| CARVIEW |
The article has now been deleted but you can read the statement here:
A commentary will follow shortly.
]]>A commentary will be posted here shortly.
]]>Pilger methodically repeats a series of Kremlin war propaganda* memes: That the 2014 Revolution of Dignity was a fascist coup (see the response to this pap by Ukrainian socialists and anarchists I link to in my blog post on Corbyn’s Ukraine fantasies); That there were pogroms against Russian speakers – a line lifted from Putin himself and a vicious fantasy.
The idea of NATO ‘expanding Eastwards’ and ‘threatening Russia’ – central to Pilger but also STWC more widely- not only ignores the agency of Eastern Europeans but also indulges one of the central myths used by Russia’s imperial rulers to maintain their rule.
It’s his post (still up on the STWC site) on the so-called ‘Odessa massacre’ that is the most dangerous. The violent events of May 2, 2014 were immediately seized on by Russia to paint Ukraine as fascist, Russia even toured exhibitions around Europe. Citizen investigations have shown that what happened was nothing like Russia says (and Pilger loyally repeats).
Among the mountain of falsehoods, Pilger includes the supposed eyewitness testimony of a doctor. This lie was very quickly debunked as Kremlin disinformation. There’s a weasel note on the post, copied from The Guardian, which fails to say that this information has been proven false.
The May 2 events have been widely used as propaganda and have led to a number of left-wingers (including Brits) traveling to Ukraine to ‘fight the fascists’. In reality they have arrived in ‘Republics’ where actual fascists wield power, anti-Semitism is endemic, homosexuality is illegal as are free trade unions and humanitarian agencies are banned because they might ‘foment counter-revolution’.
Those thug ‘Republics’ are backed by STWC leaders Lindsey German and Andrew Murray. They, along with Pilger, back war on ‘fascist’ Ukraine and appear to care less for the fate of any mugs encouraged by their website to participate.
*See this fantastic Lithuanian documentary for more on Russia’s war propaganda machine (in English)
Paul Canning
]]>The archived STWc article can be found here
This webpage is now one of the many 404 pages on STW’s website.
The poem was inspired by the supposed killing of Ahmad Saleh Manasra, a 13 year old Palestinian boy who attempted to knife to death a 13 year old Israeli boy during the spree of attacks on Israeli civilians and the inevitable response and Palestinian deaths, following tensions around the Temple Mount in October 2015.
Whilst Heathcote Williams and other UK supporters of the Palestinian “uprising” recounted the death of Ahmad, he was in fact photographed alive and receiving successful treatment in an Israeli hospital.
What is striking about the poem is not so much its simplistic, gut-wrenching interpretation of a complex, impossible situation or even its unsubtle parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany; the brown uniforms of the Zionist/ ‘fascist’ Jabotinsky – referencing Mussolini or the Sturm Abteilung who people ‘Zionism’s very own holocaust’ – but rather it is the over-riding invocation of the blood-libel.
It is the blood-libel – the time-old accusation that Jews kidnap and murder children to use their blood as part of their religious rituals – that lies right at the heart of this insult. The Jews surround the child, torture him, taunt him (detail; ‘in Hebrew” – that ancient language giving voice to the ancient ritual which, in the eyes of the poet, never really went away), and then the final triumph – Zionism:
“a murderous contraption
Still controlled by Moloch, eater of children…”
Moloch – the ancient Canaanite god who demanded the ultimate sacrifice.
Heathcote Williams is clear here; Jews are a nation of child killers.
Stop the War are also clear here.
By EP
]]>The archived article can be found here
The author was journalist/polemicist Alison Weir, who founded the “If Americans Knew” organisation, which argues that American support for Israel is as a result of domination of US media and politics by Jewish interests. A number of Jewish groups now regard this organisation as an openly antisemitic grouping.
Alison Weir regularly appears on the Free American radio show, which is hosted by white supremacist Clay Douglas. She has alleged that Israel regularly harvests organs from murdered Palestinians, both in Israeli prisons and during harvesting raids into Gaza, a crude version of the blood libel antisemitic trope that Jews use the blood of murdered gentiles for their sustenance.
