[This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]

Since I arrived with my family in the UK last summer, I have been repeatedly asked: “Why choose Bristol as your new home?”

Well, it certainly wasn’t for the weather. Now more than ever I miss Nazareth’s warmth and sunshine.

It wasn’t for the food either.

My family do have a minor connection to Bristol. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side (one from Cornwall, the other from South Wales) apparently met in Bristol – a coincidental stopping point on their separate journeys to London. They married and started a family whose line led to me.

But that distant link wasn’t the reason for coming to Bristol either.

In fact, it was only in Nazareth that Bristol began occupying a more prominent place in my family’s life.

When I was not doing journalism, I spent many years leading political tours of the Galilee, while my wife, Sally, hosted and fed many of the participants in her cultural café in Nazareth, called Liwan.

It was soon clear that a disproportionate number of our guests hailed from Bristol and the south-west. Some of you here tonight may have been among them.

But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with them about Palestine, Bristol began to reach out to me.

Toppled statue

It did so just as Sally and I were beginning discussions about whether it was time to leave Nazareth – 20 years after I had arrived – and head to the UK.

Even from thousands of miles away, a momentous event – the sound of Edward Colston’s statue being toppled – reverberated loudly with me.

My latest: Tearing down statues to slave traders isn't rule by the mob. It was only through defiance and disobedience that ordinary people won the freedoms and progress we enjoy today https://t.co/fl50HOUvrv pic.twitter.com/1Ac8PHlE8E

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 10, 2020

Ordinary people had decided they were no longer willing to be forced to venerate a slave trader, one of the most conspicious criminals of Britain’s colonial past. Even if briefly, the people of Bristol took back control of their city’s public space for themselves, and for humanity.

In doing so, they firmly thrust Britain’s sordid past – the unexamined background to most of our lives – into the light of day. It is because of their defiance that buildings and institutions that for centuries bore Colston’s name as a badge of honour are finally being forced to confront that past and make amends.

Bath, of course, was built no less on the profits of the slave trade. When visitors come to Bath simply to admire its grand Georgian architecture, its Royal Crescent, we assent – if only through ignorance – to the crimes that paid for all that splendour.

Weeks after the Colston statue was toppled, Bristol made headlines again. Crowds protested efforts to transfer yet more powers to the police to curb our already savagely diminished right to protest – the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Bristol made more noise against that bill than possibly anywhere else in the UK.

I ended up writing about both events from Nazareth.

My latest: Politicians and the police must not be left to define which protests are justified, which safe, which responsible. Because otherwise, they will define any protest against their corruption and incompetence as a threat to public health https://t.co/1fzpsOyGY8

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 23, 2021

Blind to history

Since my arrival, old and new friends alike have started to educate me about Bristol. Early on I attended a slavery tour in the city centre – one that connected those historic crimes with the current troubles faced by asylum seekers in Bristol, even as Bristol lays claim to the title of “city of sanctuary”.

For once I was being guided rather than the guide, the pupil rather than the teacher – so long my role on those tours in and around Nazareth. And I could not but help notice, as we wandered through Bristol’s streets, echoes of my own tours.

Over the years I have taken many hundeds of groups around the ruins of Saffuriya, one of the largest of the Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in its ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, the Nakba or Catastrophe.

What disturbed me most in Saffuriya was how blind its new inhabitants were to the very recent history of the place they call home.

New Jewish immigrants were moved on to the lands of Saffuriya weeks after the Israeli army destroyed the village and chased out the native Palestinian population at gunpoint. A new community built in its place was given a similar Hebrew name, Tzipori. These events were repeated across historic Palestine. Hundreds of villages were razed, and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population were expelled from what became the new state of Israel.

Troubling clues

Even today, evidence of the crimes committed in the name of these newcomers is visible everywhere. The hillsides are littered with the rubble of the hundreds of Palestinian homes that were levelled by the new Israeli army to stop their residents from returning. And there are neglected grave-stones all around – pointers to the community that was disappeared.

