Israel Shamir

The Fighting Optimist

After a Dark Political Winter, Summer Is Finally Arriving

FRENCH TRANSLATION: Après un sombre hiver

As a rule I try to see my glass half-full, leaving the half-empty one to other fellows. And now there are some good reasons for an eternal optimist to stick to his positive schedule.

Though it tarried, the summer has come, after all, to the North. The skies are blue, the grass is green and lush, the flowers are breaking out; in short, there is nothing for complaint. If God in His abundant grace bestowed this marvelous beauty upon us, He surely will not abandon us. Summertime, it is much harder to feel dejected than under incessant rain. God is in heaven and all’s right with the world.

And beside the wonderful weather, the whole neo-liberal edifice is collapsing. With the election of Trump, I told you that the Jewish Century (in the words of Slezkine) was on its way out. It is so, though sometimes it is darkest just before the dawn.

You were annoyed by PC, political correctness. And rightly so. You may call a spade, a spade, but you can’t call a Jew, a Jew. They do not like it, and waste no time in making their dislike known. This was the unfortunate experience of Jeff Sessions, the Attorney-General, who referred to “the Jewish AIPAC”. This does not sound very controversial. What can be more Jewish than AIPAC, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, aka Israel Lobby, or Jewish Lobby? This organisation is a member of the Jewish Organisations’ Conference. Its participants are Jews – or politicians and activists hoping to get generous Jewish donations. Still, Jeff Sessions has been called an anti-Semite and a KKK sympathizer.

It had much less impact that you’d expect. There were no apologies, no visible distress. A much forwarded twit (by Andrew Joyce) said “Expect Sessions to be labelled an anti-Semite from here on in for the egregious crime of suggesting that AIPAC is Jewish. Jews in panic mode”.

Why did they panic? An important part of Jewish strength has been due to their stealth mode of operation. They aren’t seen, they try (and often succeed) in being invisible.

If a scientist gets a Nobel prize, or an actress has a hit, and they are Jewish, you’ll know it. If it is a slum landlord, you won’t. AIPAC is in the twilight zone: it is a valuable tool, but with a murky reputation as Capitol Hill’s Genghis Khan. If people will call it “Jewish”, as Sessions did, who knows what else they will call “Jewish” tomorrow? The New York Times?

And here we come to the second and bigger reason for Jewish panic. Their Masters of Discourse system (media, talking heads, opinion makers) does not deliver the goods anymore. They failed to crown their preferred choice Hillary, and they failed to stop advancement of Jeremy Corbyn. The British establishment vowed to derail Corbyn; the newspapers prophesied he would suffer the biggest defeat in the history of the Labour Party. This mild man had been presented as the arch-enemy of the Jews; his hobnobbing with Hamas and other Palestinians had been mentioned endlessly. They demanded his apologies, he had to prove he was not an anti-Semite.

His worst enemies were in his own party. The Guardian attacked him incessantly. The Jewish socialists wanted to skin him. The Jewish Labour MPs were strongly againstCorbyn. They participated in an attempted coup, when they and other Blairites voted no confidence in Corbyn. Corbyn appealed to the masses – and won.

Michael Foster is a typical Jew-against-Corbyn. He is a millionaire many times over, a sponsor for Blair, an enabler of the Iraq war, the man whose name is connected to political bribery and to the subversion of the Labour Party in Blair days. He published a ferocious attack on Corbyn in the Mail, and then in the Haaretz newspaper, calling the new leader “a bully who is bad for democracy, for Britain and for British Jews”.

He objected to Corbyn’s rejuvenation of the Party: “Now [Corbyn’s people] are “democratizing” the established Labour Party by swamping the old membership with more radical, more vocal, more socialist, more Green, more anti-establishment middle class and working class supporters. Old and young, they expound a creed of public sector socialism we all experienced as having been completely discredited by the dark economic stasis of the 1970’s.”

But his “discredited” does not impress people anymore. The other way around: whatever they dislike, whatever they condemn, is a good thing for voters. There are real objectives of Corbyn, first of all. It is not a vague “make Britain great”, but a down to earth decision to end austerity, to provide free tuition in universities, to grant housing benefits for youngsters, to renationalise the railways, the National Health Service and other utilities. To take money from the defence budget, and give it to people. This is what people want, and this is what they were promised by Corbyn, while the Conservatives promised more austerity for all and less taxes for the rich.

Trump would do good to borrow a leaf from Corbyn’s cooking book: he organised his supporters into an “inner party”, called Momentum, the nearest thing to Lenin’s idea of a party. Its members acted against British counterparts of John McCain, against the traitors within the Labour. They were so efficient, that Michael Foster called them “Nazi Stormtroopers”, though their leader is Jon Lansman, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, lived in an sraeli kibbutz for a while, and is friendly to the Israeli Left (So much for the alleged anti-Semitism! A sincere Jew is always welcome in any movement, as opposed to two-timers in search of opposition control. Even Josef Stalin, who was not a renowned philosemite, had Jewish comrades at the top positions in the government and in the Party, and they remained loyal to him when others betrayed his memory.)

Foster was a poor prophet. “Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, has never done so badly in the polls since the early 1930’s”, he wrote. Actually, Labour never did so well for many years, as under Corbyn.

Do you think the Jews hated Corbyn because of his stand on Israel/Palestine? They would like you to think so. They like to be seen as patriots of Israel, but Israel is just a smokescreen to cover their true interests. They are against the working people and for themselves, that is for landlords and moneybags. They have a much better reason to hate Corbyn than the Middle East. Israel/Palestine is after all just an indicator of policy.

