6 Jun 2008

Isaac Deutscher anti-semite?


Deutscher advised Israelis to 'beware of being carried away by their
new-fangled and already red-hot nationalism . their state is not above
criticism; it is an earthly creation not a Biblical sanctity, not a "chosen"
nation state.'

Objective commentators would probably describe Deutscher as prophetic or
prescient. I suspect that UJS and the EUMC would not hesitate to describe
him as antisemitic.



Had this from Simon Lynn....Greens against a boycott seem to be arguing that it was wrong for Caroline Lucas to appear at the Palestine Solidarity Rally and have prepared a motion which they are putting to conference which argues that anti-zionism is anti-semitism.

I challenge anti-semitism but I am very worried that solidarity with people in Gaza is going to be diminished.



below an article by David Rosenberg published in Jewish Socialist (no 53)
challenging the new EU's definition of antisemistism with arguments relevant
to the motion we are opposing at conference. Simon Lynn



Freedom without flags



A narrow definition of self-determination, which ignores the reality of
Jewish life in the diaspora, is skewing the debate on antisemitism, says
David Rosenberg



In the late 1970s, there were clumsy attempts to ban Jewish student
societies (JSocs) at British universities on the basis that Jewish societies
were Zionist, Zionism was racism (the UN said so), and racists shouldn't
have a platform. These actions, and the assumptions they relied on,
reflected gross over-simplifications. Many Jewish students joined JSocs for
religious rather than Zionist reasons; Zionism in practice was racist but
many Zionists were not, and many countries voting to condemn Zionism as
racism in the UN had questionable records with regard to their minorities.
No-platforming fascists who were declared enemies of democracy had a clear
basis, but attempting to no-platform racists was more complicated. The
designation of 'racist' was often subjectively applied and, as racism is a
matter of degree ranging from mild or even unconscious, to extreme, some
racists could be won to anti-racist positions in open argument.

Those who attempted to ban JSocs ultimately discredited the left and
probably strengthened both Zionism and antisemitism.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The Zionist-dominated Jewish
student body, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), wants to stop political
opponents of Zionism, and they have dragged the National Union of Students
(NUS) executive behind them. They have found a powerful weapon - a document
drawn up by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia
(EUMC) - which promotes a contemporary definition of antisemitism as 'a
certain perception of Jews which maybe expressed as hatred towards Jews'. It
adds: 'Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed
towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards
Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.' The definition
comes with a page of interpretation. As a whole this has been incorporated
in the recent report of the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry on Antisemitism.
After an emergency motion at the NUS executive, it has won approval from the
student movement's nationally elected representatives.

But this definition, which is gaining such significance, contains at its
heart a lie. A big and pernicious lie. But quite a clever lie, built on
many layers of distortion and disinformation relating especially to the
Jewish people, Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

It says: 'Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with
regard to the State of Israel . could include: Denying the Jewish people
their right to self determination eg by claiming that the existence of a
State of Israel is a racist endeavour.'

This lie should be exposed - but it requires a lot of dissection. The nub is
'self-determination', which it locates exclusively as being in the form of
the Israeli state. It takes the Zionist version of Jewish self-determination
to be the sole legitimate and true form of Jewish self-determination.

And yet, the Zionist version of Jewish self-determination belittles the
Jewish life of the majority of Jews in the world. Zionism holds that you
have to live in Israel to be complete as a Jew and that Jews outside are
incomplete Jews: homeless, threatened and in exile.

Last year, nearly six decades after Israel came into being, it was estimated
that there were 14.5 million Jews in the world of whom 6.2 million lived in
Israel. If anything, this underestimates the global total - since
self-identifying Jews who do not belong to a synagogue or any official
Jewish institution don't get counted except as 'guesstimates'; and it
overestimates the Israeli proportion, since Israel's Jewish population
includes many church-going non-Jewish Russians who opportunistically claimed
Jewish ancestry as a way of emigrating from Russia.

Today, any Jew anywhere has the opportunity to go to live in Israel to
determine themselves there, and nearly all have the means to do so. But they
continue to choose the diaspora. So Israel is not the only place where
Jewish self-determination happens, or even where it mostly happens, but the
only place where Zionists recognise it as happening. The EUMC report
colludes completely with this view.