And yet almost no one in Jewish Tzipori asks questions about the remnants of Palestinian Saffuriya, about these clues to a troubling past. Brainwashed by reassuring state narratives, they have averted their gaze for fear of what might become visible if they looked any closer.

Tzipori’s residents never ask why there are only Jews like themselves allowed in their community, when half of the population in the surrounding area of the Galilee are Palestinian by heritage.

Instead, the people of Tzipori misleadingly refer to their Palestinian neighbours – forced to live apart from them as second and third-class citizens of a self-declared Jewish state – as “Israeli Arabs”. The purpose is to obscure, both to themselves and the outside world, the connection of these so-called Arabs to the Palestinian people.

To acknowledge the crimes Tzipori has inflicted on Saffuriya would also be to acknowledge a bigger story: of the crimes inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people as a whole.

My latest: For 16 years I have been documenting Israel's treatment of its Palestinian citizens – 20% of the population. Here I explain in detail why Israel should be called an apartheid state https://t.co/IFuqm82B0w pic.twitter.com/tkY5T44uQp

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 18, 2018

Shroud of silence

Most of us in Britain do something very similar.

In young Israel, Jews still venerate the criminals of their recent past because they and their loved ones are so intimately and freshly implicated in the crimes.

In Britain, with its much longer colonial past, the same result is often achieved not, as in Israel, through open cheerleading and glorification – though there is some of that too – but chiefly through a complicit silence. Colston surveyed his city from up on his plinth. He stood above us, superior, paternal, authoritative. His crimes did not need denying because they had been effectively shrouded in silence.

Until Colston was toppled, slavery for most Britons was entirely absent from the narrative of Britain’s past – it was something to do with racist plantation owners in the United States’ Deep South more than a century ago. It was an issue we thought about only when Hollywood raised it.

After the Colston statue came down, he became an exhibit – flat on his back – in Bristol’s harbourside museum, the M Shed. His black robes had been smeared with red paint, and scuffed and grazed from being dragged through the streets. He became a relic of the past, and one denied his grandeur. We were able to observe him variously with curiousity, contempt or amusement.

Those are far better responses than reverence or silence. But they are not enough. Because Colston isn’t just a relic. He is a living, breathing reminder that we are still complicit in colonial crimes, even if now they are invariably better disguised.

Nowadays, we usually interfere in the name of fiscal responsibility or humanitarianism, rather than the white man’s burden.

There is a discursive nervous tic all over social media at the moment, including from prominent journalists such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The demand is that everyone not only “condemn” Russian president Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, but do so without qualification.

Any reluctance to submit is considered certain proof that the person is a Putin apologist or a Kremlin bot, and that their views on everything under the sun – especially their criticisms of equivalent Western war crimes – can be safely ignored.

For years I've been arguing with a faction within the "anti-imperialist" left, that is neither anti-imperialist nor distinguishable in its foreign policy positions from the far right. It is pro-Putin. It recycles Kremlin propaganda and whitewashes atrocities.
Thread/

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) February 26, 2022

How convenient for all those Western leaders who have committed war crimes at least as bad as Russia’s current ones.

I have repeatedly described Russia’s invasion as illegal; I have regularly called Putin a war criminal (you may not have noticed but I just did it again in the two preceding paragraphs); and I have consistently compared Putin’s deeds to the very worst actions taken by the West over the past two decades. But none of that is enough. More is always needed.

The demand for unequivocal denunciation is a strange, if common, one and suggests that those insisting on it are being dishonest – if only with themselves. The function of the demand is not to clarify whether any particular piece of information or an argument is credible; it is intended purely as a “gotcha” meme.

