Ahava, Camera, Action.

"Why are we boycotting an Italian shoe shop?"

It was freezing outside Ahava in Covent Garden today but, dare I say it, I almost felt sorry for the anti-Zionist mob who come here every other Saturday to leaflet passers-by to boycott the shop.

The problem for the anti-Zionists was that the pro-Israel lot had stolen their usual pen right outside Ahava, so it looked, for all intents and purposes, like they were boycotting the neighbouring Italian shoe shop! Desastre!

The pro-Israel lot were also lifted by the sight of Phillip, who had travelled down from Wales, as usual, for the pro-Israel counter-protest.

As it happens Ahava seemed to be doing a good trade. I saw one guy ask a policeman what the protests were about and when the policeman pointed to Ahava, the guy actually went in to the shop.

This is dangerous when accosted by a beautiful sales-woman on commission but he managed not to succumb and, sadly, came away empty handed. Although, I feel he will be back.

Meanwhile, the anti-Zionists are petitioning for Professional Beauty to withdraw Ahava from their exhibition at Excel on 27 and 28 February so please email:

info@totalbeautyshow.com

and tell them about the lies spread by those that hate Israel.

Oh, and here are some pics. from today:

Proud and undaunted.

Anti-Zionists setting up.

More anti-Zionists turn up.

We just want peace...as long as it involves the end of Israel.

Safety in numbers.

Anti-Zionist photographer taking a break from his camera duties.

Martin keeps the flag flying.

Cold but determined.

This is not a laughing matter!

"I thought we were supposed to be boycotting Ahava."

Where's Ahava gone, where's Ahava gone!

Cheer up, you could be living under Hamas.

"look, what's wrong with the one state solution?"

The good old British bobby keeping me safe.

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Cameron needs to take stock about Islamic fundamentalism

Cameron (L.) meeting Erdogan (Sky News)

Now we know. David Cameron is not a Zionist, although he once proclaimed that he was.

To be a Zionist is not only to believe in the right for Israel to exist as a Jewish state but also in its right to defend itself properly.

While Cameron recognises that it is right for British soldiers to fight the Afghanistan Taliban he does not seem to accord the same right to Israeli soldiers when fighting Islamist elements.

In his meeting with Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey he spoke of Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara as being “totally unacceptable” and referred to Gaza as being a prison camp.

This meeting came one day after the report from Wikileaks that details not only the brutality of the Taliban towards the innocent Afghani population but also the many civilian casualties among the Afghani population caused by NATO troops.

The Wikileaks report is the basis for the investigation of war crimes on a huge scale. But while Israel has been investigated for war crimes in Gaza and found guilty it is unlikely that NATO countries will be similarly investigated and found guilty for the many civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

The Wikileaks report also details NATO’s targeted assassinations of Taliban leaders either by drones operated from the Nevada desert or by secret “kill-or-capture squads”. But when Israel allegedly does the same there is worldwide condemnation followed by the expulsion of Israeli diplomats. The feeble excuse given being that British or Australian passports had been misused.

More depressingly Cameron called for Turkey’s accession to the EU. This would allow possibly hundreds of thousands of Islamists access to the UK.

Before he became Prime Minister Cameron promised to crack down on Muslim fundamentalism in the UK and especially at our universities. This included the banning of the Islamist group Hiz but-Tahrir.

But Turkey’s accession to the EU would make the kind of occurrence that took place in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish suburb of North-West London, last Monday more ubiquitous.

Two youths on bikes approached a car with Jewish kippah-wearing teenagers in it. They yelled Alluah Akbar (G-d is Great) at the Jewish teenagers, who got out to remonstrate. The Jewish teenagers were then chased through Golders Green.

One of the youths, who was black, went to grab a bottle of drink from a shop and smashed it over the head of one of the Jewish teenagers. Blood poured from the wound.

Then the other youth cried “Algeria, Algeria F*ck the Jews” before both youths cycled off at speed.

The Jewish teenager was taken to hospital to have his wound and arm tended to.

This support for Turkey’s accession under Erdogan’s Islamist AK party does not accord with Cameron’s desire to crack down on Muslim fundamentalism in the UK. It would surely be better to wait till after next year’s general election in Turkey when the opposition secular party, CHP, might well take power. Even then it would be difficult to keep tabs on Turkish Islamists. EU regulations would allow Turkish citizens take up residence in the UK.

