Anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head on the left.

This is a series of copy and pastes from the Weekly Worker letters page.

Workers' Weekly 2/9/2004
Postpone

Sion Griffiths avoids the real challenge to the ‘personal’ politics of the fake ‘left’ raised by the Economic and Philosophic Science Review (Letters, August 5).

This accuses single-issue reformism (feminism, black nationalism, gay rights, etc) in the very first paragraph of being “the last refuge of anti-communism, which will provide history with the most reactionary, last-ditch defenders of the monopoly-imperialist ‘free world’ system in its final counterrevolutionary debacles. When the personal became the political, it was endless variants of extreme individualist philosophy which were being deliberately aggressively promoted …So-called ‘human rights’ became more successful than ever as a battering ram for the western imperialist controllers’ non-stop worldwide propaganda priority to wipe out communism.”

The EPSR’s point was made in a letter to the Weekly Worker: “Dream on if you think that reforms have banished racism, or reduced violence, or made for happier families, or replaced drugs and booze for discontented youth, or taught society to really value all people equally … or improved the environment, or stopped international imperialist tyranny” (July 22).

It is typical of the subjective politics now dominant that Sion Griffiths ignores this crisis of the ‘left’ in order to make a venomous personal attack because of only seeing some insult to homosexuality in the EPSR piece. But there is no insult; and the real phenomenon of homosexuality itself as such is not the issue. The cynical individualist nihilism of some gay politics (and many other single-issue philosophies) is the problem, typified by the sabotage of the Palestinian march to air the personal feelings of hurt homosexuals.

Gays should feel offended and intimidated by continued barbaric backwardness of international capitalist society on these questions, but a revolutionary world of workers’ states is the only long-term guarantee of real human enlightenment on all the rotten discriminations still prevalent in an insecure, class-divided society. Have you checked out your school playground insults lately?

But Sion Griffiths can only make jeering jokes about proletarian dictatorship, typical of current ‘left’ ignorance about, and hostility to, the real, historic-making achievements of the world’s workers-state experiences so far, despite their inevitably “brutal” realities too (as referred to, neither in praise nor admiration). And this single-issue anti-communism will last throughout the whole dying counterrevolutionary era of ‘free world’ degeneration.

All the other issues about ‘politically correct’ crassness on gay questions, and doubts about the phenomenon continuing when society is no longer macho-dominated from class or hierarchical struggle, can be debated academically; but wouldn’t they be best postponed in favour of the world seeing its way to a total Palestinian victory over the whole post-1945 Jewish/imperialist colonisation attempt, one unavoidable key on the way to the world revolution?

Another major EPSR point which Sion Griffiths managed to completely ignore in order to pursue personal ‘homophobic’ venom.

Royston Bull

Manchester


Worker Weekly 9/9/2004
Conspiracy

Royston Bull calls for “a total Palestinian victory over the whole post-1945 Jewish/imperialist colonisation attempt” (Letters, September 2).

As an anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist Jew, I have not been invited to take part. Perhaps Mr Bull can provide the address, so that I can claim my share of the benefits that I have gained from this conspiracy.

Roland Rance

email


Workers' Weekly 16/9/2004
All Zionist?

Roland Rance in his witty note is presumably asking that the post-1945 ethnic-cleansing of Palestine be termed ‘Zionist/imperialist colonisation’, as opposed to “Jewish/imperialist” - telling us that he as a Jew has not benefited from this conspiracy yet (Letters, September 9). The implication is that the millions of Jews now occupying Palestine must obviously all be Zionists, and that no Jews in the rest of the world get any benefit or comfort at all from the building of the state of Israel into an enormous military power and the most dollar-aided country on earth.

That anyone can have such naive delusions would be slightly more credible if Roland Rance could be heard denouncing the foundation of the state of Israel and all its works.

Royston Bull

Manchester

Workers' Weekly 23/9/2004
Patronising Bull

Royston Bull offensively suggests that my “naive delusions would be slightly more credible if [I] could be heard denouncing the foundation of the state of Israel and all its works” (Letters, September16).

I don’t intend here to detail my 28 years of active campaigning against Zionism and for Palestinian rights. The fact that Mr Bull appears unaware of this says more about his lack of involvement in this struggle than it does about me. This lack of involvement is reflected in the remainder of his ignorant comments about the Middle East, and about the presumed benefit to Jews of Zionist oppression.

Mr Bull’s letter appears beneath one from my friend Tony Greenstein, outlining the Zionist sympathies of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Like Tony, I have been denounced by the AWL as an anti-semite; like him, I have been banned from campuses as a result of Zionist pressure, backed by the AWL; like him, I have been reviled by the Jewish Chronicle and other elements of the official leadership of the Jewish community in Britain. I do not need any patronising remarks from Jew-hating bigots about my naivety and lack of involvement.