Do you condemn Putin's invasion and support the Ukrainian government in its resistance to the attack? Will you support the Ukrainian people in their resistance to ethno-nationalist slaughter? If yes there's nothing to worry about – these are Labour's values…

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) February 28, 2022

I don’t remember an insistence that anyone condemn Tony Blair or George W. Bush for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 before they could be heard or taken seriously. Or that they denounce the US-backed overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that plunged that country into murderous chaos. Or that they deplore the West’s material support for Saudi Arabia’s slaughter of Yemen’s population, including Britain’s sale of planes, bombs and training to Riyadh. Or that they criticize the West’s backing of head-chopping jihadists in Syria (who coincidentally now appear to be drifting into Ukraine to become our allies again). Or that they decry decades of Western support for Israel as it has disappeared the Palestinian people.

Just to remind you Britain is still, today, supplying bombs, missiles, aircraft, operational support, training and special services to Saudi Arabia to continue years of mass murder of civilians in Yemen.

Every crime we deplore in Ukraine we enable in Yemen. https://t.co/b7j0cGjata

— Craig Murray – (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 8, 2022

And those are things for which we – meaning Westerners – are directly responsible. We elected the politicians who caused this unquantifiable suffering. Those bombs were ours. We ought to be clamoring for our leaders to be dragged to The Hague to be tried for war crimes.

By contrast, we – meaning Westerners – are not responsible for Putin or his actions. I cannot vote him out of office. Nothing I say will make him alter course. And worse, anything I do say against him or Russia simply amplifies the mindless chorus of self-righteous Western commentary intended to cast stones at Russia’s warmongers while leaving our own home-grown warmongers in place.

Russian protesters being arrested aren't with you, those among us tub-thumping for a European war against a nuclear-armed Russia.

*They* are against their government's militarism and recklessness. *You*, by contrast, are cheerleading your governments' militarism and recklessness

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 3, 2022

Westerners denouncing Putin won’t make compromise and peace more likely. It will make it less likely. Russians need to be highlighting Putin’s crimes as best they can to drive him to the negotiating table, while we need to be doing the same to our leaders to push them to the same table. As long as our attention is on Putin and his crimes, it is not on our leaders and their crimes.

Fog of war

Those who insist it is quite possible to denounce both Putin and Western leaders at the same time are precisely the people who have been so half-hearted in holding our own leaders to account.

Monbiot, let us note, has not used a single one of his weekly columns at The Guardian to highlight the years-long plight of Julian Assange, locked away in a British dungeon for revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the gravest attack on a free press in living memory, and yet Monbiot used his most recent column to attack Assange supporters, such as veteran journalist John Pilger, for not being voluble enough in denouncing Putin.

Monbiot has never written a column on the worst assault on press freedom in a generation: the political persecution of Julian Assange. Soil erosion, he said, took precedence. Now he's prioritised a witchhunt of left heretics on Ukraine over Assange's freedom. He's an utter fraud pic.twitter.com/OtJ7pTE6gx

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 2, 2022

Those who require unequivocal condemnation of Putin insist that now – in the midst of a war – is not the time to be sowing doubt or undermining morale in the rightness of “our” cause. (A small giveaway that they think of this as a Western, not Ukrainian, war with Russia.)

Again conveniently, that is precisely the message Western leaders want to send too – just ask Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, whose “partygate” scandal is now a distant memory as he seeks to evoke Churchillian gravitas in facing off with Russia. Instead, the parties in the British parliament put aside their very superficial differences this week as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, rallied them with a “historic address.”

What, really, is the point of demanding Westerners denounce Putin unequivocally when the entire Western media and political class is directing our gaze exclusively at Russia’s crimes precisely so Westerners don’t look at equivalent Western crimes?

And it continues… Israel has repeatedly bombed hospitals in Gaza, including children's hospitals. Have our media ever run a front-page story accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians? Of course not! pic.twitter.com/sm4QSstJYg

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 10, 2022

The truth is that, in power politics, unequivocal denunciations are for politicians and diplomats – and virtue-signalers. Condemnations may be emotionally satisfying, but the rest of us can put our energies to far better use.

For most of us, the better course would be to blow away the immediate fog of war and instead analyze our – meaning the West’s – role in the unfolding events.