And while Cameron may still seek to crack down on Muslim fundamentalism in the UK, although there is no sign of that so far, other mainstream organisations have no such agenda.

On the BBC there was a recent televised debate about Afghanistan: Are British soldiers are dying in vain?

One of the panellists was from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) who agreed with the motion. The potential disastrous effects of British troops withdrawing from Afganistan seemed totally irrelevant to him including the dreadful oppression of women and homosexuals that would follow.

MPAC is itself a nasty organisation. It gets heavily involved in British general election and labels MPs as “Zionists” if they are in the least supportive of Israel. In 2005 it claimed one MP was Jewish when she wasn’t and she duly lost her seat.

MPAC recently ran a poll asking whether Israel should be moved to America. Farcical stuff but this is who the BBC thinks reflects the views of the British Muslim community, sadly. There are other more mainstream Muslim organisations like the Quilliam Foundation who hardly get a look in such debates.

It is to be seen whether Cameron’s speech in support of Turkey marks an Obama-esque change of attitude to Israel from the previous far more favourable Blair and Brown administrations.

After mocking him pre-election Cameron has now become close friends with Nick Clegg, his deputy Prime-Minister in the Con-Lib coalition. And we know that Clegg doesn’t seem to care about Israel’s security in the slightest after he called for a ban on the sale of weapons to Israel.

Cameron needs to take stock and reflect on his pre-election promises. If he doesn’t then what took place in Golders Green could become more common.

Saturday in London; No place for a Zionist

London, today, was not a place for a good Zionist boy, or girl for that matter, to be out and about in.

The usual anti-Israel protest outside Ahava was to be followed by a march of 50,000 from Downing Street to the Israeli Embassy (only around 2,000 turned up, although the organisers will claim 50,000).

As for the anti-Israel throng outside Ahava, the protesters were there for an hour and some scuffles broke out as the protesters insisted on standing near the entrance and harassing shoppers repeatedly with cries of “shame on you” as they came out with Ahava products. One woman was separated from her husband as they each tried to escape the insults thrown at them

Ahava’s manager was also harassed with cries of “shame” when she came out of the shop to try to have the protesters moved away from the shop front (I won’t upload footage of these incidents out of respect for the manager and the shoppers concerned).

The protesters’ songs alternated between “Israeli mud, Palestinian blood” and “From the River to the see, Palestine will be free”, which exposes the lie that they are only interested in the so-called “illegal” settlements.

Their real aim is for the Jewish state to disappear.

They had to cut short this protest after an hour to head to Downing Street for the main event.

The pro-Israel activists would have followed but there was genuine concern about raising the Israeli flag there, some would call it suicide, especially as we now know that some so-called “peace activists” carry knives and fire bombs with them, judging by the weapons haul on the Mavi Marmara.

But what has Britain come to when people cannot go for a simple shop without being harassed and abused or where people are now scared to carry out the perfectly legal and democratic act of raising another country’s flag in the public sphere?

UNSCR 242 implies the settlements are legal. Next!

More from wednesday night’s pro-Israel demo.

War on Want’s War on Israel

Protesting in Waitrose all courtesy of War on Want

Warning; if you give to BBC’s Comic Relief, please turn away now as you may find the following disturbing.

War on Want is a registered charity that claims it’s in the front line in the struggle against global poverty and injustice. It has seven main campaigns one of which is the “humanitarian crisis in Palestine”.

But WOW’s description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the most biased spin possible. There is not a single mention of Palestinian acts that have left thousands of innocent Israeli civilians dead and disabled.

And I recently visited War on Want’s offices after seeing this public announcement:

War on Want’s Supermarket Action – to stop the sale of settlement goods. When? 6pm sharp! Where? Meet at War on Want’s offices for a full briefing. Then head to a nearby supermarket. 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Nearest tube Old Street.

When I arrived at the building I was directed up to War on Want’s fourth floor offices where another briefing was about to start for those who had missed the first.

About 30 of us heard how we were going to be divided up into four groups. Some of us were to distribute anti-Israel leaflets outside the Barbican’s Waitrose while the others would actually go in and drop the Israeli produce into trolleys and bring the full trolleys to customer services where there would then be a sit-down protest.

