Pittsburgh synagogue massacre

By Richard Mellor in California

The Facts For Working People website unconditionally condemns the horrific terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue by white supremacist and neo-Nazi Robert Bowers. The increased racist attacks on immigrants, people of colour, Jews, political opponents with a liberal bent are a direct result of Trump’s call to arms. Trump has emboldened the forces that have laid quiet for times such as these.

Language matters. As we saw with the previous posting on this subject the neo-fascist Zionist leaders in Israel come to the defence of white nationalism and the racist and misogynist Donald Trump. Why would they not, one might ask? They are Europeans after all and isn’t Israel a European colonial settlement? The first British governor of Jerusalem referred to the creation of the Jewish state as “Our loyal little Ulster in the Middle East”

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal takes the same line and uses the opportunity to defend right wing neo-fascist currents. The Journal first publishes an opinion piece from a head of a congregation that merged with the Tree of Life, a carpet salesman. He too ignores the present climate and Trump’s role in it. Instead, it is that age-old scourge, anti-Semitism that is to blame and the target was chosen because Jews inherently “care for the downtrodden”. The killer, John Bowers “simply hated Jews” the Journal said in its editorial in the same issue. No link to the hatred of immigrants which was also behind the killings and the support for white nationalism. According to this carpet salesman’s world view, “concern for the downtrodden” doesn’t apply to the Palestinians.

WSJ equates fascism with the struggle for Palestinian rights

The Journal’s editorial continued in the same vein. Anti-Semitism is as old as time and there’s nothing you can do about it. Opposition to Israeli Apartheid and the Zionist regime’s brutal occupation and genocidal war against Palestinians is also simply anti-Semitism on a national scale. There is the anti-Semitism of the right like Bowers but also its partner “…the pro-Palestinian left, especially on university campusus”. The Journal writes. Let that sink in for a minute. The fascist Bowers and the struggle for Palestinian rights, two sides of the same coin!

“This irrational hatred is one of humanity’s oldest and manifests itself in murder almost daily in the Middle East. Jews are killed simply because they are Jews, as they have been throughout history.”, the Journal’s editorial says.

The Wall Street Journal champions right wing (Orthodox) Catholics like Pence and the Evangelical Christians (the US Taliban) as the, “…. most stalwart supporters of Israel and the Jewish people….” They are the non-Jewish Zionists and differ from the Jewish ones in that their support for Israel is based on the view that their god will be returning there to take them to heaven and issue in an era of peace and harmony (for them perhaps). Jews, and there are a few Jews in Israel, that do not convert to Christianity will suffer eternal damnation, in other words, they will rot in hell. The Jews don’t believe this nonsense, so they can take this support without fear of retribution.

It is somewhat ironic that the Journal can talk of Jews as victims of terrorism in Israel when most of the terrorists in Israel are Jewish. The Zionist regime is a regime kept in power through state terror and a brutal occupation.

The Wall Street Journal attacks the “liberal” media and anyone else for blaming Trump in any way, form or fashion. Don’t we realize that, “Mr. Trump’s daughter has converted to Judaism and she and her husband are raising their children in the faith.”, the newspaper asks? What’s the matter with us! Kushner, Adelson, Netanyahu, Trump love Jews and Mexicans. “Americans would do well to ignore this toxic habit of political blame for murderous acts by the racist, anti-Semitic or mentally disturbed.”
As the previous piece we posted by Simone Zimmerman pointed outthough,
“It is a particular kind of Jew — cosmopolitan, progressive, anti-racist — that Trump has adopted as a scapegoat for America’s problems… as the source of a global conspiracy working to undermine everything their nationalist worldview represents.”

Dylan Roof was just mentally disturbed. The guy that shot two black people in Louisville Kentucky, an event overshadowed by the Pittsburgh massacre, was just mentally disturbed. Trump has nothing to do with all of this surely. So there is such a thing as “fake news”.

I cannot comment on these events without once again pointing a finger at another force in society, and that is the heads of the 14 million-member trade union movement. Union members and workers of all traditions are under assault as the ruling class accumulates more and more wealth at labour’s expense. Both of the capitalist political parties have orchestrated this savage assault on our living standards. The heads of the building trades met with the racist and misogynist Trump and kissed his ass, hoping to keep some jobs for a select few workers and the source of their obscene salaries secure. But Trump will not guarantee that either.

Union leaderships demonstrate the Silence of the Lambs

The leaders of the public sector unions are not much better, whining about this betrayal and claiming the mantle of defenders of the future for workers on the coat-tails of the Democratic Party. Their whimpering in the face of Trump and his white nationalist, racist messages is criminal; it is the Silence of the Lambs. They are allowing the racists to take centre stage, they are refusing to enter into the struggle for the consciousness of the working class and we will suffer the consequences of this passive strategy; peace at all costs. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, these are all part of a strategy to divide and weaken the working class as a whole. We all suffer. Because of this refusal to lead, to offer an alternative to the working class, the struggles ahead will be unnecessarily complicated, confused and at times violent as the working class rises to its feet to defend its living standards.

Finally, on the question of Israel. Jews have always lived in the Middle East and have every right to do so in peace. They have lived, as ‘Arab’ Jews, in relative harmony with Muslims. It has not been Arabs or Muslims that waged a genocidal war against the Jewish people but Christian Europe. Israel is a necessary foothold in the Middle East for western capitalism and its plunder of the region. The Zionists and the Saudis are the staunchest defenders of US western interests in the region. That is why US and British capitalism arms them, to keep the revolutionary potential of the Arab workers and the workers of the entire region at bay. Israel cannot guarantee a safe haven for Jews. And while some oppose Israel because they are anti-Semites, opposition to this Apartheid state is not anti-Semitism. And the crises with roots in the colonial carving up of the area cannot be eradicated within the framework of capitalism.

Below is a link to a speech by Gideon Levy (pictured above). It seems obvious to me that Levy, who supported the two-state solution for the region, is losing hope that there can be a solution at all. He is despairing. But he is not a socialist, he does not see socialism as the only alternative and the working class in the region and internationally as the only force that can bring that about. Please watch it. He is a courageous Israeli and a principled individual.