mcdonnellj@parliament.uk

Please add your name to this petition asking John McDonnell not to appear on the platform of the race baiting Jewish Labour Movement.

Dear John,

Last Monday you spoke at an LRC fringe meeting at TUC Conference in Brighton.  Congratulations  on resisting the pressure not to speak on the same platform as Jackie Walker, who was wrongfully suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ last May and reinstated shortly after, despite the pressure put upon you.

The charges against Jackie were summed up by the Jewish Chronicle at the time thus:  ‘‘Labour suspends Momentum supporter who claimed Jews caused “an African holocaust”’.  This headline was in the best traditions of Britain’s tabloid press.  Unsurprisingly the JC is edited by a former editor of the Daily Express, Stephen Pollard.

Jackie had in fact been having a private Facebook conversation with two friends, one of whom was an Israeli Zionist.  She was rebutting the assertion that the holocaust of Jews meant that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel was illegitimate.  In the course of this conversation, which was hacked into by the Israel Advocacy Movement, Jackie stated – in the context of her own African and Jewish ancestry – that Africans too suffered a holocaust, the trafficking of enslaved Africans, and that ‘many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade."

Only a particularly warped and dishonest mind could interpret these remarks as saying that the Jews caused an African holocaust.  It does not suggest an exclusive Jewish role in the slave trade, but it is a fact that in certain areas of the world –Surinam, Netherlands and Brazil – Jews played a major part in financing this trade.

In an article How culpable were Dutch Jews in the slave trade? (26.12.13.) in the Jewish Journal, the largest on-line Jewish paper in the USA outside New York, a Dutch Orthodox Rabbi, van de Kamp, stated that “Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it.... Non-Jews were also complicit, but so were we. I feel partly complicit.” 

Seymour Drescher, a well-known historian of the slave trade at Pittsburgh University estimated that ‘at one point, Jews controlled about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies’.  Jewish involvement in the slave trade has been the subject of considerable academic debate and to pillory someone, who is herself partly Jewish, for discussing this privately is outrageous. 

Jackie Walker has been subject to a continuous stream of racist abuse by Zionists, with the full knowledge and complicity of the Jewish Labour Movement.  The JLM have deliberately race baited Jackie and subjected her to the political equivalent of a lynching.  This is totally unacceptable.  The JLM are affiliated, via the World Labour Zionist Movement, to the World Zionist Organisation, a body which funds and sponsors settlements in the West Bank as well as the demolition of Arab villages inside Israel itself.  It is a thoroughly racist organisation which develops Israel for the ‘Jewish people’ only.

Just this week, the JLM’s Chair, Jeremy Newmark, was quoted in the Jewish Chronicle as saying in respect of you speaking at their meeting that ‘"He must explain his defence of Walker which is inconsistent with his call for zero tolerance. This raises serious questions. Our members expect him to explain himself.”  We say you have nothing to explain.

Amongst the vile tweets Jackie has received have been ones which challenge Jackie Walker’s Jewishness.  It is a common belief in Zionist circles that someone who is Black cannot be Jewish.  Other tweets compare someone who has been a dedicated fighter against the National Front and similar groups to Goebbels and Torquemada.  This abuse only occurs because the JLM and similar Zionist groups have waged an unceasing campaign of vilification against Jackie Walker.

If the JLM were serious in their opposition to racism, then they would call out Isaac Herzog, the leader of their sister party in Israel and ask why he recently stated that ‘ I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel.’  If someone said they didn’t want a Jewish Prime Minister in Britain who could doubt that this was anti-Semitic? [Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?]   Ha’aretz, Israel’s sole liberal daily, recently reported Herzog’s  warning that the ILP should not be seen as an ‘Arab lovers party’.  Amid 'Arab-lovers' Storm, Opposition Leader Herzog Defends 'Zionist Approach'  To appreciate the full flavour of this remark one need only recall the use by fascists of the term ‘nigger lover’ or ‘Jew lover’.

In the light of the JLM’s racist witch hunt of Jackie Walker, we are asking you and other socialists to withdraw from their fringe meeting next Sunday at Labour Party Conference.  I attach copies of some of the tweets that Jackie has received.

With best wishes