In her piece on Munich, Weir states that whilst some hostages were “accidentally killed” by the Palestinian Black September terrorists, German Special Forces killed the rest. She claims that the terrorists had no plans to harm the Israeli athletes and that attempted rescue by German forces was “botched & unnecessary” and used as a pre-planned pretext for Israeli raids against Syria and Lebanon.
So – Stop the War published a conspiracy theory about the massacre of Jewish Israeli Olympic athletes, written by a discredited fringe activist known for her use of antisemitic tropes.
Saul Freeman
]]>The article has since been deleted from the Stop the War site but you can read it here:
This is a vintage piece, bringing together all the traditional STW delights of confused “logic”, invented statistics, and startlingly bold omissions of historical fact.
We’re treated to the hectoring self-certainty that is the hallmark of STW and this can only ferment in the minds of those fortunate few who have never had to face any form of genuine difficulty or discrimination and are thus free to concentrate on enjoying someone else’s. A lack of experience of any kind of insecurity, uncertainty, or vulnerability means STW supporters can make the necessary fine distinctions between peoples who are entitled to self-determination even at the cost of stabbing old women in the streets, and murdering mothers in front of their children- for example Arabs – and wicked chancers who shouldn’t expect to find national self-determination or basic safety, i.e. Jews. This is not however to be confused with anti-semitism, because to suggest otherwise would be an act of imperialist racism.
So, we begin with an open call for the disestablishment of the state of Israel, followed swiftly by the standard declaration that this does not constitute anti-Semitism. Aficionados of STW literature will of course understand that it is not necessary to bolster this statement with fact or argument; its assertion by a member of STW being sufficient to observe the traditional niceties.
We move swiftly on to as fine a piece of muddled logic as STW have ever produced- and again a classic for them- the assertion that the only logical resolution of the fact that Israel is a Holy Land to three faiths, would be the establishment of a secular state, beautifully expressed as one in which “Jews, Arabs and Christians all have equal rights.” Not for STW the petty quibble that Arab isn’t actually a religion (or the complexity of Jews as an ethnoreligious group), our bold armchair warrior needs no understanding of culture and faith to muddy his certainties. And the simple elegance of justifying a secular state on the grounds that this is Holy Land is breath-taking in its audacity.
The following paragraphs are the usual dance around history, casually cherry-picking and distorting historical fact with a light-hearted disregard for the concept of objective data. Highlights of an unusually rich selection are the idea that Jews unilaterally announced the State of Israel (no UN resolution 181 apparently), the fascinating mathematical incompetence of population statistics, and the truly original decision to entirely omit the Arab-Israeli war, skipping directly from May 1948 to the end of 1949 and simply missing out the hard to justify bit in the middle. Perhaps a breakaway Ignore the War group is fermenting here?
We move on to a classic section- having teased us so far with fear that the Holy Troika may be omitted, the author finally relieves the tension as here they come: colonisation, ethnic cleansing, and armed struggle. The armed struggle in particular shows all the very best elements of STW hypocrisy; the utter delight in violence, the almost sexual thrill of describing poor barbaric savages driven by a wicked Western Imperialist power into – against their noble better selves – resorting to violent resistance. Stop the War are very clear that they don’t mean Stop ALL Wars. Just stop the sides they don’t like from fighting back. They are besotted with the violence of those groups they can patronisingly consider as poor oppressed peasants. Don’t stop the suicide bombers, the Qasans, the knife attacks on Israeli citizens- these appear to be what Stop The War live for.
Adopting the STW principle that quantity is an adequate substitute for quality or academic rigour, our guide to the evils of Zionism chunters away to himself for an unconscionable number of paragraphs before leading us, equally irritated and bored, to something passing faintly for a conclusion.
And we finish on a joke- Hamas are so popular, we are told, because of their relative “lack of corruption”. A witticism which I’m sure billionaire leader Khaled Mashal – as he contemplates the appalling poverty of the people of Gaza whose international aid he is living comfortably off in Qatar- will appreciate.
