Clive Lewis targetted by right-wing Israel lobby group

  • Post last modified:August 13, 2024
  • Reading time:15 mins read


A right-wing pro-Israel lobby group is going after a left-leaning Labour Party MP. Specifically, Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS) has called for Norwich South MP Clive Lewis’s expulsion from the party. Unsurprisingly, the group has lodged a complaint to the party against Lewis for alleged antisemitism.

Of course, we’ve been here before – as it wouldn’t be the first time LAAS smeared the Labour left with baseless allegations of antisemitism.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is of course the most prominent casualty of this long-standing stitch up. Now, LAAS has turned its sights on Lewis for speaking out against Israel.

Clive Lewis: dehumanisation of Palestinians linked to UK far-right pogroms

Specifically, Clive Lewis made the connection between the West’s dehumanisation and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the far-right Islamophobic pogroms in the UK.

Of course, Lewis was right to drive this home. The UK’s Islamophobia cannot be extricated from this – because racism doesn’t manifest in a vacuum. It’s perfectly evident to anyone remotely paying attention that after ten months of corporate media and political establishment genocide apologism, white supremacy and Zionism runs through the very core of the UK right.

Plus, as the Canary’s Steve Topple previously wrote:

Allowing Black and brown people to be demonised over here helps with the West’s global agenda of making them subhuman. How else do you think Israel could get away with killing 40,000 Palestinians without the UN sending in peacekeepers or the US invading?

Ergo, it’s easy to imagine even on a surface level how devaluing Palestinian lives – largely Muslim – would lead to the same thing here. In fact, it has been plain to see. In February, Middle East Monitor (MEM) reported that Islamophobic attacks had risen by 235% since 7 October. Some on X poignantly summed this up:

The fact actually is that it’s worse than Lewis’s relatively mild post actually suggested:

Tommy Robinson’s Zionist connections

And this only really scratches the surface. Key race riot inciter Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – Tommy Robinson – has multifarious links to the Zionist movement. Lowkey has detailed these:

For one, he was co-founder of the English Defence League (EDL) with Israeli intelligence employee Paul Ray:

And there were more relationships:

Naturally, his ties don’t end there. As the Times of Israel reported, Philadelphia-based think tank Middle East Forum has been bankrolling Robinson:

Daniel Pipes, MEF’s president, confirmed to The Times of Israel that his group has spent roughly $60,000 on three demonstrations defending Robinson’s legal trial.

Pipes said that he first met Robinson in December 2017 and was “impressed” by him. He described Robinson as part of a group of people who are “trying to sustain their civilization, trying to keep Europe Europe, trying to keep the West the West. Overall, I think that their effort is sound and needed.”

In fact, it noted that multiple right-wing pro-Israel organisations have been sponsoring Robinson.

So, right-wingers can hardly argue there’s no connection between the recent race riot attacks against Muslim, Black, brown, and migrant communities in the UK, and Israel’s ongoing war crimes and genocide. Or so you would think.

Right-wing lobby group cry antisemitism

Enter, LAAS, who not only denied this tie altogether, but held it up as an example of antisemitism.

Director of the right-wing pro-Israel group Alex Hearn told Sky News that:

It is very concerning that people across the political spectrum, from “anti-racists” to the far right, have fantasised that ‘Zionists’ and Israel are to blame for unrest across Britain,” he said.

A recent report by the Community Security Trust showed antisemitism in the last six months has gone up 105%, and that the pretext for these 1,978 incidents are often Palestine. This includes synagogues targeted 76 times and 121 assaults.

For a Labour MP to blame a conflict thousands of miles away for the recent racism in far-right riots in Britain is highly irresponsible.

When attacks against British Jews exploded following the Hamas 7 October massacre, no such link was made by Mr Lewis.

However, as SKWAWKBOX underscored:

The Community Security Trust (CST) is a UK charity deeply committed to promoting Israel and combating the pro-Palestinian ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) campaign against goods and services from illegally-occupied Palestinian territory. It has equated opposition to Israel’s genocide with antisemitism, naming anti-genocide campaigners as the main source of antisemitic incidents.

Notably, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) unpacked the CST’s claims of a “huge rise” in antisemitism since Israel began its abhorrent genocide. Unsurprisingly, CST had conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

This has been glaringly obvious as the Western corporate media and right-wing politicians have branded pro-Palestine protest demonstrations as antisemitic on multiple occasions.

It was almost as if LAAS had an agenda. Of course, as some on X pointed out, this is precisely the case:

One poster noted that the right-wing genocide-apologist organisation had stark double-standards:

In other words, the UK mulling an arms embargo to stop Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians: connected to UK antisemitism. Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza: unconnected with the recent assaults on UK Muslims. Got it.

Politicians must speak out

CAGE International wondered why other politicians in parliament hadn’t yet had the courage to say it:

Right on cue, socialist and committed anti-racist John McDonnell backed Clive Lewis’s statement:

Other politicians like deputy Green Party leader Zack Polanski, and Jewish Labour Party councillor Martin Abrams voiced their support:

Another Jewish Labour member standing for the party’s National Executive Committee pointed out the attacks showed more about the embedded Islamophobia of Zionists than anything antisemitic:

In reality, it was actually the right-wing lobby group perpetuating antisemitism:

LAAS racism

One person pointed out that LAAS’s racism was hardly anything new:

Therefore going after a sitting Black MP is entirely on brand as well, as climate and social justice campaigner Asad Rehman noted:

Thankfully, for once, the Labour Party doesn’t seem to be pandering to Zionists. Astonishingly out of character, we know. According to Independent, the party isn’t planning disciplinary action against Lewis over his post.

Though, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. Starmer quickly threw Lewis under the bus regardless. According to the outlet:

The prime minister quickly distanced himself from the remarks, with his spokesperson on Monday saying Sir Keir would “completely disagree” with the suggestion that events in Gaza are to blame for the unrest in Britain, which saw mosques attacked and more than 900 people arrested.

She added that he would “never seek to conflate those two issues

At the end of the day, LAAS didn’t expose a left-wing Labour politician as antisemitic. It was quite the opposite in fact. Its petty, motivated complaint only bared the right-wing’s deeply entrenched Islamophobia as part and parcel of its pro-Israel and colonial racism en masse. In other words, it proved that Lewis’s point was correct all along. And that until Palestine is free, this Islamophobic violence in the UK will not end.

Featured image via the Canary





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