If you're in the west, your first priority probably shouldn't be lobbying for more western arms to be sent into an already heavily militarised war zone. It should be disrupting western propaganda narratives. Before you can see, you have to clear away the fog

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 4, 2022

NATO insurance policy

Even a cursory glance shows that the West’s hands are not clean in Ukraine. Not at all. The meddling – and hypocrisy – have occurred in two stages, first from politicians and then from the media.

@ggreenwald @aaronjmate @Jonathan_K_Cook @CraigMurrayOrg
Biden in 1997 saying that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states pic.twitter.com/GgcaVrwtRv

— Connü (@Conn18149866) March 8, 2022

It was the choices made by Western politicians that provoked the invasion. (What’s coming next is an explanation, not a justification, of those developments, for those who need such things spelled out clearly).

Russian troops are in Ukraine not because Putin is “Hitler,” “mad,” or a “megalomaniac” – though, again, the invasion makes him a war criminal in the same mold as Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Russian troops are there because he and his officials judged the West to be acting malevolently and in bad faith in their dealings with Ukraine.

The Putin as “madman” or “Hitler” script deflects attention away from the very obvious fact that Western leaders wilfully played fast and loose with the security of Ukraine and the safety of its population.

My latest: Simple-minded media propaganda – like the claim that Russia’s Putin is deranged – is precisely what brought us to the current crisis over Ukraine https://t.co/QW0pbEq44G

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 28, 2022

The West encouraged Ukrainians to believe that they would soon fall under NATO’s security umbrella, when in fact the West had no intention of protecting them, as is now only too evident. Ukrainians were led to believe that the more Russia’s posture turned belligerent towards Ukraine the more likely NATO would be to come to Ukraine’s rescue and act as its savior.

Which, of course, incentivized the Ukrainian government to keep poking the Russian bear in the expectation that Kyiv would have a NATO insurance policy up its sleeve. It didn’t. It never did, as current events show.

Prof John Mearsheimer explains why Russia was right to view Nato's actions since 2014 in Ukraine as an 'existential threat'. A clear, succinct backgrounder on a US-manufactured crisis (3-25mins) https://t.co/S4Wrzd5lad

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 1, 2022

Divide and rule, the cultivation of tribalism, is an insurance policy against successful dissent and the threat of revolution

If you were Canada’s prime minister, what would you be prepared to do to enforce Covid restrictions on large swaths of your population? No one need ask that question any longer. Now we know the answer.

For the first time in the country’s history, Justin Trudeau has invested his office with sweeping and undemocratic powers under the 1988 Emergencies Act in a bid to stop the so-called “Truckers’ Protests” against Canada’s pandemic restrictions. But, as one might expect, Trudeau has promised to use those powers briefly and sparingly – at least, until he decides otherwise.

His government can ban protests, seize protesters’ income and property without court oversight, and effectively appropriate many millions of dollars raised by supporters on crowdfunding sites to finance the protests. That isn’t a theoretical danger. Even before the current emergency powers were invoked, the Canadian government did just that. Almost certainly under federal pressure earlier in the month, GoFundMe withheld some 10 million Canadian dollars donated by protest supporters.

Trudeau has brought Canada as close to martial law as he dares without drafting platoons of soldiers on to the streets of Ottawa and Toronto and having the army seize control of the TV stations.

And paradoxically, he has responded to protesters, whose rallying cry is that the Canadian government is using the pretext of Covid to accrete more powers and behave undemocratically, by actually accreting more powers and behaving undemocratically. Trudeau acts as though this will dampen down tensions. Or maybe he is simply pandering to his electoral base.

A wiser approach has been taken by Ontario’s premier, who started lifting some of the largely redundant restrictions in his province this week as a way to take the wind out of the protesters’ sails.

Draconian measures

But let us stand back from Canada’s drama for a moment and consider both the purported and actual reason for the declaration of a state of emergency – a peacetime equivalent of Canada’s earlier War Measures Act.

