UK and Israel: Has the Fightback Against Weaponised Antisemitism Begun?

UK and Israel: Has the Fightback Against  ?Weaponised Antisemitism Begun

Jewish groups and academics are finally exposing the UK establishment's smear campaign to silence criticism of Israel and destroy the left

By Jonathan Cook

Global Research, September 28, 2023

     Middle East Eye 25 September 2023 

There has been a wave of highly damaging but unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism against students and academics, according to a new survey of British universities.

In 38 of 40 cases brought against lecturers, students, student unions and societies in the five years to 2022, no evidence was found to support the accusations of antisemitism. Hearings in the other two cases have yet to conclude.

Hidden in the raw figures is the enormous toll such false allegations take on the accused: personal suffering and reputational and career damage, as well as the additional chilling effect on academic freedom in the wider university community.

That is unlikely to be an unfortunate side product of these allegations. It seems to be precisely their point.

Brismes, a group representing British academics studying the Middle East, published the survey findings in a report this month that suggests wrongful or malicious claims of antisemitism are likely to increase in number.

The spate of allegations was unleashed after universities began adopting a revised, and highly controversial, definition of antisemitism issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016.

Three-quarters of universities have now rubber-stamped the definition after Gavin Williamson, as education secretary, threatened in 2020 to cut the funding of any that refused to do so.

A majority of the IHRA’s 11 illustrative examples – some of which, as the report notes, contradict the main definition – shift the focus away from the traditional meaning of Jew-hatred to emphasise criticism of Israel.

As many warned, that has handed Israel’s most staunch supporters a dragnet they can use to smear anyone expressing solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli oppression, while intimidating onlookers into a complicit silence.

In truth, that was always the aim. The IHRA definition grew out of covert efforts by the Israeli government to blur traditional distinctions between antisemitism and anti-Zionism to shield itself from critics, including human rights groups, who were highlighting Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians.

Critics Silenced

Promotion of the IHRA definition has risked violating Britain’s legal obligations to protect free speech. The UK government is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, and paradoxically it passed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act back in May.

The act is ostensibly designed to “ensure students are able to speak freely in and out of the classroom, while offering more protection for academics who teach material that may offend some students”.

This may explain why the government’s taskforce on antisemitism was keen to publicise feedback from universities that, it says, shows adoption of the IHRA definition has had no impact on academic freedom.

The evidence compiled by Brismes, backed by research from the European Legal Support Centre, appears to blow that claim apart. Weaponised antisemitism is creating a climate on campuses that increasingly makes discussion of Israeli crimes off-limits.

But the lessons to be learnt from the growing weaponisation of antisemitism in academia aren’t limited to universities. As Middle East Eye has regularly documented, similar smear tactics, invariably based on the IHRA definition, have been used for years to silence political activists, human rights groups, cultural icons and Palestinians.

The British establishment’s aim has been to use the IHRA definition to scrub political and social discourse of all but the mildest criticism of Israel.

That is the context making it possible for the UK to step up trade links with Israel and pass legislation to give Israel special protections, at a time when a consensus has been reached by the international human rights community that Israel is an apartheid state, and after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu included self-declared fascist politicians last year in his new government.

With barely a murmur from the opposition Labour party, the UK government’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill will deny public bodies such as local authorities the right to support boycott, sanctions and divestment campaigns against Israel over its oppression of Palestinians.

The Orwellian truth of official policy is this: the more Israel’s crimes are made public, the less we are allowed to speak about them or do anything.

Legal Complaint

The Brismes report is the belated sign of a fightback. As is the decision by Jewish political activists this month to alert the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to the Labour party’s discriminatory treatment of Jewish members under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), representing left-wing Jews in the party, sent a formal complaint to Labour, prepared by the law firm Bindmans, accusing it of “discriminating unlawfully against its Jewish members and unlawfully harassing them”.

The letter, copied to the equalities watchdog, argues that Jews are being singled out for punishment, invariably based on the IHRA definition, over their vocal criticisms of Israel. It suggests legal action may follow if the group’s concerns are not addressed.

JVL notes that Labour’s Jewish members feel a special moral responsibility to speak out about Israeli brutality towards Palestinians because that oppression is carried out by Israel in the name of all Jews.

Nonetheless, Labour statistics show that Jewish party members are six times more likely than non-Jews to be investigated over antisemitism, and nearly 10 times more likely to be expelled from the party.

