Gordon Brown still in denial about Jewish National Fund

I'm really sorry about this. Sometimes my priorities are all over the place. Hamas could be chasing Fatah out of Gaza and I'll do a post on the price of smoked salmon beigels in Brick Lane; £1.30 by the way. But I really did miss this about Gordon Brown's patronage of the Jewish National Fund. I did a post when he first became patron and I wrote to my MP, who still hasn't replied. His name's Jon Cruddas and he used to fancy himself as an anti-racist. He doesn't mind Jewish racists apparently, nor his leader's support for them. Anyway, in the first post I quoted Gordon Brown's office thus:

A spokesman for Mr Brown told the JC: “The Prime Minister supports a number of charities and has agreed to become a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK in order to encourage their work to promote charitable projects for everyone who lives in Israel.”

This was tosh because the Jewish National Fund runs projects for Jews only. In its history it has purchased land from absentee landlords and has had the natives ethnically cleansed by the British colonial police and had the same police stand guard over the empty properties while the zionist movement persuaded governments not to let migrating Jews, whether refugees or not, into countries other than Palestine, even during the holocaust.

Well the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been on the JNF's case for some time now and they wrote to the PM's office to protest his association with these racists. The Jewish Chronicle ran the story on 19th October, hence my apology. Look:

The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has written to Mr Brown complaining that the JNF is “a main instrument of Israel’s apartheid system of land control”, adding that since JNF is also involved in land projects and settlements in the West Bank, “territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967”, it is effectively “complicit in war crimes”.

The article gets a bit confusing further in because look:

A similar demand was made in August that the Prime Minister should sever his contacts with the JNF by the London-based Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine.

But a Downing Street spokesman said that there was “no question” that Mr Brown would stop being patron of the fund. “The Prime Minister supports a number of charities, but does not necessarily support every policy or decision they make. He agreed to become a patron of JNF-UK in order to encourage their work to promote charitable projects for everyone who lives in Israel.”

The quote is exactly the same as the one issued at the time he became a patron. The article doesn't make it clear whether they are saying that Brown has had the same lie reiterated or if it is the JC running with an old quote.

Either way, Gordon Brown now has no excuse for pretending to believe that the Jewish National Front is anything other than a full-blown racist organisation whose racist activities and ethos are totally incompatible with its charitable status.