One of the things I find most offensive
is that I'm a self-hating Jew,
if I'm loyal to that tradition of Judaism which
has produced such figures as Karl Marx,
Baruch Spinoza, Jesus, all
those Jewish heretics.
Somehow all those 
guys are freaks,
and Bibi Netanyahu
represents my true soul,
and if I don't like Bibi Netanyahu
very much I'm a self-hating Jew.
I can't express how
offensive I find that.
Those people don't speak for me and they
don't speak for a majority Jews worldwide.
And the fact that they are taking our
safety our culture our traditions,
and using it as a weapon
to fight against,
someone who wants to
redistribute a little money,
so there aren't homeless
people on the street.
It's a deep profound insult 
to the humanistic spirit,
which is at the core of Judaism 
it is itself anti-semitic.
I come from a left-wing Zionist
tradition actually,
my mom was Hashomer Hatzair
who were socialist Zionists.
One of the things
which is terrifying,
is how the right wing has essentially captured
to the Jewish identity more and more.
You hear people saying: Well, when
people make anti-capitalist statements,
they're being subtly anti-semitic
because as we all know,
Jewish people are more likely
to be capitalist it's like mmm:
Karl Marx is the opposite of that or Rosa Luxemburg,
Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman.
There's a long tradition
of Jewish radicalism,
To some degree what we now think
of as the left is a product,
of Jewish thought and the Jewish 
tradition just as much,
as say Christianity comes
out of that tradition.
When Brown Shirts hit the street,
when the Nazis show up and
start taking people away.
The guys who were out there defending
the Jewish neighbourhood,
will tend to be the radical left.
Basically will tend to be exactly the
people that were being targeted,
so it's crazy to go after them
and to ignore the right.
They went through anything
that Corbyn had ever said,
and tried to figure is there
anything we can construct,
as if it were somehow anti-semitic.
Obviously if you did that you could
prove anybody was anti-semitic.
You could prove that Margaret Thatcher
or Ronald Reagan were communists,
if you just took quotes in isolation
and say ohhh he laid a wreath...
I mean Ronald Reagan did lay a wreath on
the cemetery of SS troops at Bitburg.
the very same force that was running
Auschwitz wits he knew he was doing it,
and no one's ever accused him of
being an anti-semite as a result.
Around the same time as everybody
was going on and on and on,
about how Corbyn is supposedly
an anti-semite because he wasn't,
rigorous enough in disciplining
trolls on Twitter.
You have Boris Johnson
and Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon is doing a
tour of the radical right:
"He's gonna give a speech in Commons
today that's gonna throw down,
he just went back to the Daily
Telegraph as a columnist,
I've been talking to him all
weekend about this speech."
And the very next day or
maybe two days,
Johnson comes out with that famous
letter box thing about women in burkas.
It's obvious that Bannon
gave him the idea.
So here he is intentionally
flaming Islamophobia,
doing this kind of little dog whistle game
on the advice of an overt racist.
Everybody's like ladida you know
nothing to see here,
I mean Boris Johnson wrote a book
which is so obviously anti-semitic,
the only thing you can think is that people
are just pretending not to see it as.
He actually describes Jewish oligarchs
controlling the media,
and fiddling with the news to
change it to their advantage.
I mean it's a classic anti-semitic
Jewish conspiracy theory,
Overtly expressed you know in his
own name in something he wrote.
Now find me anybody in the Labour
Party who's done something like.
Yet, if you look at the number of mentions
of Tory or conservative anti-semitism,
versus Labour anti-semitism in
the media at its height in 2018,
there were over 6000 articles
mentioning Labour anti-semitism,
and the number of articles mentioning Tory
or conservative anti-semitism was 0.
Yet it's probably significant that not
only did the Conservatives oppose,
the condemnation of Victor Orbin,
a classic right-wing anti-semite,
Johnson put in his platform specifically
to criminalise Travelers.
And I don't think there's any precedent
for a political platform in the UK,
of a political party to specifically
mention an ethnic group,
and say we intend
to persecute them.
And it's that very group that 2nd to the Jews
was the most persecuted by the Nazis.
Anti-semitism has to be fought
like any other form of racism,
you can't single it out and
say the rules are different,
from some people then for others.
All of these forms of structural bias of prejudice
I don't like to use the word hatred,
because I think the word
hatred is overused.
A lot of the people who are the most
dangerous are not the ones,
who are inspired by strong emotions like
hatred they are cynical calculating people,
who are trying to turn people against each 
other create a kind of political poison.