Jewish self-determination means to live life freely and make choices as a
Jew, both individually and collectively. It means having the right to form
and join Jewish organisations and institutions, read Jewish newspapers and
literature, speak Jewish languages, eat Jewish food, carry out Jewish
religious practices, celebrate Jewish festivals, be buried in a Jewish
cemetery, and bring Jewish concerns - for example, about antisemitism - to
the attention of government and civil society organisations. Nearly all Jews
are able to do this today, whether they live in Israel or the diaspora. But
most prefer to do it in the diaspora. And if you look at emigration patterns
from Israel, there are lots of Israelis who prefer to practice their
self-determination in the diaspora too.

Ideas of Jewish autonomy and self-determination preceded Zionism. And
Zionism was only one model among several that have been fought for. In
Eastern Europe, religious Jewish communities formed kehillas - autonomous
collective institutions - which levied taxes on Jewish families, provided a
range of Jewish services, and organised their own legal systems.
Ultra-orthodox Jewish communities today still live very much within their
own collective frameworks. These are not democratic and they don't provide
for secular Jews but, in themselves, remain a form of Jewish
self-determination.

In 1897, the same year that the Zionist movement was declared in Basle, the
Bund (General Union of Jewish Workers) was formed in Vilna. The Bund
developed the idea of national cultural autonomy - Jewish self-determination
that was not contingent on territory but recognised the multinational
character of the Jewish people.

In 1905 a group calling themselves 'territorialists' split from the Zionist
movement and were active for two decades pursuing the idea of forming a
Jewish territory or compact Jewish territories in various parts of the world
and not necessarily in Palestine.

In the Soviet Union, a Jewish autonomous region was formed called
Birobidzhan. While remaining under strict party control in an authoritarian
state, Yiddish was (and continues to be) taught in schools there, and a
range of Jewish institutions operated.

Stalinists, Zionists and territorialists chose to understand Jewish
self-determination as contingent upon a defined and ghettoised territory. In
the case of the former, the territory was far from where Jews were already
living but within the territory of the state in which they lived. In the
latter two cases the territory in question was under the jurisdiction of
other rulers.

The insistence on connecting Jewish self-determination with a distinct and
hermetically sealed territory runs completely against the grain of Jewish
history. Writing in the 1950s, Professor Leibman Hirsch of Geneva University
stated that, 'the period when the entire Jewish nation was united in a truly
independent state of its own was limited to 80 years (the combined reigns of
David and Solomon), or only about 2% of the period described in Jewish
history.'

Israel's 59 years, with a significant proportion of Jews united in a Jewish
nation state, will not have increased this percentage substantially. Which
means that the normal condition of the Jews has been that of practising
their self-determination as a minority living within various nations. In
certain places in certain periods they struggled against discrimination
which limited many or few aspects of their self-determination, but, in
general, the Bund's notion of achieving full self-determination in the
diaspora chimed in with the reality of the Jewish condition.

The Bund was not alone in its view that national cultural autonomy was both
possible and necessary in diaspora communities. The Jewish historian Simon
Dubnow was instrumental in forming the Jewish Folkists - a secular liberal
movement which supported Jewish cultural autonomy in the diaspora, published
a Yiddish daily newspaper in Warsaw, and was represented in the Polish
parliament during the1920s and '30s.

So it has been, and it remains, perfectly possible to completely reject and
oppose Zionism's version of Jewish self-determination while supporting other
kinds of Jewish self-determination and supporting full equality for Jews and
non-Jews in the world.

The EUMC says anti-Zionists are antisemites for 'claiming that the existence
of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour'. If Jewish people had located a
remote place on Earth where they would settle in a territorial unit without
harming the rights of people indigenous to that territory, I can't imagine
that anti-Zionists would condemn this, or see it as a racist endeavour.

Of course, the EUMC know that anti-Zionists are not objecting to 'a' State
of Israel in abstract, but to the impact 'the' State of Israel has had on
the Palestinians - the people living within the territory that the Zionists
selected for their state. They know, too, that it is not the desire for
self-determination that is condemned as racism but the attitudes of Zionist
leaders to the population of the land they had chosen to settle, and the
exclusivist laws made by that state to privilege the new Jewish majority.

