April 17, 2005

GUPS versus Zionism and Bolshevism?

I'm a bit stung by the pamphlet that is said to have appeared on a GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students) stall at an NUS event. I have read the content on the net but I haven't seen the pamphlet itself. I don't know if carrying the pamphlet was an easy to make mistake, a malicious act by someone at GUPS with an agenda that undermines anti-zionism, if it was placed on their stall by a non-member to embarrass GUPS or if they are just a plain a sloppy, stupid or malicious group. A Palestinian friend of mine told me that GUPS is virtually defunct nowadays anyway and it's certainly true that no-one from the group has come forward to disown, apologise for or explain the presence of the pamphlet on a GUPS stall at an NUS event.

I said in an earlier post that the text read like Israel Shamir but it actually bears quite an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill's infamous anti-semitic article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald back in 1920. The main difference is that Churchill writes approvingly of zionism as a positive and useful Jewish conspiracy whereas communism is a menacing Jewish conspiracy "as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent." Churchill also has some kind, if essentialistic and downright obscurantist, words about Jews as if "this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical." The pamphlet, which is anonymous as far as I know, also, after some ridiculous and nasty anti-semitic outpourings ends on a conciliatory note, distancing Judaism from zionism but rather feebly when you consider that the buffoon who wrote it states, gratuitously and wrongly, that Lenin himself was a Jew.

The context for my writing this is that the pamphlet was referred to in a Guardian article (and in the Jewish Chronicle) by a Luciana Berger as part of her explanation as to why she, and two other zionist activists felt that they had to resign from the NUS National Executive Committee. The article itself contains far more innuendo than verifiable fact and the reference to the offending pamphlet, as clumsily as it was made (Ms Berger refers to it as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion") is just about the only significant verifiable fact in it. That is, it can either be confirmed or denied. If the former applies then GUPS should either explain or apologise; if the latter then we can simply put this down to yet more zionist deceit and move on.

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