Western mainstream media has been full of stories over recent days about “anti-Semitic” pogroms in Amsterdam. The King of the Netherlands came out to make a public statement about it referring back to the Holocaust, and the terrible role that the West European, bourgeois, ruling-class played in cooperating with the Nazi occupying forces in the slaughter of millions of Jews in their countries. Though, of course, he did not phrase it in that way!
All of this outpouring came at a time that Germany has just passed a law making any criticism of the Israeli government illegal, and defining it as being “anti-Semitic”. But, of course, as everyone now knows, who looks at social media, the reports of these “anti-Semitic” pogroms in Amsterdam, are all a lie, and the truth is the total reverse! It was Zionist football thugs, there to “support” Tel Aviv Maccabi, who engaged in well documented pogroms against local Palestinians and Muslims, attacking individuals, tearing down Palestinian flags from buildings, chanting their support for the genocide in Gaza, as well as disrupting the one minute silence in recognition of the victims of the flooding in Valencia.
That imperialism, and its media, should so overtly distort the truth is of no surprise. The Zionist state in Israel is the construct of western imperialism, and the puppet of US imperialism, without which it could not exist. Just as with Ukraine, and with Taiwan, it acts as the proxy of US imperialism, in the current phoney war between US imperialism and its subordinates, against Russia~China, and their subordinates. So, of course, that western imperialism is going to lie about the nature of the genocide being committed by its Zionist proxy, and cannot allow any criticism of it, even when its actions are, there, for all to see across the globe, in lurid living colour, and all its gore.
When that is reflected on the territory of that western imperialism, it is even more forced to lie about it, as happened with its attacks on protests by students on US campuses, against the genocide, for example, and as with the claims about “two-tier policing”, first raised by Zionists and their supporters in relation to the regular marches against genocide, months before the same refrain was raised by the likes of Farage, in relation to the racist riots that took place on an orchestrated basis. The flagrant lies told about the pogroms undertaken by the Zionist thugs in Amsterdam, last week, are simply a continuation of that.
It has been something long in the making, as the latest German legislation illustrates, which is the logical conclusion of the equation of Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism, and which, also, flows from the demand that the IHRA definition of Anti-Semitism be accepted. As part of that process, it was claimed that the IHRA definition did not prevent criticism of the actions of the Israeli government, but the reality is that the definition, with its examples, always did make any such criticism impossible, as has been repeatedly seen, even when that government has been engaged in the most obvious genocide against a people in living memory!
That genocide, and intensified attempts to exterminate the Palestinians over recent months is not inexplicable, but is part and parcel of the drive of the Zionist state, acting as the proxy of US imperialism and its NATO subordinates to create a viable Zionist state, “from the river to the sea”, as Netanyahu has proclaimed, which can act to, then, normalise relations with the other bourgeois Arab states, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and so on, who are already, themselves, clients of US imperialism, as set out in the Abraham Accords, to act as a regional politico-economic bloc, and to act against the growing influence of China~Russia/BRICS, and their proxies such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The levelling of Gaza, accelerated occupation and clearing of the West Bank, the flattening of Lebanon, are the visible expression of that strategy. In the coming months, as I wrote a while ago, the Zionist state, will move on to an invasion of Syria, annexing further territory to that it has held for decades in the Golan Heights. In the last week, it has already started bombing Damascus.
Over the last few months, we have seen US imperialism, and its UK lapdog actively support Zionist genocide, and its annexationist drive, not just in the provision of weapons and armaments, but also in its involvement in the fighting, attacking the Houthis in Yemen, for example, and increasing its military presence, on a large scale, as well as shooting down Iranian drones and missiles fired in response to the Zionist attacks on Iran, and its embassy in Damascus.
So, of course, that imperialism, and its media will lie with alacrity when it comes, not just to the actions of its Zionist proxy and its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, but also, when it comes to the actions of Zionists in undertaking pogroms in Europe and North America, even when those pogroms are undertaken against the citizens of those countries. Such is the idiocy of talking about “the people”, when it comes to nations that are actually comprised of different classes, with antagonistic class interests. The ruling class, and its state, in every country is not primarily concerned with the interests of its “people”, but only with their own naked class interest.
