GFI and SUTR
Dear SUTR
Last year Glasgow Friends of Israel (GFI) and Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland (COFIS) joined the Stand Up To Racism organised march in Glasgow. This demonstrates incredible audacity considering their sole purpose is to support and promote an apartheid state (Israel) that has more than 40 racist discriminatory laws on its statute. Many individuals and organisations made their opposition to GFI/COFIS participation known to you. You state that it was not your policy to invite or authorise the participation of specific unaffiliated groups and you stated that you were not in dialogue with these groups. This year (2019) according to GFI they are in dialogue directly with you. GFI have stated “we would like to thank members of the SUTR committee for once again confirming our participation”.
Maybe you are unaware of the nature of the material that this organisation publishes and how they demonise certain ethnicities and belittle the plight of refugees. Sometimes they claim to be a secular organisation and at other times they imply that they are being targeted because they are a Jewish organisation. How strange then that they should publish a vile anti-Semitic tweet about the ex Labour leader Ed Miliband.
Your organisation has enjoyed long standing support from the labour leadership especially the current leader Jeremy Corbyn. Maybe you are unaware of the relentless and libellously abusive campaigning that GFI have carried out online against Jeremy Corbyn. Here are a few examples of their online abuse:
Are you really welcoming an organisation who promotes Katie Hopkins? 
In June 2018 a tragedy unfolded in Gaza when a young 21 year old nurse called Razan al-Najjar was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as she attended to the wounded on the Great March of Return in support of Gaza refugees right of return.
SUTR and its supporters are well known for their humanity and compassion for the rights of refugees. Below we see how the organisation you are now linked with dismissed the death of this young woman as somehow fake news.
Glasgow Friends of Israel’s next tactic on this proved to be much more vile and sordid. They pinned a tweet suggesting that the young girl Razan was raped and coerced into being at the Great March of Return for refugees.
If you think this coverage of the death of civilians is morally corrupt, GFI decided to plumb the depths even further by injecting humour into their coverage of the deaths of Palestinians. ‘Pallywood’ is the concept invented by Israel supporters to suggest that the journalistic coverage of human rights abuses carried out by Israel on Palestinians is all fake.
Social media was ‘set alight’ when the young Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi was arrested for slapping an Israeli soldier who was on her family property. She was sentenced to jail by the world’s only military court for children (non-Jewish children) in the occupied West Bank. Again the GFI went to work in order to de-humanise this young girl by portraying her as a terrorist. Here they make a slap into a terrorist offence, juxtaposed to their jokey off-hand dismissal of the killing of civilian Palestinians.
When a group of young Jewish people were threatened by a thug and abused for holding a religious ceremony outside the House of Commons for people killed in Gaza, the GFI thought the assault was hilarious.
GFI have an ongoing smear campaign against ordinary folk who campaign for the plight of the Palestinian people. Dismissing them as benefit scroungers, mental health patients, racists and Jew haters.
Here we see an example of what they think of campaigners against the arms trade.
As for the plight of refugees GFI are campaigning in support of Donald Trump’s racist policies to end UN support for Palestinian refugees.
In light of these examples from GFI and COFIS does SUTR really think that they are suitable organisations to be working with on an anti-racist march. Organisations that exhibit anti-Semitism, trash the image of a young Muslim nurse killed by soldiers, dismiss refugees as fake and who think that the killing of Palestinians is “funny” will surely de-legitimise the anti-racist movement in Scotland and the UK.
Gerry Coutts
Glasgow
5th February 2019