My Respect branch has now submitted a policy motion opposing Zionism and supporting Palestinian return to the forthcoming Respect conference. Some Weekly Worker readers may disagree with the call for a unitary, secular and democratic Palestine; but, even if you oppose this clause, I hope that you will back the rest of the motion. In particular, the statement that “Respect opposes Zionism as a political movement whose aim is the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Respect denies the false equation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, and will oppose any attempt to ascribe collective responsibility to Jews for the crimes of the Israeli state and the Zionist movement.”

Roland Rance

email

Murky waters
If the Weekly Worker’s dedication to ‘free expression’ must extend to the rantings of the deranged Royston Bull, he should not get away with slandering comrades, whether from malice or ignorance.
Back in the days when Bull was relatively sane, we both worked on the daily News Line, published by Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party. Then and after the WRP was keen on supporting the Palestinian cause (indeed I was asked to join the paper because of my interest in the Middle East, and also wrote in the Labour Review on Zionism). But I do not recall Royston Bull taking any active part in such campaigning, then or later.

Perhaps this helps explain his assertion that criticism of his anti-Jewish remarks “would be slightly more credible if Roland Rance could be heard denouncing the foundation of the state of Israel and all its works”. I don’t always agree with Roland, but anyone involved in Palestinian solidarity and anti-Zionist work would know his record of active opposition to the Zionist state and “all its works”, both here and in Palestine. He should not have to lower himself to reply to the likes of Bull, who appears to have only discovered Palestine by way of his voyage into neo-Stalinism.

It seems odd though that Bull has not considered the part played by the late Joseph Stalin and his foreign minister Gromyko in supporting partition in Palestine and arming the Israeli state to drive out Palestinians. The Soviet Union itself had used ethnic-cleansing - for instance, the mass deportations of Chechens. Twenty million Soviet citizens perished in the war against fascism; but in Russia today, ravaged by ruthless capitalism, we have the obscenity of Stalin’s portrait carried alongside Hitler’s by the brown-red alliance, and a former Ku Klux Klan leader welcomed by nationalists and so-called communists to proclaim war on “dark-skinned peoples” and “Zionists”. Maybe history is being rewritten.

Royston Bull’s reference to overturning the “post-1945 Jewish/imperialist settlement” suggests he has drifted into very murky waters.
Charlie Pottins
email

Workers' Weekly 30/9/2004

Lumpen

The attack on Roland Rance, a comrade and friend for many years, by Royston Bull is quite amazing (Letters, September 16). Anyone active in anti-Zionist or Palestine solidarity work in the past 20 years would have had difficulty in not coming across Roland. He was editor of Return, a magazine of Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists, and active in a score of campaigns such as that to free Samir and Jawad, the two Palestinians framed for the bombing of the Israeli embassy and the Zionist headquarters, Balfour House, in London.

Indeed, strange as it might seem, I don’t seem to have come across the name of Royston Bull before in connection with Palestine. There are only two possible explanations. Either Mr Bull has never lifted a finger to become involved in solidarity work with the Palestinians and prefers to use the issue as a stick to berate others; or it is because of some variant of the world Jewish conspiracy. I leave it to your readers to judge.

What is astounding is not the anti-semitism (and homophobia) of Mr Bull, which can be found among the more lumpen and conspiratorial sections of society, but how such a creature could have risen to a position of influence within the Socialist Labour Party. For this Arthur Scargill owes us all an explanation.

Tony Greenstein

Brighton

Into the sea

In reply to Charlie Pottins and Roland Rance, the issue is about political understanding, not boasts about who does what or grotesque distortions about who did what (Letters, September 23).


Millions on the ‘left’ - Jews and others - claim to be “anti-Zionist” or even for a “unitary secular state covering the entire 1945 land of Palestine” without being at all prepared to denounce the “founding of a home for Jews in the Middle East” as one of the foulest acts of imperialist hypocrisy ever, and certainly as the most endlessly poisonous colonisation of all time.


Currently, that western imperialist stunt to achieve a militarised toehold permanently in the Middle East which ‘no one can object to’ on grounds of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, etc is providing the American empire with just the sort of perpetual provocation and unbeatable armed back-up that it needs to keep its planned warmongering offensive in the region on the boil.


Without returning to these sick post-war decisions - precisely those backed by Stalinism along with all the rest of the revisionist theoretical imbecilities with which the world communist movement was destroyed - and reversing them, then nothing but a joke ‘Palestinian return’ can come about, such as that contained in the evil fraud called ‘the two-state solution’.

Utopian make-believe can pretend that one day the Jews will accept the dismantling of ‘Israel’ for Rance’s “unitary, democratic, and secular Palestine” and happily budge up, ‘supporting Palestinian return’ to their entire 1945 positions and post-colonial expectations; but the reality of the modern Zionist-imperialist juggernaut and its whole history proves this will never happen without war. But the prospect of endless Middle East warmongering is here already, relentlessly worsening, as the paranoid American empire’s economic crisis deepens.

In this uncontrollable-war perspective, the only serious anti-imperialist position is to be for the west’s defeat, including driving this rotten Zionist stunt into the sea. [my italics]
Royston Bull

Manchester