In 1982, the British government proclaimed that it was engaging in the Falklands War in defence of the interests of the few hundred Falkland Islanders. It was, of course, nonsense. They showed no such similar concern for the interests of the Chagos Islanders, for example, who they cleared from their homes, in order to establish the US military airbase on Diego Garcia! When it comes to the rights and interests of citizens in every bourgeois state, they always come second to the interests of its tiny ruling class, and, in the age of imperialism, those interests are, themselves, always inseparable from the interests of the global ruling class.
Indeed, the same applies in relation to the interests of Jews, which are subordinated to, and sacrificed in order to defend the interests of Zionism. Zionism is, itself, one of the principal sources of anti-Semitism. Zionism could not exist without Anti-Semitism, and so, Zionism has always had a need to ensure the perpetuation of it. Even so, the central argument of Zionism that Jews required their own bourgeois state, in order to avoid anti-Semitism, and a repeat of the Holocaust, has visibly failed to convince Jews themselves, across the globe. Only 40% of Jews live in Israel, as many live in the US. That is in contrast to every other nation, where around 90% live within the particular nation state. Across the globe, Jews have found that their interests are served, not by moving to Israel, despite all of the incentives provided by Zionism, and its allies to do so, but by integrating into the society in which they reside, and particularly, for Jewish workers, by allying themselves with the working-class, and labour movement, in those societies.
That poses an existential threat to Zionism, whose ethno-nationalist ideology, requires an acceptance of the idea that no such alternative is credible. So, when Jews do not accept that racist ideology, as increasingly Jews across the globe, including the US, have done, they are defined as being not really Jews! Zionism insists upon the identity of Zionism and Judaism, and is consequently Anti-Semitic, towards all non-Zionist Jews, denying them, even legitimacy. Indeed, Zionism has more in common with fundamentalist Christian Zionists than it does with world Jewry, and it is amongst those Christian Zionists, not just in the US, but in Europe too, that it has exerted its greatest influence, as with the support for Trump et al.
It is no surprise, therefore, that amongst the Zionists and pro-imperialists in the labour movement, such as the AWL, this is also reflected. At no time in the past would it even have been considered that socialists would support the idea of demanding that workers stand shoulder to shoulder with fascists and open racists, as they confront some other group of fascists and racists. Yet, that is what the AWL have done, as they demand that workers, including Muslim workers, whose family members are being exterminated in Israel/Palestine, by Zionists, must stand with Zionists in Britain, to oppose the fascists that engaged in the riots of the last few months! They wrote,
“If ‘Zionist’ here means ‘anyone who sees a connection with Israel, or identifies with the Israeli state in some manner’, then this graphic failed to encourage ‘community self-defence’ – in fact, it was actively opposing it.”
Well, if ever there was a case of making Palestinian or Muslim lives matter less than even the chance that Zionists, or those that continue to support the genocidal acts of the Zionist state, and feel a connection with it, as it undertakes that genocide, might simply be offended, that is it. It not only epitomises the AWL's Zionism, and pro-imperialism, but is also the natural consequence of the policy of lesser-evilism, and of the descent of the left into the liberal/social-democratic/Stalinist politics of the Popular Front, as against the Marxist-Leninist policy of the United Front in action.
So, its not only the pro-imperialists of the AWL, for example, that adopt that same position of standing by and allying with the fascists of the Azov Battalion, and Right Sector, but the rest of the Ukraine Solidarity Committee. The same is seen in the AWL's stance in respect of the US Presidential Elections, which pitted two reactionary, anti-working, class candidates against each other, both of them supporting the genocide in Gaza, both of them having supported the attacks of the US state, alongside US Zionists, on students and others peacefully protesting that genocide.
Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, on precisely that basis, calling on workers to oppose Labour's actual election manifesto, and instead to support Labour candidates standing on its alternative platform. Yet, the bourgeois politics of Labour in 1979, look progressive compared to the reactionary politics of Harris/Biden and the US Democrats in 2024. Nevertheless, in stark contrast to 1979, the AWL called on US voters to back the anti-working class, Harris, and , thereby, her continued support for the genocide in Gaza, simply on the basis of a lesser-evil alternative to Trump.
