Left antisemitism

“Happy are they ... who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.” — William Hazlitt Steve Cohen, who died at the age of 63 on 8th March after a prolonged, brave, terrible battle against the progressive ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, became a revolutionary socialist early in life, in the late 1960s. He remained true to the insights and commitments of his youth, and died a...

Solidarity with the Palestinians — but don't line up behind Hamas! ON 13 APRIL [2002] there was a big London march "for Palestine". What happened was shocking from a socialist standpoint, and harmful to the Palestinian cause. The core organising group — "The Muslim Association" — has strong Islamic-fundamentalist links. For example, its web site links to the Pakistani fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami. The Trafalgar Square rally started with long readings from the Koran. Although speakers such as Labour left MP Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn were on the platform, their speeches were punctuated...

This speech by Lenin, from 1919, shows how the Bolsheviks attacked the problem of age-old Russian anti-semitism after the workers' revolution of 1917. "Anti-semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed Tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landlords and capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we...

On September 28, supporters of the “Islamic Human Rights Commission” — actually an Islamist group with links to Islamic Republic of Iran — marched through London to mark “Al Quds day”. The day of action is supposedly in solidarity with the Palestinians, but in fact was launched by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to strengthen international support for his Islamist counter-revolution. About 300 people took part, similar to last year. Stop The War Coalition (dominated by the SWP) and George Galloway’s Respect sponsored the march, though only one Respect member was bold enough to turn up, and no SWPer...

At the demonstration against the fascist BNP's "Red, White, and Blue" festival in Codnor, Derbyshire, on 16 August, the SWP was circulating a contact sheet. The document (attached) described itself as a "petition", though it had spaces only for names, not signatures, and the text directly above the name/ address/ details blanks was "Join UAF". Then at the bottom it said "return to Love Music Hate Racism", but identified itself as "initiated by Socialist Worker". Whatever. It was a political statement to identify and attract people to the SWP. The statement was about denouncing the BNP, and the...

LEFT WING ANTI-SEMITE Why do you misconstrue my view? Believe me, I don't hate no Jew; And seeing what pure love will do, What need have I for hatred too?

Why, again and again and again, time after time, does Jew-baiting, in one form or another, become a force in history? There are always "immediate" historical reasons, but one central, continuous, underlying "cultural" reason is this: anti-Semitism is threaded into the very fabric of Europe's 2000-year-old Christian civilisation. Christianity is saturated with anti-Semitism. The New Testament of the Bible is one of the main documents of historical anti-Semitism. As Karl Kautsky, the leading writer of early 20th Century Marxism, showed in his book The Foundations of Christianity, the writers of...

Not a headline you'd expect to see here, since Tony Greenstein has spent much of his energy, for many years, on denouncing and traducing the AWL because we support the right to self-determination for Israeli Jews as well as for the Palestinians. But read on. Greenstein has been the most high-pitched and abusive of those who say that when AWL argues against left anti-semitism, we are just belabouring an invented straw man, and de facto helping the ruling circles in Israel. Well, now Greenstein himself - a vehement supporter of boycotting Israel, etc. etc. - has fallen foul of people on the left...

By Sean Matgamna The main bulk of this item is a debate on Israel and the Palestinians in the mid-1990s in Workers' Liberty , between the late Jim Higgins and myself. It was triggered by an article in Socialist Worker by Paul Foot and my response to it in Workers' Liberty . Some of the material in my pieces has been incorporated in the AWL pamphlet Two Nations, Two States , and it did not occur to me that there would be any point in collecting and republishing the exchange until an admiring citizen with a lopsided notion of debate and little discernible interest in politics put two of Jim...