The letter adds that harassment of left-wing Jewish members by Labour head office includes a “harsh disciplinary regime” that subjects them to investigation as well as an unwillingness to take their own complaints seriously. Eleven of the JVL’s 12 Jewish executive committee members have been investigated.

Last year John McDonnell, a former shadow chancellor, himself wrote to the party warning that “disrespectful” treatment of JVL members amounted to discrimination.

Jenny Manson, one of JVL’s founders, told MEE that Jewish members were often required to receive antisemitism training after being disciplined for alleged antisemitic conduct if they wished to remain in the party. 

“It’s a cruel, even brutal, trick to brand these Jewish members as antisemites when they have experience and in-depth understanding of real antisemitism,” she said.

Labour, she added, not only appeared to tolerate their characterisation as “the wrong sort of Jews” but often implicitly endorsed this racist labelling by refusing to deal with their harassment.

Findings Buried

The JVL’s notification to the equalities watchdog of the abusive treatment of Jewish party members is likely to embarrass Starmer. It has echoes of claims made against his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. 

In Corbyn’s case, unlike Starmer’s, there was no evidence beyond media-fuelled insinuations that Labour discriminated against Jews or indulged antisemitism. 

Nonetheless, in 2018, two pro-Israel groups referred Labour to the EHRC, claiming that antisemitism was rife under Corbyn. The watchdog carried out an investigation – the first into a major political party –  that reported two years later.

Even relying on the IHRA definition, the Equalities Commission could identify only two instances of what it characterised as “antisemitic harassment“, in each instance by an individual rather than party structures.

In fact, its main conclusion – buried in both the report and the media coverage – was that, when Corbyn’s officials discriminated by interfering in antisemitism disciplinary cases, it was usually in favour of complainants. In other words, Labour under Corbyn was unfairly ruling incidents as antisemitic when the evidence was lacking.

The over-eagerness of Corbyn’s team to suspend or expel members for antisemitism on flimsy evidence was hardly surprising, given that the entire British media were portraying Labour under his leadership as a nest of antisemites.

An independent investigation by Martin Forde KC, ordered by Starmer, found last year that the issue of antisemitism had been weaponised for factional purposes, chiefly to damage Corbyn and his left-wing supporters and strengthen the Labour right.

Forde’s inquiry confirmed many of the revelations contained in a leaked internal report that showed the right-wing Labour bureaucracy plotting against Corbyn, dragging its feet on disciplinary cases to embarrass him, and actively trying to sabotage his 2017 election campaign.

Starmer has done his best to bury the Forde report since its publication last year. He is also preparing to risk up to £4m ($4.9m) in legal billsto pursue former Corbyn staff members he accuses of leaking the report.

Labour did not respond to a request from Middle East Eye for comment.

Rigged Politics

Paradoxically, discrimination against Jews by Labour is now quantifiable under Starmer’s leadership: Jewish members critical of Israel have been disproportionately targeted. 

Such an outcome was something Corbyn’s team explicitly warned against while he was leader, even as he came under severe pressure from the media and pro-Israel lobby groups.

Despite the thinness of the evidence against Corbyn, the EHRC imposed on Labour an “action plan“, effectively monitoring it “to prevent continuation or reoccurrence” of unlawful acts relating to antisemitism. The action plan, it added, “was legally enforceable by the court if not fulfilled”.

Jewish Voice for Labour, it appears, is calling the EHRC’s bluff. The equalities body was all too ready to investigate Labour when Corbyn was leader, even on weak evidence of antisemitism and harassment of Jews. 

Will it subject Starmer to similar scrutiny, especially when evidence of harassment against Jewish party members seems overwhelming and the equalities watchdog’s action plan is being so flagrantly flouted?

Don’t hold your breath. The EHRC released Labour from special measures back in January.

An EHRC spokesperson told Middle East Eye the commission was “satisfed [Labour] had implemented the necessary actions to improve their complaints, recruitment, training and other procedures to the legal standards required”.

As Corbyn warned in response to the publication of the commission’s report in 2020, the scale of antisemitism in Labour under his leadership was “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party”. Those opponents have won. 

The lack of concern about Jews being so openly discriminated against by one of Britain’s two largest parties will, however, demonstrate how right Corbyn was. 

The furore was never about antisemitism or the welfare of Jews. For some, it was about silencing criticism of Israel, while for others it was about preventing a moderate socialist from getting anywhere near No 10 Downing Street. 

Starmer, who has put patriotism, Nato and big business at the top of his programme, has nothing to fear. No one in power cares about how much his party harasses Jews, when those Jews are on the left. 