The truckers’ protests have been largely peaceful – at least in the sense that there have been very few arrests and relatively minor criminal damage. The protesters have caused inconvenience but only of the kind that is inevitable in any civil disobedience campaign.

Emergency powers have been invoked because the protesters have refused to disperse and because officials warn of some future scenario of potential violence – exactly the sort of accusation leveled against any unwelcome mass protest.

However, the more pressing reason is that the truckers’ actions have impeded cross-border deliveries from Canada to US factories, such as car plants. That has started to have a damaging impact on the US economy, and President Joe Biden has been making his view on the matter only too clear to Trudeau.

It is worth considering a comparison to see how draconian and dangerously unreasonable Trudeau is being. Over several years, protests in the UK by the environmental action group Extinction Rebellion have repeatedly caused similar levels of disruption – and similar levels of antipathy from sections of the British public. Protesters have blocked highways, railway lines and airports. Some have been arrested and fined.

But despite all of this, even the right-wing government of Boris Johnson has not suggested going as far as Canada’s current state of emergency.

Pull the rug

To put the gravity of Trudeau’s decision – and the flimsiness of the justification for it – in proper perspective, consider what the Canadian prime minister needs to do to put an end to the truckers’ protests compared to what would be required of Johnson for Extinction Rebellion’s climate emergency protests to be brought to a halt.

Johnson would have to radically overhaul the entire British economy, quickly ending its reliance on fossil fuels, while abandoning his entire political ideology of individualist, dog-eat-dog capitalism and replacing it with the far more collectivist approach inherent in a Green New Deal. That is a tall order indeed. Should they spread, Extinction Rebellion’s protests really could become an emergency for Johnson.

Trudeau, on the other hand, could easily pull the rug from under the truckers’ protests – as Ontario officials are trying to do – with nothing more than a decision to relent on many of the most grating restrictions, especially mandated vaccines for some professions and the requirement on unvaccinated truckers to quarantine for 14 days on their return from the US.

That would not touch Trudeau’s political program. It would not cost the Canadian taxpayer a cent. It would not require a reorganization of Canadian society.

So why has he chosen this particular hill to make his stand?

Those who are still singularly focused on the dangers of Covid presumably think that Trudeau is right. But with the highly infectious and much milder omicron variant, hospitalization and death rates are plummeting worldwide, as the virus, after spreading like wildlife, starts to burn itself out.

Even if vaccine mandates are enforced, few of the unvaccinated will manage to get both doses before they are exposed to the virus and develop natural immunity anyway. Omicron has made the already dubious need for vaccine mandates and quarantines largely moot. The evidence suggests natural infection provides – for the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike – stronger and longer-term immunity of the kind the vaccines have so far failed to deliver.

Even the argument that vaccines should still be insisted upon in case omicron mutates into another nastier variant is looking decidedly weak. Infection with omicron will provide a much closer immunity match to any future variant derived from omicron than vaccines based on the now-distant original variant of Covid.

Veil of democracy

In other words, Trudeau has ostensibly chosen to grab for himself autocratic powers, undermining Canadian democracy, for the sake of a pig-headed commitment to mandate and quarantine rules that no longer fit the science or help with the pandemic. Rather than back down in the face of changing circumstances, he has invoked extreme powers to enforce those rules.

Remember, Trudeau considered, but did not invoke, the Emergencies Act when the pandemic – a genuine emergency – hit Canada at a time when the country had no tools, such as vaccines, to deal with it. Is the need to impose vaccine mandates now really more of an emergency than the need to deal with the outbreak of Covid was two years ago?

For that reason, we all ought to be deeply troubled by what Trudeau has done. He has shown how power works and whom it benefits by stripping off the veil of democracy. As a result, Canada is in a state of emergency entirely of Trudeau and Biden’s making.

‘Shock’ experiments

Those sympathetic to Trudeau’s action, or ready to turn a blind eye to it, especially on the left, have failed to absorb the lessons of Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine.”