Under our coats we would wear the green “Free Palestine” T-shirts handed out to us in the office.

“We are not expecting any kind of aggression towards us but there is always that possibility. If the police do show up we will leave automatically. We will stand up in an orderly fashion and walk out chanting ‘Free Free Palestine’ and we will continue the demonstration outside,” we were told.

We were also introduced to a cameraman and a photographer.

But by then fingers were pointing and I was outed as a “Zionist”.

As I made to leave I was followed down the four flights of stairs by said cameraman and questioned by John Hilary, I believe, WOW’s Chief Exective:

“Who are you from? Why have you come to this place, it wasn’t an open invitation. Just tell me who you are. Who are you?” he kept on while in hot pursuit.

I immediately went to the Waitrose store and told the manager of the imminent invasion. He was grateful but eventually unable to distinguish protesters from normal shoppers.

In the youtube video* of the invasion below John Hilary gives a speech and then presents the manager of Waitrose with a letter having been told that the police had been called.

WOW receives funding from the European Commission and the Department of International Development but in the last six years it has also received £1,687,918 from Comic Relief.

It is of no public concern what private donors give directly to a charity, as many do to War on Want, but it is of great concern when publicly donated funds, that people hope are going to help sick and starving children, are going to a charity that embraces immature supermarket games.

How much of Comic Relief’s money might be helping to finance the aforementioned T-shirts, office space, cameramen and photographers?

Are such student pranks really be an allowable objective for a charity like War on Want?

And why can valuable Metropolitan Police time be wasted so unnecessarily by a charity?

We have had the bankers and the politicians, maybe it’s about time the behaviour of our charities is also questioned and investigated.

*Comments posted to youtube underneath this War On Want video include:

ShaktipatSeer: Stick it to those fascist jews!!

AetherWisp: Did that include all the food we pay a Jewish tax on?

The clip is also on the War on Want website.

MPAC, the General Election and British Jews

With the gun for the general election having been fired British Jews are expecting open season on them and on Israel.

Even before the announcement of the May 6th election, which is expected to be close and could result in a hung Parliament with the highly anti-Israel Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power between Labour and the Conservatives, the attacks have been vicious. Recent accusations of Jewish political financing and Israel pulling the strings behind the electoral scenes have been hitting the headlines.

Martin Linton, a Labour MP, recently gave a talk in Parliament to the Friends of Al Aqsa and spoke of Israel’s “long tentacles” that fund British election campaigns and which try to buy a Conservative victory. Linton said that he failed to appreciate the Nazi symbolism of the Jewish octopus controlling the world with its tentacles and he apologised but he stands by his thesis of Israelis and pro-Israelis trying to buy a Conservative win.

At the same meeting Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish Labour MP, spoke of Lord Ashcroft owning part of the Conservative Party and right-wing Jewish millionaires owning the other part.

These are, of course, unfounded and defamatory accusations that paint many British Jews as being Fifth Columnists dedicated to another country only, Israel.

Then there is the election literature that has been doing the rounds. The Liberal Democrats are expert at manipulating the religious and ethnic sympathies of the voting public. They have already called for a ban on the sale of arms to Israel. Woe betide Israel if a hung Parliament results in Nick Clegg as Foreign Secretary as a quid pro quo for the Liberal Democrats supporting either Gordon Brown or David Cameron if neither wins a majority on May 6th.

In London there are two neighbouring constituencies where the policy of Liberal Democrats towards Israel depends wholly on the ethnic and religious make-up of the voters. In Holborn and St. Pancras, with its disproportionately high Bangladeshi community, the leaflets of the Liberal Democrat candidate scream “Stop Arming Israel”.

But in Hampstead and Kilburn, where the voters are disproportionately Jewish, the leaflets are pro-Israel with pictures of the Liberal Democrat candidate’s recent visit to Israel and there is even Hebrew writing included. Mezuzahs are very useful in determining whether to push said leaflet through a door or not.

MPAC: “Get out the Muslim vote II”

There is also the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which is sure to have a big say in some constituencies on who gets elected or not. A page on the MPAC website asks “is your MP a Zionist?” and then goes on to list those MPs and candidates that it deems to be so. You don’t have to be Jewish. The only qualification seems to be that you are affiliated to a Friends of Israel group of one of the three main political parties.

