterian missionary; it's been claimed that his overt support for the Arab cause cost him the chance of ministerial office;
Sir Dingle Foot QC, MP (1905-78; one of the trio of brothers dubbed "The Three Left Feet"); he'd been president of the Oxford Union and in the 1940s and 1950s was moderator of a BBC current affairs programme called In The News; he was Labour MP for Ipswich from 1957-70, having previously been a Liberal MP;
Tim Fortescue CBE MP (1916-2008); a Cambridge-educated former colonial civil servant, he was Conservative MP for Liverpool Garston from 1966-74 and a whip and junior minister under Edward Heath;
Sir John Glubb CMG, DSO, MC (1897-1986), who, being Glubb Pasha, needs no introduction;
Princess Dina Abdul Hamid,(1929-    ) King Hussein's first wife; in 1970 she had married  the much younger Palestinian commando and high-ranking PLO official Asad Sulayman Abd al-Qadir, alias Salah Ta'amari;
John Alfred Haywood, author of the widely acclaimed A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language; he's been a Sudan-based member of the colonial service and from 1955-78 taught Arabic at the University of Durham;
David Holden (1924-77), author and journalist, who once worked for the Guardian but was best known as chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, fated to be shot dead in Cairo by assassins unidentified;
Dr Albert Hourani (1915-93), an Oxford-educated scholar born in Manchester to Christian Lebanese parents;in the 1940s he'd worked succesively at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), in the office of the British Minister of State in Cairo, and at the Arab Office in Jerusalem and London; he subsequently taught at Oxford, where he founded and directed the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College; the author of A History of the Arab Peoples (1991) and other works, he was Reader in the History of the Modern Middle East at Oxfor, and is said to have trained more academic historians of the modern Middle East than any other academi historian of his generation;
Carol Alfred Johnson CBE, MP (1903-2000), Labour MP for Lewisham South from 1959-74 (notes his Guardian obituary: "In 1965, he wrote a report urging links between the six countries of the EEC and the Western European Union. He became secretary to the British Council of the European Movement and vice president of the Labour Committee for Europe. In 1974, he chastised the Economist for its "partisan" reporting of the Arab-Israeli war, and attacked Israeli intransigence in a letter to the Guardian");
Dr Kathleen Kenyon CBE (1906-78; created a Dame in 1973), the distinguished archaeologist connected in particular with excavations in Jericho;
Peter Kilner, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs who was editor of the Arab Report and Record;
David Llewellyn (his particulars evade me);
Tom Little MBE; a journalist who authored several books on Arab countries, was director of a news agancy based in the Middle East, from where he'd also written for The Times, The Economist,  and The Observer.
(Sir) [Harry] Neil Marten MP (1916-85), an anti-EEC Conservative who represented Banbury from 1959-83 and held office under Margaret Thatcher; a solicitor and shipping adviser, he was, tellingly, for our purposes, he was employed by the Foreign Office from 1947-57.
David Mitchell (another who's hard to identify with certainty);
Mrs Elizabeth Monroe, author of Britain's Moment in the Middle East, 1914-1956;
James Morris (now gender realigned as Jan Morris), who'd covered the Suez Crisis for the [then Manchester] Guardian and exposed the collusion between France and Israel;
Stanley Orme MP (1923-2005; created life peer as Baron Orme of Salford in 1997), Labour MP for Salford seats from 1959-97; a Cabinet minister (1976-79), he also served (1987-92) as chairman of the parliamentary party, and was attached to such leftwing causes as the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament;
(Sir) [Arthur] John Page MP (1919-2008); educated at Harrow and Cambridge and knighted in 1984, he sat as Conservatove MP for Harrow West from 1960-87;
C. J. Parsons (I have no idea of his details);
Brian Pease (ditto);
Professor Edith Penrose (1914-96; American-born as Edith Tilton, she taught economics at the SOAS, having previously done so at the LSE and, earlier, at the University of Baghdad);
Sir John Richmond (1909-90), a public school and Oxford-educated career diplomat who served with British military intelligence in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq during the Second World War; he was British ambassador to Kuwait (1961-63) and Sudan (1965-66), and then joined the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Durham. ;
Miss Mary Rowlatt, author of Founders of Modern Egypt (1962);
David Rubinstein, whom I've been unable to identify (possibly the historian of that name, who's apparently a Quaker);
Patrick Seale, a journalist (Reuters, The Observer) and author specialising in the Middle East, whose Jewish-born father, a native of Jerusalem, was a noted Arabist and theologian;
Sir Frederick Snow (1899-1976), a notable civil and structural engineer;