“Why is Boris Johnson making false claims about Starmer and Savile?” runs a headline in the news pages of the Guardian. It is just one of a barrage of indignant recent stories in the British media, rushing to the defence of the opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

The reason? Last week the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, blamed Starmer, now the Labour party leader, for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a TV presenter and serial child abuser, when his case came under police review in 2009. Between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Savile died in 2011 before he could face justice.

Johnson accused Starmer, who at the time was Director of Public Prosecutions, of wasting “his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”.

The sudden chorus of outrage at Johnson impugning Starmer’s reputation is strange in many different ways. It is not as though Johnson has a record of good behaviour. His whole political persona is built on the idea of his being a rascal, a clown, a chancer.

He is also a well-documented liar. Few, least of all in the media, cared much about his pattern of lying until now. Indeed, most observers have long pointed out that his popularity was based on his mischief-making and his populist guise as an anti-establishment politician. No one, apart from his political opponents, seemed too bothered.

And it is also not as though there are not lots of other, more critically important things relating to Johnson to be far more enraged about, even before we consider his catastrophic handling of the pandemic, and his raiding of the public coffers to enrich his crony friends and party donors.

Jumping ship

Johnson is currently embroiled in the so-called “partygate” scandal. He attended – and his closest officials appear to have organised – several gatherings at his residence in Downing Street in 2020 and 2021 at a time when the rest of the country was under strict lockdown. For the first time the public mood has shifted against Johnson.

My latest: The media's watchdog role is an illusion. The current scandal over Boris Johnson's lockdown parties reveals just how dependent journalists are on government https://t.co/BxykcG3qfc

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 21, 2022

But it was Johnson’s criticisms of Starmer, not partygate, that led several of his senior advisers last week to resign their posts. One can at least suspect that in their case – given how quickly the Johnson brand is sinking, and the repercussions they may face from a police investigation into the partygate scandal – that finding an honorable pretext for jumping ship may have been the wisest move.

But there is something deeply strange about Johnson’s own Conservative MPs and the British media lining up to express their indignation at Johnson’s attack on Starmer, a not particularly liked or likable opposition leader, and then turning it into the reason to bring down a prime minister whose other flaws are only too visible.

What makes the situation even weirder is that Johnson’s so-called “smears” of Starmer may not actually be smears at all. They look like rare examples of Johnson alluding to – admittedly in his own clumsy and self-interested way – genuinely problematic behaviour by Starmer.

One would never know this from the coverage, of course.

Here is the Guardian supposedly fact-checking Johnson’s attack on Starmer under the apparently neutral question: “Is there any evidence that Starmer was involved in any decision not to prosecute Savile?”

The Guardian’s answer is decisive:

No. The CPS has confirmed that there is no reference to any involvement from Starmer in the decision-making within an official report examining the case.

Surrey police consulted the CPS for advice about the allegations after interviewing Savile’s victims, according to a 2013 CPS statement made by Starmer as DPP.

The official report, written by Alison Levitt QC, found that in October 2009 the CPS lawyer responsible for the cases – who was not Starmer – advised that no prosecution could be brought on the grounds that none of the complainants were ‘prepared to support any police action’.

That’s a pretty definite “No”, then. Not “No, according to Starmer”. Or “No, according to the CPS”. Or “No, according to an official report” – and doubtless a determinedly face-saving one at that – into the Savile scandal.

Just “No”.

Here is the Guardian’s political correspondent Peter Walker echoing how cut and dried the corporate media’s assessment is: “[Starmer] had no connection to decisions over the case, and the idea he did emerged later in conspiracy theories mainly shared among the far right.”

So it’s just a far-right conspiracy theory. Case against Starmer closed.

But not so fast.