Weaponised antisemitism is still serving its purpose: it has crushed the left politically, using Israel as the cudgel, and is now busy stifling discussions on campuses that might have exposed how bogus and politicised the campaign against the left really was. 

That is why the fightback matters. It is not just about setting the record straight. It is about exposing how rigged British politics truly is.

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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

The original source of this article is Middle East Eye

Copyright © Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 2023

Al Qaeda and Guantanamo: I Was the Only U.S. Official Imprisoned Over the CIA Torture Program — Because I Opposed It. John Kiriakou

Al Qaeda and Guantanamo: I Was the Only U.S. Official Imprisoned Over the CIA Torture Program — Because I Opposed It. John Kiriakou

The only person associated with the CIA's global torture program who was prosecuted and imprisoned was the man who blew the whistle on it — John Kiriakou.

By John Kiriakou

Global Research, September 28, 2023

ScheerPost 25 September 2023

When I joined the CIA in January 1990, I did it to serve my country and to see the world. I believed at the time that we were the “good guys.” I believed that the United States was a force for good around the world. I wanted to put my degrees—in Middle Eastern Studies/Islamic Theology and Legislative Affairs/Policy Analysis—to good use. Seven years after joining the CIA, I made a move to counterterrorism operations to stave off boredom. I still believed we were the good guys, and I wanted to help keep Americans safe. My whole world, like the worlds of all Americans, changed dramatically and permanently on September 11, 2001. Within months of the attacks, I found myself heading to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan.  

Almost immediately, my team began capturing al-Qaeda fighters at safehouses all around Pakistan. In late March, 2002, we hit the jackpot with the capture of Abu Zubaydah and dozens of other fighters, including two who commanded al-Qaeda’s training camps in southern Afghanistan. And by the end of the month, my Pakistani colleagues told me that the local jail, where we were temporarily holding the men we had captured, was full. They had to be moved somewhere. I called the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and said that the Pakistanis wanted our prisoners out of their jail. Where should I send them?

The response was quick. Put them on a plane and send them to Guantanamo. “Guantanamo, Cuba?” I asked. “Why in the world would we send them to Cuba?” My interlocutor explained what, at the time, sounded like it had been well thought out. “We’re going to hold them at the U.S. base in Guantanamo for two or three weeks until we can identify which federal district court they’ll be tried in. It’ll be Boston, New York, Washington, or the Eastern District of Virginia.”  

That made perfect sense to me. We were a nation of laws. And we were going to show the world what the rule of law looked like. These men, who had murdered 3,000 people on that awful day, would go on trial for their crimes. I called my contact in the U.S.  Air Force, made the arrangements for the flights, and loaded my handcuffed and shackled prisoners for the trip. I never saw any of them again.

The problem is that our country’s leaders, whether they were at the White House, the Justice Department, or the CIA, never really intended any of these men to face trial in a court of law, being judged by a jury of their peers. The fix was in from the beginning.  

Just a month after the September 11 attacks, the CIA leadership gathered its army of lawyers and black ops people and came up with a plan to legalize torture. This was despite the fact that torture has long been patently illegal in the United States. But it didn’t matter. There was no thought to the long term. There was no worry about what would happen if prisoners were tortured and then actually did have to go on trial. Nothing they said would be admissible. But nobody cared.  

On August 2, 2002, CIA officers and contractors began torturing Abu Zubaydah at a secret prison. That torture was well-documented in the Senate Torture Report, or rather, in the heavily-redacted Executive Summary of the Senate Torture Report. The report itself will likely never be released. But even in its redacted version, and with comprehensive footnotes, it paints a horrifying picture of what the CIA did to its prisoners. That torture, that policy, has come back to haunt the CIA.

Military trials have always moved at a glacial pace at the U.S. base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where the United States has kept a total of roughly 780 prisoners from the so-called “War on Terror” since early 2002. That number is down to a few dozen of what the government calls the “worst of the worst.” Only a small handful are cleared for eventual release, pending the identification of a country willing to take them. The rest will likely never be released.

An Ex-CIA Agent Blows the Whistle on Torture and Secret Prisons

The problem with charging a defendant at Guantanamo has proven to be several-fold. First, much of the evidence that the Pentagon wants to use against the likes of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, accused al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaydah, accused September 11 facilitator Ramzi bin al-Shibh and others was collected by CIA officers and contractors through the use of torture. That in and of itself essentially doomed the cases from the start. 