Indeed, now Corbyn called to take over empty houses of absentee landlords to house the survivors of the horrible fire in North Kensington. There are at least fifteen hundred empty houses in the borough, whose owners keep them empty in the hope of selling them on at a massive profit when the time is right. There are also empty houses kept by banks and investment companies.

This is why London has such expensive property rents, such long waiting lists for municipal housing, and that’s why native Brits can’t afford to live in London. Their homes are being taken over by people who can afford the high rents or by people who are willing to squeeze into shoe-box-size flats, like the burned-out Grenfell Tower. In both cases the tenants aren’t likely to be English, while the landlords are very likely to hate Jeremy Corbyn.

Not all British landlords are Jews, far from it. But the Jews speak for them and support them. The majority of British Jews vote Conservative, and over 70 Conservative MPs are landlords. They are proud that Jewish voters stopped Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister against the wishes of the British people.

Corbyn belongs to the traditional Labour of the 1970s. In those days I also lived in London, working for the BBC. London and England influenced me a lot. My favourite writer is Wodehouse, not Dostoyevsky. My favourite river is the Thames, not the Volga or the Jordan. I remember England of the Labour days with great nostalgia. The wonderful city full of life was affordable even for a young journalist. I and my wife could (and did) buy an apartment of a decent size in Kensington, and paid a very reasonable mortgage. The housing was affordable because the Labour gave priority to the tenants, not to the landlords. The homeless (or just the adventurous) squatted in luxury properties of foreign millionaires that anyway stood empty. Landlords could not evict their tenants at will or raise the rent freely, and they sold their properties to their tenants. ‘Landlord’ was not a good vocation in Labour England. Owners-occupiers became the biggest group of London dwellers.

In those glorious days, financiers were severely taxed, while coal miners were subsidised. That was before the wicked witch Margaret Thatcher closed the mines and turned workers’ Britain into a financiers’ paradise, before they invented Global Warming to kill coal. And that is the England Jeremy Corbyn wants to return to. That is why British Jews hate him so passionately.

The Jews wouldn’t be Jews if they were to support just one party. They support them all and turn them into look-alikes. They supported Labour, and Labour became Conservative Lite, all for bankers and against workers. They supported Conservatives, and they dropped their conservative ideas, embraced the Jews and the PC, and brought foreigners from the Third World and from East Europe in droves. And now comes Corbyn, reinventing Labour as it was and ruining all their efforts to gentrify the party.

Corbyn’s Labour didn’t win outright at the polls, but chances are good that he will – perhaps within one year. Jewish columnists like Nick Cohen (a disclosure: he attacked me for my collaboration with Julian Assange and Wikileaks) may eat their hats: they predicted Corbyn would fail miserably, but it was they who failed.

I’ll give you an additional example of the PC collapse that is taking place in Europe.

In Sweden, a wonderful country hit by extreme, almost suicidal self-abnegation, there is the issue of “unaccompanied minor refugees”. These are usually young male Afghanis or Syrians who arrive in Sweden and claim they are unaccompanied minors. They are accepted and provided with all modest comforts. Even if they commit a crime, they are treated leniently, as minors. They often look like young men in their twenties, or even thirties. True, it could be hard to determine the age of a person of a different background, and the Easterners look older than Northerners. Usually these “children” lack reliable documents. Until now, it was considered a hate crime to doubt they are what they say they are. When a journalist wrote they were in their middle twenties, he was branded by a Nazi stigma and lost his job. Reputable journalists in reputable papers referred to the common feeling on their age as an “urban legend”.

However, there has been a big shift in attitudes. The Swedish Democrats, the far right nationalist party, a Swedish twin of French FN, became, according to the recent polls, the second biggest party in the country. And the liberals understood that their ideas can’t be outlawed and marginalized, that they do not scare people anymore by a Nazi comparison, people do not buy it anymore.

They did a full paradigm shift. The leading liberal newspaper, the same one that stigmatised its opponents as Nazis, published an editorial saying that the accompanied children are not children at all. 80 to 85 per cent are over twenty. It is not an urban legend, as they said previously, but reality. And they proposed to eliminate the category of children refugees by declaration. If one wants to be considered a child, he or she should submit to medical examination. This demand has been considered a Nazi demand; a good person was supposed to believe what the boys were saying. And now it changed. A good person may trust his own eyes, and send the boy to a doctor to have his age determined. So the struggle against people who are used by the world government strategists keen on population replacement bore fruit.

Does it mean that the Swedish Democrats are likely to win the elections? I doubt it, for they have no answers to other questions beside immigration. Should Sweden stay in the EU, or leave? Should Swedish workers get security of their jobs, or they will continue to work under easily revoked contracts? They have no answer, and thus it is hard to believe they will win. But anyway they did a good job by undermining PC and allowing the free exchange of ideas.

You can trick some people etc, but you can’t trick all the people forever. The great Jewish invention called PC and their media do not impress anymore.

If that is so, why, will you ask me, did the opposition not win in France? It is because the far right, or the alt-right, the FN has some good ideas, but it is not fighting for real issues: austerity, salaries, dwellings, job security. It is good to be against immigration, but it is not the most urgent question people want to answer. Corbyn promised to turn temporary jobs into permanent, while Marine Le Pen did not.

The US is very different. Though your young people are also working under short term contracts and can be fired at five minutes notice, though you have to pay thousands of dollars for schooling and medical help, you are used to it and consider it natural. You have never had social democracy, your trade unions are non-existent. In your view, the leftists are those who stand by Jews and blacks, not for you. A true leftist, one who fights for the workers, would probably end up being lynched as a Commie.

Anyway, be aware that all over the world there is a new wind blowing, a wind of change. You may consider it a sort of return to 1970s, after many years of CIA-bred neoliberalism. As the US had always been different from Europe, your way forward will also be different.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

This article was first published at The Unz Review.

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