Stop the War: Reasons why it’s not anti-Semitic to say the state of Israel should not exist
Rachel A
]]>On the 14th August 2014 Stop the War published an article which said that the threat to the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar had never been.
That article has been deleted but you can find an archive of it here.
There was no hunting of the thousands to a trapped death. The water had not run out. The US air strikes that broke the siege and saved them were an illegitimate act of war.
It was, said Stop the War, the ‘false story’ of a ‘Yazidi crisis.’
And why had it not happened?
Because if it had happened, the contrast to the siege of Gaza would have been less acute. There is no other evidence in the Stop the War piece than that.
It is a strange view that says none shall suffer unless they are the victims of your convenience. It is a strange humanitarian who thinks the case for Gaza is made stronger by denying the deaths of Yazidis, and Kurds and Christians and Muslims at the hands of Islamic State.
And it takes a Stop the War writer to borrow the experience of Palestinians living through the siege of Gaza, and to turn that loss to the cause of denying mass murder.
What an insult to Palestine it is to do so. What an insult to the people of Gaza.
Because yes, the Yazidis died: up to 5,000 Yazidi men in Sinjar, more on the flight to the mountains, of dehydration and in the brothels of Islamic State.
We have the records of the seven year old girls sold into sexual slavery. We are finding the graves of their mothers still.
The UN has evidence to say that it is genocide – conversion or death; conversion and death; starvation or a mass grave – the questions that attend the deliberate destruction of a race.
On the day after the air strikes started, ten thousand fled. The deadlock around Mount Sinjar was broken. Together, the Kurdish fighters of the PKK and YPG opened the way for 35,000 of the estimated 50,000 trapped to escape. US drops of 100,000 dropped meal rations and 35,000 gallons of air lifted water sustained thousands more.
Apologise for that? Apologise for Sinjar? Deny genocide?
The hell we will. It takes a Stop the War writer to do that.
Jenny Foreigner
]]>The title is using an antisemitic trope – playing into the ages-old idea, loved by antisemites, that Israel controls the United States – its banks, its media, or as here – its foreign policy.
The article makes the claim, too, but the hatred is between the lines. On the surface it’s simply an article attacking a world leader, in this case Benjamin Netanyahu –
‘one of the most repellent and dangerous politicians in the world today’, a man ‘who trades on fear and war, a cynical and amoral manipulator without a trace of honesty in his entire body, who lies as easily as he breathes’.
I think this is all fine: it’s not a compelling argument in itself, of course, simply levelling a series of insults at a politician, and personally I can think of many who are more repellent and dangerous. But it’s a valid enough opinion: Israeli leaders can of course be strongly criticized in such ways without any malice towards Jews being meant.
Carr also accuses Netanyahu – ‘the Great Liar’, as he calls him – of cynically invoking the Holocaust, the Munich massacre and more for political gain in his address to Congress.
The article then veers into much more unpleasant territory as he discusses the reaction of American politicians to Netanyahu’s speech and talks about the:
‘Zionist propaganda that it has been injecting into its veins for years’.
The image conjures up not simply an idea of Israel being a carrier of poison into America, but that it is doing so without Congressmen knowing. It evokes Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing – and of course the antisemitic trope (beloved of the Nazis) that Jews secretly controlled the unwitting dupes of the world to gain power.
Carr continues the theme by presenting members of the US Congress listening to Netanyahu in terms familiar from 1950s science fiction. They are
‘glassy-eyed zombie-politicians…..sucking up Netanyahu’s fearmongering, warmongering poison like alien seed pods in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’.
Carr adds that they have also ‘had their minds well and truly snatched’.
This idea of Jews having such influence over others that they practice a kind of mind control has long been a favourite theme of antisemites, and is still used today. The theme runs through this article by Carr.
No cartoons of Jews with hooked noses or references to a world Jewish conspiracy, but here where antisemitism rests just below the surface, it is truly at its most insidious.
Jeremy Duns.
]]>In May 2015 Stop the War posted an article that made an causal link between FIFA corruption and Israel.
