Zionist Antisemitism and the Reinvention of Judaism in Home Affairs Select Committee Report

I just had another look at the Home Affairs Select Committee Report on Antisemitism report.  It makes for such depressing reading I can only take in little looks at a time.  I was just looking at what I thought was the Chief Rabbi's contribution and I was struck by the casual way his evidence was used, it was gleaned from something he wrote for the Daily Telegraph.  I was also struck by his sheer dishonesty though Lord Sacks was a hard act to follow where dishonesty was concerned.

See this:

In an article for The Daily Telegraph in May, the Chief Rabbi criticised attempts by Labour members and activists to separate Zionism from Judaism as a faith, arguing that their claims are “fictional”. In evidence to us, he stressed that “Zionism has been an integral part of Judaism from the dawn of our faith”. He stated that “spelling out the right of the Jewish people to live within secure borders with self-determination in their own country, which they had been absent from for 2,000 years—that is what Zionism is”. His view was that “If you are an anti-Zionist, you are anti everything I have just mentioned”

That's utterly absurd. If Zionism goes to the "dawn of our faith" what happened between the destruction of the second temple and the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s?  There were Zionistic ideas around before then but they tended to lead to the excommunication and even execution of their promoters.

Another question is, so what?   Even if Judaism does demand a Jewish supremacist state based on colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing, why should anyone else accept that?  The Chief Rabbi's sheer dishonesty or ignorance about the history and tenets of his own religion gives you some idea of why the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) were excluded from the HASC's process.  If Satmar Jews were called upon they would say, as they often do, that "Zionism and Judaism are diametrically opposed".  Even the now Kahanist inclined Lubavitch would have to admit that they only became Zionist when the Jewish state moved from being an issue to a fact in 1948. Not the "dawn of our faith" then.

Moving on from the exclusion of the wrong kind of Jews I saw this:

Similarly, CST and the JLC describe Zionism as “an ideological belief in the authenticity of Jewish peoplehood and that the Jewish people have the right to a state”. Sir Mick Davis, Chairman of the JLC, told us that criticising Zionism is the same as antisemitism, because:

Zionism is so totally identified with how the Jew thinks of himself, and is so associated with the right of the Jewish people to have their own country and to have self-determination within that country, that if you attack Zionism, you attack the very fundamentals of how the Jews believe in themselves.

Neither CST nor the JLC are essentially religious so they had to admit that Zionism is an ideology not a religious tenet or religion in its own right but look at how Sir Mick Davis expressed himself:

Zionism is so totally identified with how the Jew thinks of himself

"How the Jew thinks of himself"?  Leaving aside that for Davis, the Jew is a "him", it looks like an extract from a Nazi tract.  Do Zionists know what they're messing with?  And to think they cry when you call them racist.  The Jew, the Jews, Zionism, Israel are all the same to them.  The individual, the race, the ideology, the state, and for the Zionists that is in reverse order of importance to them.

They're riding a tiger and they don't seem to know it.