The very model of a part-Jewish major-general

Major-General Sir Edward Spears KBE, CB, MC (1886-1974; pictured left in 1942, the year he was knighted), who happened to be of part-Jewish extraction but, like Beamish, was decidedly reluctant to admit it; he had been a Liberal and then a Conservative MP. opposed to Appeasement, and had famously served in the Levant during the Second World War;
Roger Stacey (an elusive member);
Mrs. Robert Stephens (presumably the wife of Middle East specialist Robert Stephens, author of Nasser: A Political Biography, and other works);
Desmond Stewart (1924-81), a journalist and author who spent many years in Cairo, an admirer of Nasser, his books include, of course, a well-known biography of Herzl (1974) and one of Lawrence of Arabia (1977);
Mrs M. O. Sykes (possibly Manuela Sykes's mother);
Professor Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), the Winchester and Balliol-educated historian, who was a consultant to government regarding the Middle East; notes Wiipedia:

".... His stance during World War I reflected less sympathy for the Arab cause and a pro-Zionist outlook. He also expressed support for a Jewish State in Palestine, which he believed had "begun to recover its ancient prosperity" as a result. Toynbee investigated Zionism in 1915 at the Information Department of the Foreign Office, and in 1917 he published a memorandum with his colleague Lewis Namier which supported exclusive Jewish political rights in Palestine. In 1922 he was influenced by the Palestine Arab delegation which was visiting London, and he adopted their views. His subsequent writings show the way he changed his outlook on the subject, and in the late 1930s he moved away from supporting the Zionist cause and moved toward the Arab camp. By the 1950s he was an opponent of the state of Israel";

Miss  Penelope Turing (1925-2010), who was an acknowledged authority on opera, especially of the Wagnerian kind.;
Christopher Walker (I'm not sure of his identity);
David Warburton, a Middle East scholar specialisng in Ancient Egypt;
Gordon Waterfield OBE (1903-87), author of Sultans of Aden and other works, was head (1949-59) of the Eastern Service of the BBC, and head (1959-64) of the Arabic Service at the BBC;
(Sir) William Thomas (Tom) Williams QC, MP (1915-86), an Oxford-educated Welshman who was a Baptist minister before being called to the Bar in 1951; he sat as a Labour MP for various constituencies between 1949 and 1981, served as Recorder of Birkenhead 1969-71, Recorder of the Crown Court 1972-81, and in 1981 became a High Court Judge. (Wikipedia states that in 1969 he "was appointed by the then-East Pakistan based Awami League, one of Bangladesh's main political factions since independence in 1971, to represent Pakistani and later-Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the Agartala Conspiracy Case. The military junta of Gen. Ayub Khan did not allow [him] to represent Rahman, citing domestic security and interference in sovereign matters.")

In his speech, Mayhew went on to observe:

"None  of the founders of CAABU, I feel sure, expected to enjoy the experience of challenging the Zionist lobby ... but it was plainly a job that had to be done by someone.  Moreover, there are always compensations in supporting wildly unpopular causes.  To begin with, nobody joins you for a beer, so that your companions tend to be people of genuine conviction.  Moreover, in a situation where everyone desperately needs mutual encouragement, personal relations tend to flourish.  There have been notably few resignations or quarrels in CAABU during the past ten years. Sadly, death has removed some of our most vauled colleagues.  We remember, for example, Arnold Toynbee, Tom Little, Will Griffiths and Nevill Barbour."

Later in the speech, Mayhew reflected:

'It is extraordinary, looking back, to see how many statements about the Middle East that are now uncontroversial were considered, ten years ago, not merely wrong but wicked.  In June, 1967, a Guardian report of a meeting of the Labour Party's Foreign Affairs Group contained the following passage

"Bitterness came to the surface when Mr Mayhew began to speak .... the interruptions began when he argued that it was wrong to talk in terms of racial extermination by the Arab forces .... he was almost shouted down when he went on to claim that the existence of the Palestinian refugees was the root of the crisis".

If the same speech were made today, the audience, instead of shouting the speaker down, would gently fall asleep."

.... There are still some aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict which cannot be freely discussed in the press or on radio or television.  For example, the proposition that Zionism is racialist, or that Zionists have dual loyalties; but these propositions, though true and important, are not central to the basis argument.  Other criticisms of Zionism and of Israel appear quite frequently nowadays in the media....

This advance was, of course, only partly due to the pressure of CAABU and its supporters.  A much more important cause was the better showing of the Arabs in the war of 1973, and their subsequent growth of wealth and power, which compelled the world to listen to them.....

We have come a long way in ten years.  To begin with we were regarded as barely respectable: now we are part of the Establishment, officially visited by the Foreign Secretary.  We are becoming part of the European establishment too....'

During his speech Mayhew announced:

From a Lebanese newspaper of 1967

"I cannot resist giving a rather colourful and clearcut example of the collapse of a Zionist myth.  At the time of the June War, it was stridently asserted by Zionist propaganda, and almost universally believed in the West, that President Nasser had threatened to drive the Israelis into the sea.  This belief, for which there was no evidence at all, had a powerful effect on public and parliamentary opinion at the time.

Eventually [in 1973], when it was quoted against me by a Zionist MP during a television programme I was taking part in, I then and there offered to pay £5000 [about £30,000 to £50,000 in today's money] to any of the millions of viewers who could produce any evidence for Nasser's statement.  Later [also 1973], in the House of Commons, I repeated the offer and broadened it to include genocidal statements by other Arab leaders.