The article has now been deleted, but you can find an archived version of it here:
Geoff Lee of the campaign Red Card Israeli Racism and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, wrote this piece explaining why Israel should be “kicked out of world football.” The title and subtitle hint at a conspiricism so often found with pieces about Israel and which the main text does nothing to substantiate. In this case it draws a connection between the timing of the FIFA corruption scandal and its apparent benefit to Israel at the 65th FIFA Congress.
The main problem with this is that the attempted vote it described wasn’t ‘abandoned’. The Palestinians altered their approach and put forward a different motion with more limited aims. It was voted on and it passed. The FIFA corruption scandal apparently had nothing to do with this. The fact that Lee doesn’t try to make the case alluded to in the title strongly suggests that the unsubstantiated hint of conspiracy was itself the aim.
The rest of the article uses partial information and tenuous logical leaps to paint Israel as targeting Palestinian football or as analogous to South Africa during its years outside of international sport. For example, any Palestinian killed/wounded by Israeli forces, who happened to have played football at some point, is included as an example of Israel attacking Palestinian football. Lee suggests that any restriction of movement due to Israeli security checks is also an attack on football via the fact that some Palestinians are football players.
FIFA’s Statute 3 is against discrimination and racism by its member groups. Lee’s claim is that the Israeli government is racist and that the Israeli Football Federation receives government funding, therefore the football federation is complicit in the actions of its government and therefore is in breach of Statute 3. If the article had merely stuck to repeating the case for Israeli expulsion it would be worth challenging with honest disagreement. However, the entirely misleading title and subtitle push it into the realms of antisemitic trope.
David Paxton
]]>The article has been deleted but you can read it here:
The attacks on Paris started at 9.20pm on the evening of the 13th. They lasted for hours. After the end of the siege of the Bataclan, it took ten hours more for the bodies to be counted, and the process of identification begun.
What does this mean?
That while young Parisians were dying as hostages in the Bataclan, in the four separate suicide bombings including the Stade de France and the shootings on the rue Alibert, the rue del la Fontaine-au-roi, and rue de Charonne, Stop the War’s writer was sitting down to his typewriter. Before we had an idea of the numbers who had died or would die, or could take the first breath to mourn them, he wrote to blame the victims.
The premise of the article was simple. It was stated in the sub-header, ‘Without decades of intervention by the US and its allies there would have been no ‘war on terror’ and no terrorist attacks in Paris.’
Presumably that’s the invasion of Iraq that France stayed out of. Even Daesh, who took responsibility for the attacks and trained and funded attackers, didn’t think so. They cited the current airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and President Hollande’s policy toward Muslims worldwide.
The attackers struck from Belgium, the country that had turned away from the same strikes Daesh cited and they did so as European citizens, our radicalised internal horrors. Yes, some of the attackers had trained abroad, but they did so having been raised in Paris and Strasbourg. This is the pattern of radicalism and it is a known pattern. Those who kill in the West are distinguished not by even a perversion of piety but by alienation, disinterest and poverty.
Placing the blame for the deaths of the Paris victims on foreign policy – on the votes that their parents cast a generation before is distasteful. It is ugly and convenient and morally obscene – there is no responsibility for acts of violence outside those who commit them. It denies moral agency to those that have it.
And it is obviously, clearly, demonstrably wrong.
What did the government of Tunisia do to justify the killings on the beach? What did Libya do to justify the crucifixions in Sirte? What did Russia do to justify the bomb on the Metrojet airliner? What did Nigeria do to justify the market place bombs? What did the Yazidi ever do?
What did the thousands upon thousands who have died at the hands of Daesh do that Stop the War think their deaths should not count?
They are the inconvenient dead. The dead whose deaths can’t be twisted to fit a theory even while they are dying.
Responsibility for the deaths of the 130 people in Paris lies with, and only with those who killed them, or helped to plan the attacks. It does not lie, and never lies, with the victims.
The public reaction was swift and immediate. This was the first of the many articles Stop the War then took down. It was the one that revealed them for what they are.
Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East
Jake Wilde
]]>On the 4th December 2015 Stop the War published an article on the decision to extend air strikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria.