None of that information, no matter how damning it may be, can be used against them. Even the purported “worst of the worst” have constitutional protections, whether we like it or not. Second, what information that remains against each defendant is generally classified—usually at a very high level—and the CIA is unwilling to declassify it, even for a trial. Consequently, no trials progress except at the slowest possible bureaucratic pace. And if you’re the CIA, why would you care if trials proceed? Nobody’s going anywhere, whether they do or not.

With that said, the Pentagon is still willing to go through the motions. In 2006, the Pentagon initiated a program whereby law enforcement officers tried to get Guantanamo defendants to make voluntary confessions independent of what they had told their CIA torturers. That way, the torture couldn’t be used as a defense. But that effort failed. 

In 2007, a military judge threw out a confession that these officers obtained from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi prisoner who has been accused of being the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing, in which 17 American sailors were killed. The Pentagon argued that the officers made clear to Nashiri that his statement was completely voluntary. But the judge held that after four years in secret CIA prisons, where Nashiri was tortured mercilessly, “any resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.”  

This is the same reason that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, and others have not been tried, despite having been in U.S. custody for more than 20 years. And to make matters worse, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of being one of the most dangerous masterminds of the September 11 attacks, last week was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. Relentless CIA torture at black sites around the world and at Guantanamo, has caused “psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder” so severe that he is not only unable to participate in his own defense, but he is so insane that he cannot even enter a plea and understand what he is doing. Defense attorneys said in court last week that the only hope of making bin al-Shibh sane enough to be tried would be to provide him with post-trauma psychological care and to release him from military confinement. That will never ever happen.

Bin al-Shibh’s attorneys say that in the four years between when he was captured by the CIA in 2002 and his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006, their client “went insane as a result of what the Agency called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ that included sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and beatings.” Bin al-Shibh ranted incoherently during a court hearing in 2008, and his mental state has been an issue ever since.

Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, and another accused September 11 conspirator, has had a similar experience. Like his co-defendants, Baluchi, who also goes by the name Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is facing the death penalty, if he can ever get a trial.  But he, too, was the victim of CIA torture. A 2008 report by the CIA Inspector General, declassified and released in early 2023, found that Baluchi had been used as a “living prop” to teach CIA trainee interrogators, who lined up to take turns knocking his head against a wall, leaving him with permanent brain damage. The report also said that in 2018, Baluchi was given an MRI and examined by a neuropsychologist, who found “brain abnormalities consistent with traumatic brain injury, and moderate-to-severe brain damage.” Like bin al-Shibh, Baluchi is unable to participate in his own defense.  

All Americans should know about these recent developments. All Americans should understand that the purpose of trials would be to expose the truth. We all have a right to know what happened to us on September 11. Without that information, conspiracies run wild. Without that information, there is no accountability. We have a right to know about the planning for the attacks and about what al-Qaeda did to us. But at the same time, we have a right to know what the official government response was. Why did torture suddenly become acceptable? Who was responsible for it? And why weren’t they punished for obvious crimes against humanity?

In the end, I was the only person associated with the CIA’s torture program who was prosecuted and imprisoned. I never tortured anybody. But I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for telling ABC News and the New York Times that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by the president himself. I served 23 months in a federal prison. It was worth every minute.

There is certainly no easy fix to this situation. The New York Times reported in March 2022 that prosecutors had opened talks with attorneys representing Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and four co-defendants to negotiate a plea agreement that would drop the death penalty in exchange for sentences of life without parole and promises that the men would be allowed to remain in Guantanamo, rather than to be transferred to a Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Defense attorneys also said the men vastly prefer the weather of eastern Cuba to the snows of Colorado. The Times notes that such a deal would infuriate death penalty advocates among the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks.  

I’m sure that’s true, and I’m sorry if their feelings would be hurt by such a decision. But as angry as they might be at the likes of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and the others, they should be at least as angry with the likes of former CIA Director George Tenet, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez, former CIA Executive Director John Brennan, and CIA contract psychologist and torture program creators James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, all of whom were the godfathers of the torture program.  

They should be just as angry with the Justice Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who did intellectual handstands to convince themselves that the torture program was somehow legal. And let’s not forget that the buck has to stop somewhere. We also should blame George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. This cast of characters weakened our democracy by pretending that the Constitution and the rule of law didn’t exist. Their irresponsibility, childish emotion, and willingness to commit crimes against humanity guaranteed that the men who likely committed the worst ever crime against Americans will never be fully and legally punished. It’s up to us to make sure that future generations know that.

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John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Featured image: Picture from Abu Graib. (Source: ScheerPost)

The original source of this article is ScheerPost

Copyright © John Kiriakou, ScheerPost, 2023