Hodge & McIntosh: false allegations of anti-semitism

"Pro-war, pro-Israel Margaret Hodge accuses supporters of Palestine in the Labour Party of bringing that party into disrepute. Her own disgraceful cover up of child abuse as leader of Islington Council, her abuse of the victims for which she was finally forced to apologise and pay damages, makes her unfit to appear on any public platform, especially where she appears in support of Israel’s ongoing and widely reported abuse of Palestinian children. Foul-mouthed Margaret Hodge has a shameful record of covering up sexual abuse and smearing the victims who spoke up; she is reprising that role by falsely accusing of anti-semitism those who stand for Palestine."

At the Scottish Parliament - Friday 3pm -  Margaret Hodge and Ken McIntosh will discuss, inter allia, Hodge’s “experience of antisemitism both inside and outside of the Labour Party”.

They are both members of Israeli Embassy front group, Labour Friends of Israel, recently shown on Al Jazeera’s documentary The Lobby to be in receipt of largesse to the tune of £1 million from the Israeli Embassy. An Israeli Embassy political officer is filmed discussing how to “take down” certain MPs as well as describing his plans to set up a Labour Friends of Israel youth wing.

As members of Labour Friends of Israel, Hodge and McIntosh defend what Amnesty International, the UN’s Goldstone Commission and others report as war crimes and “possible crimes against humanity”.

While the Scottish Government, Amnesty and others called for an arms embargo against Israel following the massacre of 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, in summer 2014 (Gaza scene left) Hodge and McIntosh blame the Palestinians for their plight. They also support Israeli snipers currently massacring almost 200 Palestinians demonstrating for their legal rights in Gaza since March 30th. (No sniper has suffered a scratch while methodically killing adults, children, medical workers, journalists, even double amputees.) Some MPs have left the group over its stomach-churning slaughter but not Hodge or McIntosh.

 Hodge and McIntosh support Israel’s recent Nation State Law, which explicitly strips democratic rights from Palestinian citizens of Israel and reserves them exclusively for Jews.

Part of McIntosh and Hodge’s work in supporting Israel’s genocidal violence is to smear opponents of such crimes as “antisemitic”. The foul-mouthed Hodge recently shouted such an accusation histrionically at the Labour Party Leader and Ken McIntosh has accused Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign of distributing antisemitic materials. McIntosh, when asked, claimed to have lost the evidence - an obvious lie even before Police Scotland said no crime had been committed when pro-Palestine materials had indeed been distributed.

Hodge and McIntosh work to conflate opposition to Israel’s monstrous behaviour - crimes they support - with hostility to Jews as a group, despite the prominent role that Jews of conscience play in the world-wide movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people. This includes working for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel until it ends its ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the Palestinians.

The stark reality is that the Zionist movement to set up the State of Israel has been accused by Jews since its inception as itself an antisemitic movement for arguing that Jews have no right to remain in Europe but should leave to colonise Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, who went on to be the first President of Israel, echoed the worst antisemites when he opined to a German audience in 1912 that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews”. This was, of course, music to the antisemites’ ears and horrified the majority of Jews.

This acceptance of antisemitic ideas marks Zionist thinking from Herzl to Netanyahu. Anti-racists oppose Zionism not only for its murderous treatment of the Palestinian people but also for its antisemitic ambition for a Jew-free Europe after all Jewish citizens of European countries have left for the Zionist State.

No wonder the Jewish community in Munich, fifteen years before Weizmann’s Berlin utterances, had driven Herzl’s First Zionist Congress out of Munich. In 1917 Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, opposed the Balfour Declaration as antisemitic. Montagu considered himself to be an Englishman by nationality and Jewish by religion. He saw Zionism as a “mischievous political creed” that made too many concessions to anti-semitism.

More recently, Netanyahu’s attempt to exploit a terrorist attack on Jews by urging French Jews to emigrate to Israel/Palestine was met by a loud rendition by French Jews of the Marseillaise to rebuke the war criminal and assert their determination to defy the terrorists and remain in France, contrary to the role Zionism allocates to them.