Many Jews arrived in Israel in the late 1940s as refugees who had no desire
to treat others as they themselves had been treated, but they were
incorporated into a system which granted them permanent privileges at the
expense of the indigenous population of Palestine.

This state was founded against the wishes of the neighbouring states whose
hostility to a Jewish enclave in the Arab world was probably more pressing
than their concern for the Palestinians. But more significantly, it was
established against the wishes of the majority who were already living on
that territory, and was firmly established through terror and expulsion,
through razing Palestinian villages and building Jewish settlements on this
land. The discriminatory character of the state was established through laws
that reserved ownership of most of the land exclusively for Jews and denied
the right of Palestinian refugees to return.

The Bundist approach to Jewish self-determination was the opposite to that
of the Zionists. Bundist theorist Emanuel Scherer described it as: 'Rights
and justice for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustice to other people
anywhere.' The Bundists separated statehood from peoplehood and rejected the
idea that Jews living outside of a Jewish nation state were homeless. They
argued that, for their full liberation, the Jewish people did not need to
change territories, but to make changes within their territories. The Bund
argued that there were no separate Jewish solutions for the problems Jews
faced; these would be found within solutions to humanity's problems of
majorities and minorities, oppression and inequality.

While Zionism proclaims that the answer to antisemitism, especially in the
form of Nazism, is found through self determination in a nation state,
Bundists argue that they have failed to identify the root of the problem:
the national chauvinism encouraged through the nation state itself.

So, in effect, Zionism has lined up in philosophy and practice with the
nationalist systems that have inflicted the greatest misfortunes on the
Jews, and is inflicting its own misfortunes on its national minorities.

On Israel's 10th birthday, the renowned Polish Jewish Marxist, Isaac
Deutscher, wrote: 'The Jews were conditioned by the circumstances of their
existence to rise above the limitations of the nationalist outlook, to
overcome the fetishes of state and empire, and to look forward to
supra-national forms of social existence. Now, however, when the
nation-state is decaying, when it has become as crass an anachronism as the
feudal princedoms once were . Jews are investing their boundless enthusiasm
and their great talents in their own nation state.'

Deutscher advised Israelis to 'beware of being carried away by their
new-fangled and already red-hot nationalism . their state is not above
criticism; it is an earthly creation not a Biblical sanctity, not a "chosen"
nation state.'

Objective commentators would probably describe Deutscher as prophetic or
prescient. I suspect that UJS and the EUMC would not hesitate to describe
him as antisemitic.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Greens against a boycott seem to be arguing that it was wrong for Caroline Lucas to appear at the Palestine Solidarity Rally"

Not quite correct, Derek.

"According to Green Party policy, Speakers and Officers of The Green Party of England, Wales and Northern Ireland will only share platforms with groups who endorse racial, ethnic or national hatred at a public or private meeting where that offers an opportunity to confront and oppose racism."

Anonymous said...

Derek, the evidence of your opposition to antisemitism that you link to is only concerned with antisemitism on the right. What about antisemitism on the left - this is the bigger problem for British Jews at the moment.

Anonymous said...

And Derek, roping in Deutscher is a little strange. I'm no expert but I know that like most Bundists, he dropped his opposition to Zionism after the Holocaust - not to mention the disgraceful aftermath of the Holocaust - conclusively proved that Jews needed to be able to defend themselves.

Raphael said...

"Objective commentators would probably describe Deutscher as prophetic or prescient. I suspect that UJS and the EUMC would not hesitate to describe him as antisemitic."

Not quite correct, Derek.

Isaac Deutscher says this: "their state is not above criticism; it is an earthly creation not a Biblical sanctity, not a "chosen" nation state."

The EUMC definition says this:
"criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

Not only the quote from Deutscher would not make it an antisemite according to the EUMC definition, but Deutscher and the EUMC seem to be in perfect agreement in asking that Israel should simply be treated as a normal state, not "chosen", one way or another.

Israel is not above criticism. Criticism of "red-hot nationalism", in Israel and elsewhere is appropriate, but the singling out of Israel as a unique evil in the world is antisemitic.