To take people whose interests are in
common whose experiences,
are much more similar to
each other than they are,
to the people in control of our society
and to make them hate each other,
those are the people we really
have to worry about.
Anti-semitism is a problem 
it exists in our society,
and we shouldn't pretend
that it doesn't.
I think people who say what
are you talking about,
there are no anti-semites
in the Labour Party.
Now that's absurd 
of course there are.
On the other hand the question is
is it worse in the Labour Party,
than it is anywhere else and at least until 
this scandal broke it was very clear that,
Labour Party voters were less
likely to be anti-semitic.
On the other hand if you're trying
to create anti-semitism,
if you're trying to create a feeling
that there is a Jewish conspiracy,
intervening in politics I can't think
of a better way of doing it,
then what actually happened
which is a group of people,
most of whom were not Jewish.
Going to the media and
screaming their heads off,
and trying to create hysteria trying
to terrify the Jewish population.
Trying to create a atmosphere of fear of
potential purges within a political party,
because then people
are gonna say well,
maybe there is some kind
of conspiracy going on.
It wasn't as it turned out largely
a Jewish conspiracy,
most of the people doing it weren't
Jewish and most of the people,
who were Jewish were hardly representative
of the Jewish community at large.
But it's important to remember that
the people who are the most loud,
in accusing Corbyn of anti-semitism,
had been protesting everything else
they could possibly think of,
about Corbyn ranging
from his unelectability,
to his taste in clothes.
They've been trying to make a scandal
out of something for years on end,
and hadn't shown the slightest concern
many of them for Jewish issues,
until they figured out, oh this is
something we can make it stick.
And one reason of course that it seems
to stick is because he'd been,
a long-term campaigner
for Palestinian rights.
In America there was an attempt even
before the fervour about Corbyn,
during the governor's race in New York to
accuse the other side of anti-semitism.
And the New York Times stepped in,
in this case they said: No don't go there
this is a really bad precedent,
we do not want to weaponise anti-semitism
and by using it for cheap political shots.
But then after what happened in the UK
there's been a second round.
And people are saying well maybe
if it worked so well against Corbyn,
we can try it against Sanders
of course Sanders is Jewish,
so it's gonna be a little more difficult
right but they gave it a shot,
and they're definitely using it
against some of his allies.
I think it's important to distinguish between
3 things that people often confuse.
One is anti-semitism,
another is anti-zionism,
and the third thing is opposition
to the Israeli government.
You can say that the current right wing
government of Israel is horrific,
and still not be opposed to the existence
of Israel, let alone not hate Jews.
And what people are trying to
do now is not just conflate,
anti-semitism and anti-zionism.
They're trying to inflate anti-semitism,
anti-zionism and opposition,
to a particular political party and
its agenda which is just crazy.
The project of Zionism meant 
something very different,
from someone who was a
follower of Jabotinsky,
who might as well have been a Fascist
but happened to be Jewish.
And someone who was say Hashomer
Hatzair who was a socialist Marxist,
who wanted to go to Israel to create a
communal society in cooperation,
with the Arabs who lived there.
I'm actually myself a
little uncomfortable,
when people use: I'm not anti-semitic
I'm anti Zionist but all Zionists are evil.
No they weren't all evil, I mean
the project has ended up,
in an absolutely horrific
right-wing government,
that doesn't mean it had
to turn out that way.
I'm an Anarchist I'm opposed to
States as a solution to anything,
but I think that everyone has a right
to live where they want to live.
If Jewish people identify with
this as their homeland,
they have a right to live there,
but so does anybody else who
identifies as a homeland.
You don't have to have these violent
exclusionary solutions to problems.
It is conceivable for people to work out
their problems reasonably and get along.
In fact requires a lot of work
to keep people apart,
to keep people from comparing
notes and noticing that actually,
they have a lot more in common
they have which divides them.
You have forces right now
in the Middle East,
trying as hard as they can to stop people from
realising how much they have in common.
In much the same way that
racism has been deployed,
to keep working-class people from
uniting against their employers.
At this time nationalists, ideologies
are almost invariably deployed,
to keep people forgetting
how much they,
actually have in common
with their neighbours.
If the last election in the
UK showed anything,
it's that the existing media
is not our friend.
We need to create media that will actually
allow other voices to come out,
and to talk about what's
really going on.
Double Down News on
Patreon is one of the ways,
that we are trying to create
alternative media,
this is something
you can do to help.
