An Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory On A London Wall (with video)

Hanbury Street, in London's East End, looms large in the Anglo-Jewish story.  Among those once resident there was Chaim Reuben Weintrop, better known as comedian Bud Flanagan; a blue plaque on the wall of number twelve marks the spot.

Last week, on a wall in Hanbury Street, accompanying the message "The New World Order Is The Enemy Of Humanity," appeared this offensive image from the brush of an American muralist who believes that Jews and Freemasons rule the world.

Sounds familiar? It is, having characterised antisemitic conspiracy theories of both left and right since the nineteenth century.

To the best of my knowledge the first conspiracy theorist to allege a sinister collusion between the two groups was the odious renegade Jew Jacob Brafman, whose pamphlet on the subject in the mid-nineteenth century anticipated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Kalen Ockerman (aka Mear One), the muralist responsible for this excrescence, claims that it's not antisemitic but classist.  Some have accepted his explanation

But the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Luftur Rahman, told the Jewish Chronicle:

"I have received a number of complaints that the mural has antisemitic images. I share these concerns. Whether intentional or otherwise, the images of the bankers perpetuate antisemitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial and political institutions.

Where freedom of expression runs the risk of inciting racial hatred then it is right that such expression should be curtailed. I have asked my officers to do everything possible to see to it that this mural is removed."

It is instructive, and somewhat disturbing, to watch this video of the mural being painted, with narration by the artist, and see how the initial antipathy by locals chamges as the mural takes shape.

Read more here (hat tip: reader Ian G)

The Blonde and the Batty (video)

Haters of Jews are so very often haters of Freemasons.

For instance, the nineteenth-century Russian apostate from Judaism Jacob Brafman demonised the two groups in his nasty and notorious Kniga Kagala - The Book of the  Kahal  - precursor to that despicable forgery and "warrant for genocide" The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Then, too, the ultramontane and fascist persecutors of Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France classed Jews, Freemasons, and Protestants as the trio of  so-called métèque elements held, absurdly, to be deliberately and perversely undermining the nation.

Indeed, in just one contemporary internet example, a conspiracy theorist and avowed Christian believer  who persistently infests my comments box with grotesque judeophobic tripe has a breathtakingly vicious anti-Israel blog in which Jews and Freemasons are routinely held responsible for the world's troubles.

The following video, featuring a titled Australian Ahmadinejad-admiring judeophobe (for whom see http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/12/beauty-beasts-and-birobidjan.html), is notable mainly for its curiosity value as an example of the genre. You'll gather, from the reference to Gordon Brown as "prime minister in waiting," that it's not exactly up-to-the-minute (unless, as I suspect, she meant to say "former prime minister".) But it's worth watching all the same, as an insight into the raw antisemitism that still lurks in some quarters - the kind of nutty Jew-hatred, with references to rule by the Rothschilds and a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy - that really should have had the decency to have died along with Hitler. 

In the words of its uploader:

'In March 2011 the mainstream media reported Iranian alarm that the logo for London's 2012 Olympics had been encoded simultaneously to spell out the word ZION - a celebration of the predatory Zionist state in Palestine founded in 1948 (the year of the previous London Olympics). In this video the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network interviews Lady Michèle Renouf and lawyer Philip Bree, who explain the background to this affair: the "brand consultants" and advertising agencies with close ties to leading Zionists and the Western political establishment; the influence of Freemasonry among the founders of the modern Olympics, such as their main instigator Baron Pierre de Coubertin; and the occult/Masonic significance of the famous Olympic symbol.'