Anonymous said...

"asking that Israel should simply be treated as a normal state"

Israel is not a normal state. It tries to pass itself off as one but it is in reality a colonial settler state, racist and sectarian to its rotten core. Zionism is a racist ideology and it is one of the great ironies of history that it was enthusiastically promoted by anti-Semites like Balfour for British imperial ends.

Zionism and anti-Semitism are ugly twins. The anti-Semite wants Jews to leave, and Zionism obliges that desire. This is why Nazi Germany and Zionists were originally buddies and why Adolf Eichman was invited to Palestine in the 1930s by Jews.

Anti-semitism is more or less non-existent in Britain today, but of course defenders of Israel are keen to talk it up and blur it with anti-Zionism. It's another desperate attempt to muffle the growing criticism of Israel's daily atrocities against the Palestinians and the thuggish IDF's ongoing massacre of Palestinian children. Not to mention the ongoing theft of Palestinian land.

I was disgusted today to see in a supermarket that the Soil Association gives its imprimatur to organic potatoes from Israel (i.e. occupied land). There's nothing very Green or ethical about that.

Anonymous said...

Raphael says that the singling out of Israel as a unique evil in the world is antisemitic.

That's an absurd formulation. No one suggests that Israel is uniquely evil. However, it is uniquely sectarian. No other country in the world discriminates as Israel does, by religion.

There are plenty of reasons for Britain to be at the forefront of opposing Israel. Britain first sponsored the idea of a Jewish settler society planted on Palestinian land. Britain destroyed Palestinian resistance, with massive military repression 1936-39. Britain helped arm Israel with weapons of mass destruction. Britain continues to supply the technology which the vile IDF uses to repress Palestinian resistance.

Anonymous said...

Alan Howe turns reality on its head. Israel is a racist entity. Caroline Lucas quite properly supported Palestine Solidarity in its opposition to the Zionist state.

Anonymous said...

"What about antisemitism on the left - this is the bigger problem for British Jews at the moment."

The usual Zionist crap. The Left used to support Israel and now it has got wise to its reality. Even the tame mass media can't hide the atrocities which Israel routinely inflicts on the Palestinians. The only people on the Left who support Israel are the same people who support invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, i.e. barely Left at all, more like Thatcherites in Blairite wool.

ModernityBlog said...

Big Jim wrote:

Anti-semitism is more or less non-existent in Britain today, "

Derek, I sincerely hope that you challenge an ill informed notion?

ModernityBlog said...

ops, that should be Jolly Jim

Anonymous said...

Jolly Jim was simply speaking the truth. The two groups most likely to face discrimination and violence in Brtain today are Muslims and gay men. Anti-Semitism barely exists, although of course Zionists pretend otherwise, so that they can categorize anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Britain's Jewish community is not remotely under threat and it is hysterical nonsense to pretend otherwise.

Anonymous said...

There are some misconceptions in the responses.
Isaac Deutscher did not become a Zionist after the Holocaust though he described himself as a "friend of the Israeli people" and his post-war opposition to Zionism as "more in sorrow than anger".

Few Bundists survived the Nazi genocide but small Bund groups re-formed in the countries they ended up in as refugees including Palestine/Israel. The first Bund conferences after the Holocaust - in Belgium in 1947 and the USA in 48 re-affirmed the Bund's historical opposition to Zionism, and rejected the idea of partitioning Palestine. They favoured a bi-national solution.

Those who have posted comments suggesting that antisemitism is insignificant or non-existent in Britain today are quite mistaken and do not help either the anti-racist movement or those opposing Zionism.

While other groups bear the brunt of direct discrimination, antisemitic incidents are nevertheless running at a serious level both here and in a number of other countries in Western and Eastern Europe. And despite the opportunism of far right groups like the BNP now pretending that they admire Israel, antisemitism remains at the heart of their worldview.

Zionists are past masters at exploiting the presence of antisemitism for their ends but if progressives don't acknowledge antisemitism and act against it - it leaves the field open for the Zionists.

Today there is more dissent within Jewish communities over Israel/Zionism than at any time since Israel was created. We should be challenging zionist racism and oppression of the Palestinians at the same time as, and not instead of, challenging antisemitism.