Given Savile’s tight ties to the establishment – from royalty and prime ministers down – and the establishment’s role in providing, however inadvertently, cover for Savile’s paedophilia for decades, it should hardly surprise us that the blame for the failure to prosecute him has been placed squarely on the shoulders of a low-level lawyer in the Crown Prosecution Service. How it could be otherwise? If we started unpicking the thorny Savile knot, who knows how the threads might unravel?

Sacrificial victim

Former ambassador Craig Murray has made an interesting observation about Johnson’s remark on Starmer. Murray, let us remember, has been a first-hand observer and chronicler of the dark arts of the establishment in protecting itself from exposure, after he himself was made a sacrificial victim for revealing the British government’s illegal involvement in torture and extraordinary rendition.

My latest: The refusal to hear Craig Murray’s appeal against his unprecedented conviction for ‘jigsaw identification’ means the British state has now effectively been given the power to license journalists https://t.co/czxg9VNtnU

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 30, 2021

As Murray notes:

Of course the Director of Public Prosecutions does not handle the individual cases, which are assigned to lawyers under them. But the Director most certainly is then consulted on the decisions in the high profile and important cases.

That is why they are there. It is unthinkable that Starmer was not consulted on the decision to shelve the Savile case – what do they expect us to believe his role was, as head of the office, ordering the paperclips?

And of the official inquiry into Starmer’s role that cleared him of any wrongdoing, the one that so impresses the Guardian and everyone else, Murray adds:

When the public outcry reached a peak in 2012, Starmer played the go-to trick in the Establishment book. He commissioned an “independent” lawyer he knew to write a report exonerating him. Mistakes have been made at lower levels, lessons will be learnt… you know what it says. Mishcon de Reya, money launderers to the oligarchs, provided the lawyer to do the whitewash. Once he retired from the post of DPP, Starmer went to work at, umm,…

Yes, Mischon de Reya.

Delighted to be joining Mishcon de Reya and to remain with Doughty Street Chambers under new dual capacity rules http://t.co/ejoBDIxImK

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) June 23, 2014

Starmer and Assange

Whoopi Goldberg is not someone I would normally rush to defend. Our politics are too far apart on too many issues. And many will doubtless take delight in the fact that the queen of cancel culture has just found herself canceled.

But the pile-on against Goldberg for expressing a non-conventional view about the Holocaust needs examination – less for the content of the furore it has provoked than for what that furore tells us about power relations in our society. And for what the furore says about the things we hold dear and the things we don’t.

What seems to have done for Goldberg – leading to her suspension from a popular daytime TV talk show, The View, even after she apologized – was her comment that the Holocaust “isn’t about race.” Rather, she said, “it’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people…”

We don’t know exactly where Goldberg was heading with this particular line of thought because nervous fellow panelists shut it down. But she had a chance to clarify later on the Colbert Show, where she appeared to suggest that distinctions of “race” relate chiefly to the color of one’s skin.

“Race,” of course, is a socially constructed idea. Goldberg’s critics are right that calling Jews “white” in the context of the Holocaust is not only historically inaccurate but unhelpful to a clearer understanding of what the Holocaust was about. In Nazi Germany, it was the Nazis, not Whoopi Goldberg, who got to decide which groups constituted a “race.”

Nonetheless, her later apology seemed a good corrective: “On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man’. I should have said it is about both … I stand corrected.”

‘Dangerous’ comment

But that, of course, was not enough. Much of the coverage has subtly implied that Goldberg skated a little too close to Holocaust denial or antisemitism. Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, reinforced that impression with a statement that presumed all Jews were offended by Goldberg’s remark: “The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League, went even further, labeling Goldberg’s comment “dangerous.” But in what meaningful sense was her remark dangerous rather than naïve, ignorant or misguided?

Goldberg wasn’t excusing or even minimizing the Holocaust. Nothing in her remarks makes a repetition of the Holocaust more likely, or encourages hatred or prejudice towards Jews. She simply reframed the Holocaust in ways that made sense to her given her own experiences of racism. Like many people, she struggled to see clearly enough another person’s viewpoint. We all do that, most of the time.