The current list contains 36 names. In 2005 Lorna Fitzsimons, now head of British Israel Communications and Research Centre, lost her seat as a Labour MP partly because of MPAC. The 2006 Report of the All Parliamentary Committee into anti-Semitism found that MPAC, in order to help unseat Fitzsimons, distributed leaflets stating “she had done nothing to help the Palestinians because she was a Jewish member of the Labour Friends of Israel”. Lorna Fitzsimons is not Jewish.

The media will play its role. The Independent has committed anti-Israel writers like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Johan Hari and Robert Fisk and the Guardian’s Comment is Free section is replete with anti-Israel polemic. A recent Guardian editorial on the Dubai passports affair and Israel’s building in east Jerusalem spoke of Israel as “an arrogant nation that has overeached itself”. This seems to be an implicit attack not on Israel specifically but on Jews generally.

But with four weeks to go until election day we can expect Jewish and Muslim sensitivities to be manipulated to the full in order to propel a political candidate into Parliament, or to reduce their chances.

So who will you be voting for and why?

Galloway and Tamimi team up at QMUL

Tonight there was a two for one offer on as Queen Mary, University of London’s Palestine Society held its inaugural meeting where about 300 students heard George Galloway and Azzam Tamimi speak. Tamimi is notorious for condoning suicide bombers inside Israel.

This was Mile End, the heart of George Galloway’s parliamentary constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, and so it was a good opportunity for the Respect Party’s parliamentary candidate to make an appearance.

Abjol Miah’s leaflet screams, “I am Bethnal Green and Bow to the Core” before stating on the back “Justice for Palestine”.

Incidentally, George will be the Respect Party’s parliamentary candidate in the neighbouring constituency of Poplar and Limehouse on May 6th, where the Labour majority is just 3,942.

But I am just recovering after a bit of nastiness I was unlucky enough to get involved in. On my way home I passed George outside the college telling some students how Israel’s attack on Iran is getting very close now.

I politely asked him about the Hamas Charter’s reference to killing Jews to which he replied that he doubts it says that. His constant refrain is that as Hamas was democratically elected it should be allowed to govern. All well and good until you read Article 8 of said Charter:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

I then asked him about the Egyptian border guard shot dead by a Hamas sniper when the Viva Palestina convoy was trying to enter Gaza last month. At that point his heavies stepped in and repeatedly demanded to know my name while also accusing me of trespassing and recording the conversation surreptitiously.

This allowed George to slip away and drive off. In all fairness to George he was actually willing to stand and engage with me but inexplicably his heavies intervened and the situation was getting a bit fractious to say the least.

At the event proper we heard initially from Bellavia Ribeiro-Addy, the NUS Black Students’ Officer. She mentioned the Black Students’ Union pro-Palestine policy and condemned the President of the NUS for both visiting Israel and saying that the majority of students were actually pro-Israel. He is now facing a motion of no-confidence at the next NUS executive meeting.

Next was Azam Tamimi. He congratulated QMUL for going ahead with the meeting after “they had tried to stop me speaking at Cambridge, Manchester, SOAS and Birmingham which shows Israel is losing the war”. He said he is “more semite than any Jew in the world”.

He said that supporters of Israel are ignorant and brainwashed and cited the film Defamation which “shows how Jews are brainwashed into believing they are under threat and that Israel is their protector and therefore they have to defend Israel no matter what”.

Read my lips: "I don't have a problem with the Jews"

He criticised the reporting of his speech at SOAS and told those who had “twisted” his words to listen carefully: “I have no problem with the Jews, I only have a problem with the Zionists”. (What I don’t get is that he opened his speech condemning the Zionists who had come from Europe to escape the Holocaust. Bearing in mind that they were all Jewish it doesn’t follow logically that he doesn’t have a problem with Jews).

He said Hamas is the true representative of the Palestinian people and that the only solution was for “the Israelis to apologise to the Palestinians for all the injustice they have caused them and to ask for a new chapter to begin. Only then would we agree. The Jews have never suffered in Muslim lands, only in Europe and Europe threw them out and sent them to us”.

QMUL students hanging on Tamimi's every word

Finally, George spoke. He started by addressing those of “ill will” who might be present and said they “can email as much as they like and complain to OFCOM, the Charity Commission and the police but if you kill us our sons will pick up the banner”.