ModernityBlog said...

Derek,

you make much of your opposition to antisemitism, that being the case, why don't you take up the erroneous and misleading comments by Jolly Jim and Michael Williams when he states, categorically :

"Anti-Semitism barely exists, although of course Zionists pretend otherwise, so that they can categorize anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Britain's Jewish community is not remotely under threat and it is hysterical nonsense to pretend otherwise.

Anonymous said...

Isaac Deutscher in 1954:

"Israelis who have known me as an anti-Zionist of long standing are curious to hear what I think about Zionism. I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilization, which that society and civilization have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers."

Read more on Engage:

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/index.php?id=49

Anonymous said...

"antisemitic incidents are nevertheless running at a serious level...here"

And the evidence for that is?

Anonymous said...

Taking antisemitism seriously ought not compromise a principled stand in support of the Palestinians against occupation. Figures from a range of bodies including Jewish bodies, police and anti-racist monitoring groups confirm several hundred incidents a year ranging from verbal abuse to serious physical attacks and Nazi-style daubings on Jewish cemeteries, synagogues etc.

No doubt some of this is misplaced anger over Israeli policy being vented on individual Jews who are not responsible for what the Israeli state does, but a lot of it seems to stem from the traditional white far-right sources.

Twenty five years ago, the annual number of antisemitic incidents in Britain was in the hundreds. There have been minor fluctations but the levels have remained significant. Whatever level of incidents should have no bearing on our determination to fight racism whether perpetrated by antisemites here or Zionist forces in Palestine. So I can't see what Michael Williams is driving at.

It is very sad that Isaac Deutscher is not here to comment on how his statements have been used or claimed but I would advise whoever quoted his 1954 statement to read also the essay that Deutscher wrote in the year he died, on the 1967 war which resulted in the occupation that the Palestinians still suffer under 41 years later. He says:

"The responsibility for the tragedy of European Jews in Auschwitz, Majdanek, and the slaughters in the ghetto, rests entirely on our western bourgeoise 'civilisation'...Yet it was the Arabs who were made to pay the price for the crimes the West committed towards the Jews...Israel never even recognised the Arab grievance. From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants."

If anyone thinks that is some kind of ringing endorsement of Zionism they have seriously got the wrong end of the stick.

Anonymous said...

I don't dissent from your analysis, 'anonymous' and I don't wish to downplay the seriousness of anti-Semitic attacks. However, I think caution is required if you rely on statistics supplied by outfits like CST, which are run by Zionists.

The ambition of British Zionists is to criminalize criticism of Israel by defining it as anti-Semitic. To that end they are keen to promote the idea that anti-Semitism is a massive and growing problem in Britain. This I think is nonsense.

The Standard recently published a photograph of graffitti reading 'I HATE ISRAEL' This was described as racist and anti-Semitic, and I'm sure CST chalked it up as such for their stats. But in my view it wasn't at all - it was no more racist than 'I HATE THE USA' would be.

By promoting the silly idea that Kristallnacht is just around the corner, Zionists hope to muffle the Palestine Solidarity movement.

ModernityBlog said...

Michael Williams,

Are you a Green Party member or a supporter? because either way I am surprised to read your stuff, which I'll come to later, but in the meanwhile:

Taken from the CST 2007 report:

http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents_Report_07.pdf

Executive Summary.

o 547 antisemitic incidents were recorded by CST in 2007. This is the second-highest annual total since CST began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984.
o The total of 547 incidents is an eight per cent fall from the 2006 total of 594 incidents. However, this fall is not large enough to alter the long-term trend of rising antisemitic incidents in Britain since the late 1990s.

o The fall in the number of incidents in 2007 is due to the absence of ‘trigger events’ that can cause temporary increases in incidents. In 2006 there was a significant trigger event, the war between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon, which led to a large rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK.

o There were 114 violent antisemitic assaults in 2007, the highest ever recorded by CST. This included one incident that was classified as Extreme Violence, meaning that the victim’s life was endangered. Violent assaults were the only category of incident to increase in 2007 and make up an increasing proportion of antisemitic incidents in the UK, from 13 per cent of the total in 2002, up to 21 per cent in 2007.

