Fighting antisemitism

What is the racist and fascist danger in France today?

The major factor of recent months in France is Hollande's loss of the credit he had when elected in 2012. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. It presents a somewhat different angle on the Dieudonné affair from Yves Coleman's article in Solidarity 309 . Hollande was able to beat Sarkozy not because of his programme and his campaign, but because the masses sought a political way out, and that will to get rid of Sarkozy was boosted by the campaign of the Front de Gauche and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon, especially following on from the success of the Paris demonstration of...

Dieudonné: symptom of a wider problem

On 28 December 2013, West Bromwich Albion strike Nicolas Anelka made an anti-Semitic “quenelle” gesture. Anelka says the gesture was an “anti-establishment” tribute to his friend, the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Describing himself primarily as an “anti-Zionist”, Dieudonné has become increasingly politically associated with the fascist far-right. Yves Coleman, a French activist involved in the journal Ni patrie ni frontières (“No Fatherland, No Borders”), offers a contribution to the discussion about the convergence of “anti-Zionism” with the far-right, and the French left’s response...

September 1939: Behind the Stalinazi pact

I: 5 September 1939 The Hitler-Stalin pact is the most sensational news to come out of Moscow in many years. Up to yesterday, it was the general belief that Stalin was moving heaven and earth in an earnest attempt to establish a “peace front” of the “democracies” against the “fascist aggressors”, especially against Fascist Germany. The friends and supporters of the Stalin regime said this repeatedly, and in so many plain words. Suddenly, right in the midst of the Anglo-French-Russian military discussions in Moscow, came the news that Hitler and Stalin had made a very important trade agreement...

The pogroms did not end in 1945

Anti-Jewish pogroms continued in Europe after the defeat of the Nazis, as this report from the US “orthodox” Trotskyist paper, The Militant, of 11 August 1947, shows. The “orthodox” Trotskyists tended to argue that the Jews were soon doomed, whatever happened, short of socialist revolution: see the “Third Camp” heterodox Trotskyists’ debate with them on that. Palestine last week witnessed a reign of terror against the civilian Jewish population that matched the goriest pogroms staged by the Nazis. Almost simultaneously those anti-semitic abominations leaped over to the “tight little island”...

The ghetto fighters of Warsaw

Seventy years ago, in April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose up against the Nazis. On 28 September 1939 Hitler’s troops had captured Warsaw and taken control of Poland. Three million Jews lived in Poland as a whole: 350-400,000, a third of Warsaw’s population, were Jews. The Nazis herded the Jews into medieval style ghettoes —smaller and smaller areas in 45 separate ghetto towns across Poland — where Jews worked for German war industries. The first was set up in Lodz in April 1940. Immediately the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was put in “quarantine” and 80,000 non-Jews living in the...

NUS and the EUMC definition of anti-semitism

At the National Union of Students conference (8-10 April, Sheffield), there was once again a controversy about anti-semitism. This is Workers’ Liberty Students’ response. In 2007, NUS conference passed policy on anti-racism referencing the definition of anti-semitism produced by the former European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, now called the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (for the definition, see here ; for the NUS policy here ). NUS policies lapse after three year unless the conference votes to actively renew them; this policy was renewed in 2010 and came up again at...

Anti-semitism explained away

The slippery, urbane face of Islamism, Tariq Ramadan , has excelled himself explaining away the actions of Islamist murderer Mohamed Merah. Ramadan, proving Merah was no Islamic militant, writes that, “Two weeks before the shooting… he spent an evening in a nightclub in a very festive mood.” Hardly unique. The BBC reported that “Many [of the 2004 Madrid train bombers] appeared westernised and integrated into the Spanish community, with a liking for football, fashion, drinking and Spanish girlfriends.” Ramadan assures us: “Religion was not Mohamed Merah’s problem ; nor is politics.” Merah was...

The USSR's bans on Jews

In November 2002 the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted his proof of the Poincaré conjecture on the internet. The conjecture had been formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré and is no abstract, dusty problem, but deals with the possible shape of our universe. By 2006 Grigori Perelman’s solution had become widely accepted. He was awarded the Fields Medal (the maths version of the Nobel Prize), had jobs offers from leading universities, and was awarded $1 million (the Clay Institute prize for solving one of the seven “Millennium” maths problems). Perelman refused...

Lies, ant-semitism and conspiracy theories

Umberto Eco’s protagonist is a spy (who is not particular about which state police he serves), a forger, an agent provocateur and a stool pigeon. In other words, Simone Simonini is the worst kind of low life, and as revolting a fictional character as you will ever encounter. Simonini is an invention. Every other character in Eco’s book is real. All the events — whether as backdrop or integral to the plot — really happened. As the text is sometimes a pastiche of 19th-century adventure story it doesn’t read like history. We meet Simonini in the late 1890s. Old, physically failing and suffering...

60th anniversary of the Slansky Trial: Stalinism, anti-semitism and "anti-Zionism"

PART ONE: THE REHEARSALS 2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the “Trial of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre led by Rudolf Slansky”, staged in the Czechoslovak capital of Prague. Sixty years ago, The Slansky Trial was one of a series of Eastern European post-war Stalinist show-trials in which leading Communist Party members confessed – after prolonged physical and psychological torture – to being longstanding agents of imperialism. But the trial also broke new ground. It was the first show-trial in which state-sponsored anti-semitism played a central role. As the “New York Times”...

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