“The idea of the liberation of Palestine is unstoppable and non-negotiable. Its time has come and it is an idea that is going to win, be sure about that. Palestine will be free and the Palestinian people will return to their homes.”

“The government of what they call Israel will in the end be defeated. The essence of their ideology is apartheid. It is an insult that the Palestinians are called the terrorists when it is the Zionists who are the terrorists.”

He said anti-Semitism is only a European Christian phenomenon and while the Holocaust was the biggest crime in history the Palestinians are paying the price for it.

He finished off by claiming that the leaders of Britain and America, including George W. Bush, hated the Jews.

During the Q&A a student said that “the biggest crime in history was not the Holocaust as that had only gone on for four years. The biggest crime was against the Palestinians as that has been going on for 60 years”.

That just about summed up the level of discourse tonight.

Holocaust Denial Day down at Westminster

27th January is the day the death camp, Auschwitz, in southern Poland, was liberated. So the 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day worldwide, excepting, now, the British Parliament.

There are ways to criticise Israel but using Holocaust Memorial Day is not one of them.

Out of all the Holocaust survivors worldwide the shameless pro-Palestine campaign located one who inexplicably hates Israel, and everything it stands for, to the core. His name is Hajo Meyer.

Born in Germany in 1924 Meyer survived 10 months in Auschwitz. Now he tours internationally speaking out against Israel and Zionism, the same Israel which if it had been created soon after the Balfour Declaration 0f 1917, and not 31 years later, would have meant he would not have seen his family and friends gassed to death.

Meyer (centre), Corbyn (left)

So how can a human being like this speak out against what would have saved so many lives?

It is inconceivable, surely, that a man who has witnessed so much death and cruelty can criticise a notion that would have stopped all that suffering.

The pro-Palestinian campaign can have sympathy for the people of Gaza without equating Gaza to Auschwitz. But this equation is nothing more than implied Holocaust denial.

1400 Palestinians, some say much less, died during Operation Cast Lead. 1,500,000 died in Auschwitz. There are no gas chambers in Gaza.

But that is of no concern to pro-Palestine campaign Holocaust deniers.

Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism is on the increase. Yesterday, I had a Palestinian taxi driver who told me he doubted the figure of 6,000,000 dead Jews. He went on tell me how the Jews never integrate in the country they live in and how they all moved to the Middle East from Europe just to control the region.

It was a 30 minute tirade specifically against Jews (not Zionists or Israelis).

Totally ashamed, I had to agree with everything he said. I thought about questioning him but I realised that first, it was a lost cause, and second, he was dropping me home and might see the mezuza on my front door!

But back to Holocaust Denial Day at Parliament. Jonathan Hoffman sums up the gist of Meyer’s talk thus:

“Jewish victims in central Europe had hardly any sympathy for Israel; Zionists picked and chose the best ones to escape to Palestine; Zionists had no sympathy for holocaust victims, they referred to them as “pieces of unusable material”.

Whoever has ever picked up a book about Zionism will know that Zionism was about saving every Jew from discrimination, not seeing fellow Jews as “unusable material”.

After Meyer we had a speech from Haidar Eid via telephone from Gaza who spoke about the “genocidal campaign” of the Israelis against the people of Gaza. There was no mention of the Egyptians who are also building a wall on their side of Gaza to keep Hamas out of Egypt.

In the meantime five pro-Israel supporters had been evicted from the room by the police at the behest of Jeremy Corbyn MP, who had sponsored the event, for making a stand against the despicable speech of Meyer. Here we were in Parliament listening to a speech that paints as total evil anyone that is a supporter of Israel. They were given no platform and had to make their voices heard and anger felt.

Meyer’s biased rhetoric can only darken the view that people have of Israel and people like me, who support Israel and its right to exist. This propaganda is exactly the same type that my taxi driver was brought up on.

To end the meeting the pro-Palestine campaign tried to make itself look reasonable by inviting various other people to speak about their own causes. Armenia, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Ireland and Africa were spoken about but the speakers were allocated a mere two minutes.

The representative of Armenia spoke about the child genocide that was taking place every day in Africa; 3,000 children die each day there. This is surely more important than Gaza but then African children do not walk into cafes and blow themselves up killing innocent people like Hamas do.

27th January 2010 can now be remembered as Holocaust Denial Day in our Parliament.