Of course we condemn Holocaust denial – but no-one denied it! – affirms Free Speech on Israel

Free Speech on Israel rebuts claims of Holocaust Denial


For the avoidance of all doubt:
the meeting discussed in the posting below was NOT the launch meeting of JVL.
  • Miko Peled did not endorse Holocaust Denial
  • Entrapment and character assassination tarnish political life

Allegations that have been made that Free Speech on Israel, a Jewish-led organisation, is complicit in holocaust denial are a signal episode in the manufacture of fake news.

They are distortions based on highly selective quotations, ripped out of context, from a strong and principled speech by celebrated Israeli Army veteran and author Miko Peled at our fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. These allegations, too readily re-broadcast by an insufficiently critical press, misrepresent the meaning and intention of his talk. His words, read in the flow of his speech, offer no support at all to holocaust denial. These tactics of attempted entrapment and character assassination tarnish the integrity of political life in Britain.

Free Speech on Israel always challenges Holocaust denial whenever it rears its head, just as we are resolute in our opposition to antisemitism. Like Miko we are equally determined to fight false accusations of antisemitism and their use to silence criticism of Israeli crimes or to suppress support for Palestinian rights.

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And here is a letter of correction sent to the Evening Standard, one of the many papers that ran happily with a fabricated “story”.

The letter, to our immense surprise, has not been published:
From: Amanda Sebestyen <[email protected]>
Subject: Letter about ‘anti-Semitic rants’
Date: 27 September 2017 01:38:02 BST
To: [email protected]

The speaker falsely accused of Holocaust denial at the Brighton conference isn’t a ‘paid-up Labour party member’ [‘Corbyn under pressure to expel activists over “anti-Semitic rants”, September 25].

He is Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli General and an Israeli army veteran himself, whose grandfather signed Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. After his niece was killed in a suicide attack, instead of seeking revenge Miko Peled sought knowledge. What he found about the reality of Palestinian lives has made him into a human rights activist who believes that only a single state of Palestine for all its citizens can bring lasting peace. 
 
I was in the front row of that fringe meeting held by the Jewish-led network Free Speech on Israel. l could hear every word that was said, and also notice two infiltrators filming and tweeting without permission. They must have had very sophisticated editing equipment indeed to make out that Miko Peled denied the Holocaust; I certainly thought he said that denying it was ‘beyond the limits of tolerance’. 
 
A few minutes later I saw the Israeli ambassador and former press officer Mark Regev walking down the Lanes of Brighton with his bodyguards. Why would he be there, when he has no connection even to the Israeli Labor Party but is an apppointee of Israel’s dangerously rightwing government? Could his well-known propaganda expertise have anything to do with the fake news reports which immediately circulated about anti-Semitism in the UK Labour party?
 
I’m waiting for anyone to notice that the Labour members fighting to counter this flood of alternative facts are Jewish themselves. That night we launched Jewish Voice for Labour, to make a space where we can speak out against injustice whether it takes place in Britain, the Middle East or across the world. A huge ballroom was filled to bursting with members who had been waiting for years to find their place. Well-known names came forward with powerful support. This was the real news!

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Comments (3)

  • Greg Douglas says:

    I attended both the ‘Free speech on Israel’ and ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ meetings.
    I agree totally with the reply to the Standard.One Jewish visitor was astounded that to be a member of JLM one needs to be neither Jewish or a member of the Labour Party;she remarked:”Why arte they in the Labour Party?”,but there was no call for the expulsion of either the JLM or Labour Friends of Israel from the Party.

    What is clear is that many Jewish LP members have yearned for a group such as the JVLfor a long time and have resented that JLM claims to speak for Labour Party Jews

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  • John Spencer says:

    I attended the lunchtime and the evening meeting of JVL in Brighton last Monday. The account of these meetings appearing in the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard is an insulting travesty. There was no Holocaust denial and it beggars belief that a meeting largely composed of Jewish delegates and visitors to the Labour conference would have listened appreciatively if there had been. I couldn’t see what was going on in the back of the hall, largely because both meetings were packed out. But it’s a wonder the Mail and Standard didn’t notice that the consecrated host was undergoing torture there! The strident attacks on Jewish Voice for Labour are in truth an antisemitic campaign.

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  • David Ashton says:

    The question of how many Jews and others were killed by Nazis and others during WW2 and by what methods is a matter of specialist historiography, like the numbers killed and by what methods by Communists and others. It no longer deserves special and unique protection by the equivalent of medieval blasphemy laws.

    It is quite easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Nazi leaders regarded the Jews as a “racial” enemy, and that millions of them died from many causes during the war, including mass-murder,

    What are not so easy to prove are some received odd elements still in mainstream Holocaust literature, such as the excavation and burning of 250,000 corpses previously killed within a short time by the fumes of captured Soviet engines at Treblinka.

    It is not the horror that raises skepticism but the sheer practicality of such items, To clean the “record” of falsehood and nonsense does not detract from but adds to the credibility of the demonstrable core facts. The same applies to some of the bizarre anecdotes used to swell the propaganda effect in the misguided short term interest of Israel, whose existence however I personally support.

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