A steady trickle of letters came in from eager claimants, each one producing some blood-curdling quotation from an Arab leader, usually culled straight from some pro-Israeli publication.  I replied to each claimant, explaining that the quotation was mistranslated, or wrongly attributed or invented, as the case might be, but always adding that if the claimant was not satisfied he could take me to Court, and if I lost I would pay up.

Eventually one claimant [Warren Bergson: see Jewish Chronicle, 27 Feb. 1976] did take me to Court.  Perhaps significantly he offered no evidence for Nasser's statement.  Instead, he produced a chilling genocidal threat alleged by pro-Israelis to have been made by the then Secretary-General of the Arab League Azzam Pasha in 1948.  However, when we produced the original statement in Arabic, the claimant could not deny that his English version was a flagrant and apparently deliberate mistranslation, and he immediately tried to withdraw his writ.  But I refused to allow this, and on the 23rd February last year [1976], his Counsel declared in the High Court of Justice that his client offered his apologies and acknowledged that after thorough research he had been unable to find any statement by a responsible Arab leader which could be described as genocidal.

I should add that this admission by Counsel was not reported in any British newspaper, many of which had helped to propagate these slanders in the first place.  Nevertheless, since the Court case, the Israelis and pro-Israelis seem to have stopped this line of propaganda, which did a good deal after the 1967 War to blacken the Arabs' reputation and to increase tension all round.

Finally, since the Court case took place after the General Election, it did not prevent enthusiastic Zionists from circulating 15,000 leaflets in the constituency I was fighting, informing the voters that I was not a man to be trusted because I was refusing to pay out £5,000 to claimants who had sent me chapter and verse for genocidal statements by Arab leaders."

For the record, I asked several Middle East scholars whether Nasser did, in fact, say the words widely attributed to him.  One told me:

'The book by Theodore Draper, Israel & World Politics [New York: Viking 1968], presents extensive quotes from Nasser's speeches in the weeks leading up to the war. On p 222, we read: "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." He said this before the Central Council of International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions on 26 May 1967. I am sure that you could find additional quotes to the same effect if you read the appendices of the book.

 I also suggest the Israeli documentary film on the war, Six Days to Eternity. It shows a million-strong mob on the streets of Cairo deliriously calling for a war to destroy Israel, carrying skull-&-crossbones flags & banners.

 I don't think that Nasser threatened the Jews of Israel that they would be thrown into the sea, in 1967. However, he did make such genocide threats as did Ahmad Shukairy, shortly before the 6 Day War.

Moreover, The threat to throw the Jews into the sea was made in the 1947-1948 period by an Arab here in Israel. And this threat with the person's name is recorded in Dominique Lapierre's O Jerusalem. Dominique Lapierre had a cowriter for this book. I forget his name at the moment. But I suggest you check out that book, O Jerusalem.

Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha did in fact threaten the Jews in Israel with "Mongol massacres" [he used the word Tartar instead of Mongol]. These words and more appeared in an interview with an Egyptian paper, [Akhbar al-Yom?] on 11 October 1947. A somewhat similar statement by Azzam appears in a book by Kenneth Bilby, New Star in the Near East, or some such title.

Mayhew was one of the worst haters of Israel in the UK'

 Said another:

'If the claim is that the phrase itself never passed Nasser's lips, that's possible. If the claim is that Nasser never threatened to wage genocidal war against Israel, that's idiotic.

Abba Eban's My Journey has a section in the index on Nasser, verbal assaults on Israel. It goes to...

* "Israel is the greatest crime in history"

* Existence of Israel is a "stain," "a shame," "a disgrace", "a bleeding wound"

* [Quoted the communique signed jointly by Nasser and Aref in 1963]: "the aim of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel"

* "We are face-to-face with Israel. Hence-forward the situation, my gallant soldiers, is in your hands. Our armed forces have occupied Sharm el-Sheikh. We shall on no account allow the Israeli flag to pass through the Gulf of Nastier. The Jews threaten to make war. I reply, 'ahlan wasahlan,' welcome. We are ready for war: this water is ours."

* "Today we tell the Israelis we are facing you in the battle and are burning with the desire for it to begin. This will make the world realize what the Arabs are and what Israel is"

* [About Nasser and Hussein conspiring on an open line to blame the US for attacking them, risking global nuclear war in the process; note that 'destruction' is a quote]: "... as the victims of Great Power aggression than as having suffered defeat by the despised Jews whose 'destruction' Nasser had been predicting with a loud voice"

From there Nasser gets a lot less publicly ambitious, and falls into post-1967 "what was taken by war must be regained by war" rhetoric. Catastrophic losses will do that.'

(I've taken Mayhew's speech from the 10-page pamphlet  CAABU's Tenth Anniversary, published in London by the Arab-British Centre in 1977.  If anybody knows the particulars of the people I've failed to identify, please leave a comment to that effect.)