The article has been deleted but you can find an archive of it here.
The case is made. There is no doubt that the extension of strikes – the extension of the operational area of eight Tornado jets a handful of miles across a border that IS don’t recognise –is the right thing to do.
We need not rehearse the arguments here. We need not talk about the Paris attacks, or the direct appeal made by the government of France to the people of Britain. We need not talk about the treaty relationships or fundamental friendships invoked in order to fight a terrible wrong in the world; the UN mandate; the UN mandate, or the successes against ISIL in Iraq that had driven IS back to Syria in the first place.
In one year of RAF air strikes there, ISIL have been broken up and driven back. They have lost 25% of their land, half of the prestige they derive from establishing a caliphate in the lands of Islam’s origins.
And that, at last, will be all they have.
This is the time of ISIL’s vulnerability – as StW patrons admit. Diane Abbot says now that she would not stop the Iraq strikes, only those in Syria. The argument is legal, and spurious.
So no trouble with war then, from Stop the War’s leaders: no refusal of strikes, just the strange argument of Syria’s uniqueness.
But not on Stop the War’s website. No, there Hilary Benn’s extraordinary speech was a speech of blandishment. There the fine parliamentary debate about the extension of strikes was nothing more than “much talk of ‘our values’, ‘evil’, ‘our way of life’, ‘national security’ and ‘the need to keep our country safe.”
Well yes, because it was talk of ISIL.
And so, dismissively, to Hilary Benn’s extraordinary speech.
It is not possible to sell that profound, moral recognition for a lie. Benn placed a pin through ISIL and he named them for fascism, invoking Labour’s century long fight against the brutish and the cold, against the perversion of our shared humanity and a ‘government’s duty of care.’
It took the prejudice of Stop the War to see Benn’s speech as a false prospectus, as blandishments and lies.
To Stop the War, ISIL are not the fascists, we are. Our ordered forces are.
In the world of Stop the War, the spirit of the International Brigades – the ghosts of those extraordinary brave anti-fascist fighters than Benn invoked, and those who backed them; the ghosts of Orwell and of Atlee – they march with ISIL.
Let StW be damned by the words they published and deleted.
‘The jihadist movement that ultimately spawned Daesh (ISIL) is far closer to the spirit of internationalism and solidarity that drove the International Brigades than Cameron’s bombing campaign.’
Most of ISIL’s victims are Muslim, and enslaved. No choice of internationalism, or of historical parallel for them.
What do the dead care for why they died? What do the history lectures and the equivocation of the Stop the War hold for them?
Benn invoked the ghosts of the International Brigades for Labour and in the name of our responsibility. He invoked Orwell and Atlee for us.
Stop the War did so to tell the dead that they were wrong – again.
Always, with StW, the victims and the blame. Always, the victims made victims twice.
Jenny Foreigner
Stop the War: Groundhog day in Syria as Mr Benn goes bombing
]]>Stop the War: Time to go to war with Israel as the only path to peace in the Middle East
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This site is a resource for all those who need or want to know what the Stop the War Coalition really says and means.
Got a 404 when you visited the Stop the War Coalition site? That’s because Stop the War has launched a war against its own website. Stop the War Coalition is desperately filleting their web site of incriminating, nauseating and racist material.
If you are looking for an article from the Stop the War website that blames everything on the West, or one written by or referencing an active antisemite, it may now have been deleted.
If so, this site could be for you.
It is a collection of links, references and short critiques that relate to the British Stop the War Coalition. We’ll also be highlighting articles not yet culled that lurk in the depths of the Stop the War Site.
Stop the War’s co-founder and their past chair, Jeremy Corbyn, is now leader of the Labour Party. Pure speculation, but the recent Night of the Long Knives at the Stop the War website may possibly be related to the sudden and uncomfortable scrutiny that STW now find themselves under and the rash of revisions to their published content.
But the truth must out, so this is a record of the Stop the War Coalition’s stupidity, nihilism and pandering to racism.
Enjoy!
Soupy, Saul & our contributors/collaborators at the Real Stop the War.
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