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.

By its own admission Home Affairs Select Committee on Antisemitism barked up the wrong tree and had nothing to bark at anyway

What a performance about nothing.  The antisemitism crisis "engulfing Labour" has been about nothing, nothing at all.  Well alright, not completely nothing.  The rise of a Palestine solidarity supporter and leftist, Jeremy Corbyn, to the leadership of the Labour Party has sent Tories, Blairites and Zionists into a blind panic but as far as antisemitism goes there is little or nothing to see here.  I can't see and read the whole report.  I just look at snippets at a time.  I know there are outright lies in it from the precious little that I have read.  In fact I just saw this almost by accident:

Mr Livingstone has since admitted that it was “rubbish” to refer to Hitler as a Zionist. Regardless of academic rigour, his decision to invoke Hitler in a debate about antisemitism and Zionism—in defence of a Facebook post [by Naz Shah] comparing Israel with the Nazis—was unwise

Rubbish it may be but Ken didn't refer to "Hitler as a Zionist", he said Hitler supported Zionism for a time and he did.  Naz Shah didn't compare Israel to the Nazis, though there's no reason why she shouldn't. She invoked Martin Luther King to say that legality isn't the sole or a key determinant of right and wrong.  And it wasn't Ken who invoked the Nazis anyway, it was his interviewer, Vanessa Feltz.

Now my guess is that the pack of lies we've just seen gives a flavour of the whole report but something I saw on Twitter yesterday is a stand-out not as a lie but as a fact.  Here's the report.  Now see this:

Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party, and a number of revelations regarding inappropriate social media content, there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party. We are unaware whether efforts to identify antisemitic social media content within the Labour Party were applied equally to members and activists from other political parties, and we are not aware of any polls exploring antisemitic attitudes among political party members, either within or outside the Labour Party. The current impression of a heightened prevalence of antisemitism within in the Labour Party is clearly a serious problem, but we would wish to emphasise that this is also a challenge for other parties.

This is strange, if they wish to "emphasise the challenge for other parties" why didn't they?  Because they weren't trying to undermine other parties.  Because there are no other mainstream parties with a leader that supports (or supported) the Palestinian cause.  And that's what this has all been about, protecting the racist war criminals of the State of Israel from the criticism and condemnation that any illegitimate racist entity would attract irrespective of the ethno-religious identity of those it purports to represent.

Charedi Jews complain of being excluded by Home Affairs Select Committee on Antisemitism

Here's a curious tweet from the Shomrim group, which is a "Proactive Neighbourhood Watch" group in Stamford Hill, which is home to probably the largest so-called ultra-orthodox Jewish (or frummer or Haredi) communities in the UK.

President of Stamford Hill Shomrim - Rabbi Herschel Gluck OBE - comments on the @CommonsHomeAffs report into 'Antisemitism in the UK' pic.twitter.com/RmICvsdBbE

— Shomrim N.E. London (@Shomrim) October 16, 2016

Looking at the statement, it claims the Home Affairs Select Committee on Antisemitism in the UK report  "focuses primarily on the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.... it's important to note that the parliamentary enquiry did not request any evidence from the most visible section of the Jewish community, the Charedi Community, where the majority of the attacks are in person rather than online, leaving victims very vulnerable and are usually clearly and unequivocally anti-Semitic". [emphasis added and possibly innecessary]

Actually I disagree that the report focuses on the differences between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It is clearly aimed at redefining the latter as the former whilst ignoring "clearly and unequivocally anti-Semitic" actions because they befall the wrong kind of Jews.

This exclusion of the people most likely to suffer real instances of antisemitism more than anything actually in the enquiry or its report exposes the whole exercise as a politically partisan charade whose sole purpose was to protect The State of Israel and its supporters from criticism and condemnation.