Labours Anti-Semitism Problem.

Recently the UK Labour Party has been making headlines over the long running problem of anti-Semitism amongst its members.

On April 27th (27/4/16) the Labour MP for the Bradford West constituency Naz Shah was suspended from the party. This forced her to resign as both the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to shadow Chancellor (Finance Minister) John McDonnell and from the Home Affairs Parliamentary Select Committee. This came after it emerged that she had made a series of social media posts warning Labour supporters that "The Jews are rallying to the polls" and suggesting that Israel should be relocated to the US in order to "save the Jews some pocket money."

This plan to relocate Israel to America actually has its roots in a TV sit-com called "The Big Bang Theory." In one episode a child prodigy joins the university's physics department prompting the lead character "Sheldon Cooper" to worry that he'll never be able to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. So instead he sets out to win the Nobel Peace Prize by trying to relocate Israel to America in order to solve the Israel/Palestine conflict. The joke being that he'd gone so mad he was unable to conceive of the reasons why Israel is located where it is.

The reason why people like Naz Shah have adopted the idea is to erase from history the fact that there has been a Jewish nation in the region certainly since 1050BC when it was known as the "Kingdom of Israel." During the Roman Empire it was known simply as "Judea." The term "Palaestina" or "Palestine" wasn't used until around 135AD and even then it was considered a Jewish nation. It was another 600 years before Islam was founded.

By denying the Jewish history of the region people like Naz Shah are trying to deny the history of Judaism itself and therefore any claim that Jews have to live in the region. That can only be a precursor to eradicating the nation of Israel and ethnically cleansing Jews from the region.

That is seriously anti-Semitic in my book.

On April 28th (28/4/16) Labour Party grandee and former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone defended Naz Shah by claiming that she couldn't be anti-Semitic because Adolf Hitler was a Zionist. This is an extremely bizarre claim because Hitler frequently warned against the establishment of a Jewish state as a solution to his "Jewish question" on the grounds that it would act as a base for the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy.

In an effort to defend his comments Livingstone cited the "Haazara" or "Transfer" Agreement as evidence of Hitler helping to build a Jewish state by sending German Jews to what was then British Mandated (BM) Palestine. This is absolute nonsense.

Following the rise of the Nazi Party Germany's Jews were being widely persecuted with many wanting to flee. However the German government prevented them from leaving by refusing to allow them to take their assets out of the country.

In 1933 Hanotea - a Jewish owned farming company based in BM Palestine found a way around this. German Jews would use their assets to buy German produced goods which they would export to BM Palestine helping the German economy. In order to ensure the security of those goods on the long sea voyage they would travel with them to BM Palestine. On arrival they would sell the goods turning them back into cash and then simply refuse to return to Germany.

Rather than being a way to help German Jews to establish a Jewish state the Haazara Agreement was an elaborate way to get around the restrictions placed on Jews leaving Germany. It considered the Jews to be little more than produce to be exported to help the German economy and was a forerunner to using their hair and skin to make products like mattresses and lampshades in the death camps.

Declaring the Haazara Agreement to be Nazi support for Zionism is like accusing Oskar Schindler of being a Nazi collaborator.

What is particularly alarming about Ken Livingstone's comments is that they were cynically calculated to help the Labour candidate to win the Mayoral election being voted on today.

That Labour candidate is Sadiq Khan. His only qualification for nomination is that he is a Muslim. There are roughly 1.3 million Muslim voters in London. As such Labour's cynical calculation is that all those Muslims would vote for Sadiq Khan simply because he is also a Muslim.

The majority of London's Muslims can trace themselves back to Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. One of the most dominate forms of Islam in those nations is Deobandism which is a particularly aggressive form of Sunni Islam similar to the Wahhabism practised in Saudi Arabia. As a result many of Britain's Muslim - particularly first generation immigrants - hold very extreme anti-Semitic views.

So by keeping the link between the Labour Party and anti-Semitism in the news for as long as possible in the run-up to the election Ken Livingstone was trying to give London's Muslims yet another reason to vote for Sadiq Khan.

It may well backfire though because initially I wasn't going to bother vote in what has got to be one of the World's most pointless elections. However the prospect of voting against this sort of crap encouraged me.

16:50 on 5/5/16 (UK date).