“Socialists should from now until November support the Harris-Walz ticket, not because they represent a significant progressive alternative, but because it gives us four more years in our democracy — such as it is — to organize social and political movements to fight for the working class and the oppressed and raise the ideal of democratic socialism.”
And, indicating the extent to which they have abandoned the revolutionary tactic of the United Front, in favour of the Stalinist Popular Front, they even perform their usual trick, as epigones, of distorting the words of Trotsky to justify that position. They wrote, quoting Trotsky's opposition to the madness of the Third Period, and suggesting that US socialists should, thereby, have voted for Harris,
“The wiseacres who claim they see no difference between Bruning [the conservative who led Germany before the Nazis took power] and Hitler are in fact saying: it makes no difference whether our organisations or whether they are destroyed … If fascism comes to power, it will ride like a tank over your skulls and spines … Only a fighting unity with social democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, communist workers; you have little time to lose.”
As usual, just a look at what Trotsky writes, here, exposes the lying nature of the AWL's politics. What Trotsky says here, is not that German workers should have VOTED for Bruning as a “lesser-evil” to Hitler, far from it. What he argues is that fighting the fascists required not dropping your own revolutionary politics and calling on workers to support their class enemies, in the election, but sharply demarcating yourself from them!! Elsewhere, Trotsky wrote, setting that out,
"Fascism is a form of despair in the petit-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy and the Comintern was the prerequisite for fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism."
(Phrases and Reality, in Writings 1938-9, p 19)
In the quote that the AWL epigones give, Trotsky, even spells it out, not a passive, lesser-evilist capitulation, and throwing in your lot with the electoral fortunes of the imperialist bourgeoisie, but, an active “fighting unity with social democratic workers”. That is the tactic of the United Front of march separately, strike together. It is the position that Trotsky set out in The Action Programme for France, for fighting fascism, not by supporting or giving any credibility to the sham of bourgeois-democracy, but of building a fighting working-class opposition to the fascists, and their attempts to destroy even those bourgeois rights and freedoms that bourgeois-democracy claimed to provide for workers.
“In the struggle against fascism, reaction and war, the proletariat accepts the aid of petty-bourgeois groupings (pacifists, League for the Rights of Man, the Common Front, etc.), but such alliances can be only of secondary importance. Above all, the task is to secure the united action of the working class itself in the factories and the workers’ neighbourhoods of industrial centres. The alliance of the important workers’ organizations (Communist Party, Socialist Party, CGT, CGTU, Communist League) will have no revolutionary value unless it is oriented toward the creation of:
1. Committees of struggle representing the mass itself (embryo soviets);2. Workers’ militia, always united in action, even though organized by various parties and organizations.
To reinforce the struggle of both the workers and peasants, the workers’ committees should establish close collaboration with the peasant committees. Constituted as organs of popular defence against fascism, these workers’ alliance committees and these peasant committees must become, during the course of the struggle, organisms directly elected by the masses, organs of power of the workers and peasants. On this basis the proletarian power will be erected in opposition to the capitalist power, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Commune will triumph.”
US/NATO imperialism, and its agents in the labour movement, such as the AWL, is engaged in a phoney war against the rival imperialist bloc of Russia~China. In Ukraine, that war is not even at the stage of phoney war, but of an active shooting war. In the Middle-East, Zionism is conducting a war against the clients of Russia~China, on behalf of US imperialism, whilst fulfilling its ideological commitment to create a Zionist state “from the river to the sea”. Consequently, US imperialism, and its agents within Europe and the labour movement can brook not even the slightest criticism of the actions of the Zionist regime, as it pursues its genocide. Hence the insistence on the IHRA definition, and on the German legislation, the fake anti-Semitism, witch hunt in the Labour Party, the blanket use of charges of “anti-Semitism” against any criticism of the genocide, and the outright lies told by politicians an the media, both in relation to that genocide in Gaza, and in relation to its transfer on to European and American soil, by the supporters of Zionism, and their pogroms against Muslims, as seen in Amsterdam.
It is forced into not just lying by omission, in its reporting of the genocide, but active lying and distortion, as the deletion of the Sky News report indicated, and as has been even more blatantly seen in the use of the video footage of pogroms conducted by the Zionist thugs in Amsterdam, which were then presented as being attacks on them, and for which, they have had to make apologies when challenged by the teenage videographer!
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