It is a logical step from wishing for a mass Jewish exit from Europe to cooperating with others who share that racist goal; Herzl confided in his diary that, “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies." A marriage made in Hell but a relationship that has characterised the Zionist movement and its state until the present day.

Honoured in Israel, Arthur Balfour was a hard core antisemite - after meeting Cosima Wagner he told Weizmann that he “shared many of her anti-semitic postulates’. The extended  history of Zionist leaders working with antisemitic movements and states includes the Argentine Junta murdering a disproportionately high number of Jewish Argentinians while enjoying excellent relations with Israel.

It includes Netanyahu rejecting pleas from the Jewish community of Hungary not to embrace his extreme rightist counterpart, Viktor Orban, who is rehabilitating, even glorifying, the head of the WWII Nazi puppet regime, Niklos Horthy, who was responsible for the deaths of over half a million Hungarian Jews. Orban is also running an openly antisemitic campaign against liberal billionaire George Soros, deploying language from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Netanyahu and Orban are political allies and Netanyah condemned Jewish critics of Orban in Hungary.

Space permits only one other example of the worst anti-semites who love Israel: John Hagee and Robert Jeffress were the Christian Zionists whom Trump brought to Jersualem to open the new US Embassy there on May 14th. Hagee is on record preaching that Hitler was "a hunter" sent by God to drive Jews to Palestine, the only place they should live in order to fulfill biblical prophecy. Here is an extract from the sermon transcript:

God says in Jeremiah 16: “Behold, I will bring them the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave to their fathers. … Behold, I will send for many fishers, and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them.” That would be the Jews. … Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.

Trump’s other pastor, Robert Jeffress, has pronounced that all Jews will burn in Hell for eternity. It would be interesting to discover whether Hagee's and Jeffress' views are shared by the weird Christian fundamentalists who lead the Friends of Israel groups in Scotland as part of their work to get Jews to Palestine to fulfill Biblical prophecy.

Ronnie Kasrils, Jewish veteran of the South African freedom struggle visited Palestine and wrote afterwords:

This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses.

In response to the world’s governments ignoring a ruling against Israel by the International Court of Justice, Palestinian civil society issued a call for BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) against the State of Israel to force it to end its crimes.

BDS has been growing worldwide and the smears of antisemitism against supporters of Palestinian freedom are Israel’s orchestrated response, in which Hodge and McIntosh play their allotted part. An Israeli ministry to fight BDS has a growing budget of tens of millions of dollars and a record of failure despite its tactics of “dirty tricks”.

In Scotland this has led to the Zionist leaders of SCoJeC publishing defamatory smears against Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and then having to pulp 6,000 copies of the offending material on the direct orders of the then-Scottish First Minister.

It has led to two failed criminal prosecutions for “racism” against SPSC members for, on one occasion, saying in public, “End the siege of Gaza! Genocide in Gaza!” and, in the second case, for holding the placard on the left which has a blood symbol to condemn Israel’s bloody massacre of Palestinians in summer 2014.

Pro-war, pro-Israel Dame Hodge accuses supporters of Palestine in the Labour Party of bringing that party into disrepute. She fought off calls for action over child abuse as a councillor and then leader of Islington Council. She was forced by public pressure to apologise and pay damages to a victim who had courageously spoken out about his abuse and been slandered by Hodge for his campaigning activity. She is unfit to appear on any public platform, especially where she supports Israel’s ongoing and widely reported abuse of Palestinian children, including sexual abuse. Ben White reports, "An academic study published in November 2015 in a peer-reviewed medical journal revealed dozens of cases of sexual torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners detained by Israel."

Given foul-mouthed Dame Hodge's shameful efforts in the past to silence those trying to expose sexual abuse, including smearing the victims who spoke up; she is reprising that same role by falsely accusing of antisemitism those who stand for Palestine. This intimidation will fail as did her efforts to smear and intimidate victims of sexual abuse in Islington..

Mick Napier
10 October 2018
West Calder