The question is: So what? Isn’t that what we have TV talk shows for? So people get to talk and exchange ideas, often worthless ones on subjects they know little about.

Moments after she had made her initial comment, Goldberg sought to expand on it in more interesting and helpful ways: “You’re missing the point … let’s talk about it for what it really is. It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other.”

Within the limits of TV talk shows’ soundbite culture, she appeared to be making a universal point about how each of us is susceptible to being manipulated into hatred and violence against other groups, especially if those groups have been demonized.

‘Reflect and learn’

That was a reminder – one we hear too rarely – that the Holocaust was not a crime only against Jews. It was equally a crime against the Roma people. Half of each “race” was exterminated. The Nazis also sent other groups to the concentration camps, including socialists, gays and the disabled, none of whom could be described in racial terms.

With Western politicians and the media dehumanizing the Russian, Chinese and Iranian peoples by vilifying their leaders – and thereby driving us towards potentially catastrophic wars – it is no bad thing to be reminded that Hitler had larger ambitions even than a genocide of the Jewish people.

It is worth being reminded too that propaganda, and groupthink, occur in every period of history. It is not just one state at one time that has duped its people into committing crimes against humanity. And similarly, many groups and “races” have been victims of others’ greed and fear. To pretend otherwise is to make the repetition of such crimes more likely.

It is quite possible for Goldberg’s comment to be unhelpful or simplistic – this is daytime TV, after all – without it being especially harmful.

Nonetheless, not only was she required to apologize but she was barred from the show for two weeks “to reflect and learn.” It seems a Black woman is in greater need of reflecting on her racism than the ABC News organization and her white colleagues.

Once again, everyone seems remarkably comfortable telling a prominent black person not only that they don't know enough about racism to speak with any authority on the subject, but that they must be re-educated before they can be allowed to take part in the conversation pic.twitter.com/9irKImUTlM

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 2, 2022

That makes sense only in the modern world of souped-up liberal identity politics, where each “race” gets to have exclusive rights over their own concerns. Black Americans can talk about slavery, though not so much about poverty and the justice system. Jews, or rather Jewish organizations, get exclusive rights to define and contextualize the Holocaust. Hispanics get … well, it’s too early to decide what they get.

And whites – the rich ones, at least – get to act as referee while all the other “races” argue about who’s been victimized most.

Schooled on racism

But here we get to the trickiest part of the Whoopi Goldberg episode. The Anti-Defamation League’s Greenblatt appears to have adopted the role of mentor as Goldberg “reflects” on her black privilege. He accompanied her as she made a second apology live on The View, the seeming first step on her path to re-education.

Does Goldberg really need to be schooled on racism by those like Greenblatt who shout their offense loudest?

In fact, Greenblatt joined the pile-on against Goldberg fresh from dealing with another pressing problem that needed his attention. He and the Anti-Defamation League had just emerged from dealing with the renowned human rights group Amnesty International, which offended their sensibilities even more grossly.

The misnamed Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is only very secondarily concerned with defamation. Its real purpose is much narrower. It works day and night to shield Israel from scrutiny so that the self-declared Jewish state can continue being a racist state oppressing and dispossessing the Palestinians it rules over. (A documentary, “Defamation,” by the Israeli film-maker Yuval Shamir, on the ADL’s role in manipulating public discourse about both the Holocaust and antisemitism is a must watch.)

That is why the ADL has just invested so much of its energies in vilifying Amnesty. This week the human rights group joined Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, an Israeli group that monitors the Israeli army’s abuses of Palestinians in the occupied territories, in declaring Israel an apartheid state. Israel is increasingly being understood as the successor to apartheid South Africa.

Victims, not perpetrators

Let us back up a minute. Remember Greenblatt said Goldberg’s comments – including her highlighting the universal message of the Holocaust as “man’s inhumanity to man” – were “dangerous.” That seems a strange assessment until we consider what the Holocaust represents to Greenblatt and other fanatical defenders of Israel.