o Incidents of Damage and Desecration to Jewish property fell by 11 per cent, from 70 incidents in 2006 to 62 incidents in 2007.

o There were 328 incidents of Abusive Behaviour in 2007, a fall of ten per cent from the 365 incidents recorded in 2006. This category includes verbal abuse, hatemail and antisemitic graffiti on non-Jewish property.

o September was the joint fourth-highest monthly total on record. Of the 78 incidents recorded during the month, 35 took place on the festivals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when there are relatively large numbers of visibly Jewish people on the streets, walking to and from synagogue.

o In 59 incidents the victims were Jewish students, academics or other student bodies. This is a 228 per cent rise from 2006, probably because of increased reporting by students to CST. Out of 59 incidents, 31 took place on campus and 28 off campus. Six incidents occurred in the direct context of student political campaigning.

o In 282 antisemitic incidents the victims were individual Jewish people in public places. In 189 of these, the victims were visibly identifiable as Jewish.

o Synagogues were the target in 67 incidents, and congregants on their way to or from prayer were the targets in 64 incidents.

o Jewish schools or schoolchildren were the targets in 47 incidents, of which 31 were against Jewish schoolchildren on their journeys to or from school. There were six cases of Jewish or pro-Israel websites being hacked and defaced. In all six cases, the hackers appeared to be Islamist extremists based outside the UK.

o The lack of trigger events from the Middle East in 2007 meant the number of antisemitic incidents that included anti-Zionist discourse fell from 106 in 2006 to 46 in 2007, while the number that included neo-Nazi discourse rose slightly, from 125 in 2006 to 127 in 2007.

 In addition to the 547 antisemitic incidents recorded by CST in 2007, a further 488 reports of potential incidents were received by CST, but not included in the total number of antisemitic incidents as there was no evidence of antisemitic motivation, targeting or content.

ModernityBlog said...

Michael Williams wrote:

The Standard recently published a photograph of graffitti reading 'I HATE ISRAEL' This was described as racist and anti-Semitic, and I'm sure CST chalked it up as such for their stats. But in my view it wasn't at all - it was no more racist than 'I HATE THE USA' would be.

This, I believe, is an extract from that report:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23484717-details/Synagogue+walls+daubed+with+anti-Jewish+graffiti/article.do

"Residents were today warned to look out for suspicious activity following the racist attack in north-east London.

Vandals sprayed shops, pavements and walls outside four synagogues in Clapton Common and Stamford Hill on Tuesday night. Worshippers were yesterday confronted with slogans such as "Jihad to Israel" and "Jihad to Tel Aviv".

Hackney council is removing the graffiti, which consisted of 40 pieces of writing.

David Greenwald, 20, who visits the Chasidey Belz Beth Hemedrash synagogue in Clapton Common, said the close-knit community was shocked.

"This morning I went to synagogue to pray and saw the writing all over everywhere - walls, shops, traffic lights," he said. "Everyone feels scared. Here we do not have any problem with Arabs - there has never been anything like this before, but now we are worried."

Another worshipper said: "It makes us feel that we are in exile. It could be kids doing it but even so, it shows something." The other synagogues were Satmar Beth Hamedrash Yetev Lev, Atereth Zvi Beth Hamedrash, and the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. Yesterday further racist graffiti appeared in Bethnal Green.

A spokesman for the Community Security Trust, an organisation which looks after the safety of British Jews, said: "We are already on a relatively high state of alert due to pronouncements by pro-al Qaeda supporters relating to attacks on Jews, and this adds to the picture of threat." Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, said: "Hackney is a tolerant place and we've never seen anything like this before. Our graffiti removal teams are working with the police to remove it as quickly as possible to minimise any further distress."


The incidents, sprayed shops, pavements and walls outside four synagogues in Clapton Common and Stamford Hill, the graffiti, which consisted of 40 pieces of writing.

So is that the official position?

does Green Party and its supporters consider that attacks on synagogues not to be racially motivated?

Or racist graffiti not to be an sign of anti-Jewish racism (as above) ?

Any Green bold enough to answer?

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