Jonathan Rosenhead; a timely and informative interview.
Jonathan Rosenhead, JVL’s Strategy Officer, introduces the fascinating interview he did recently with Heather Mendick. They look at his personal history, his suspension from the Labour Party and discuss the difference between Labour’s antisemitism training and JVL’s antisemitism education. (LL)
“Exactly 18 months ago I was suspended from the Labour Party – for 18 months. I am expecting imminently the kind offer of training on antisemitism made to people like me. Too many people have already travelled this route.
The Labour Party has not published its ‘training’ anywhere. (Maybe they are not exactly proud of it?) It is online only, with access only available to those lucky enough to have been instructed by the party to expose themselves to it. But, to be fair, the party is working strenuously to make it available to more and more of its members.
Heather Mendick has been helping too. Heather and I are comrades from Hackney South, where she was the live-wire CLP secretary. (I was a mere branch chair.) We met there 8 years back. Heather has managed to access the training, and has provided a video guide to it. I will put a link to that video below, but would rather you watched the interview I had with Heather about the “training” first. It was a good talk, because we had a lot in common. She has been expelled, not just suspended, so they didn’t offer her the training. But she found it anyway. We are both it seems antisemites. Perplexing, as we are both Jewish…”
[Heather’s analysis of the Labour antisemitism ‘training’ is here.]
Starmer’s Labour party jumps through hoops to accommodate the narrow view of the Board of Deputies. LFI set the MET on me but failed.
Putin recently called Zelensky a ‘Disgrace to the Jewish People’
That is a problem for the Jewish Community
If you ask me a non Jew, who I support Russians or Nazis, that’s easy, 27 million Russians died saving me and mine in WWII, that is something we will never forget
JVL allows Doug’s post above presumably because there is not a sniff of pro-Jewish community or pro-Israel in it, never mind that his comment is almost incomprehensibly puerile and totally irrelevant to the article.
So let’s point out to Doug that Putin isn’t a saint whose comments about Jews, or those of his FM, matter, and Zelensky isn’t a treasonous Jew leading Nazis in an attack against Russia. That’s also from Putin’s playbook. As for who saved who in WW2, millions of Allied troops and Jews paid the price just like millions of Russians whose communist masters signed up with the Nazis before Russia itself was attacked and then they swiftly joined the Allied effort after repelling the Germans. If Hitler had not attacked Russia a Nazi-Communist Hitler-Stalin partitioned dictatorship might have been Europe’s nightmarish fate since the Red Army didn’t liberate Eastern Europe but enslaved its peoples in the Soviet dictatorship. Thank you also USA and our Commonwealth allies.
It is not my specialist subject but as I recall in the 1938 Munich agreement the British did their level best to keep Russia out of any retaliation against the Nazis. This prepared the ground for the subsequent non-aggression pact between Nazis and Soviets. In both countries there was some fear of repeating the horrors of WW1 but given their massive ideological differences the pact was only ever going to be a delaying tactic. According to some sources – though not all – Hitler entertained fantasies that the allies would switch to his side if Germany took on the Soviets.
As for thanking the Commonwealth for its war effort this was more an abusive misuse of the resources of Empire. According to the Institute of Education’s guide ‘The British Empire & Commonwealth in WW2’ by Stuart Foster
“India provided over 2.5 million men and women for the armed forces and spent a staggering 80 per cent of its wealth in 1943-44 on the war effort.” How willing this was on the Indian’s peoples part is debatable given, they lost a 10 million people over 10 years attempting to drive the British out in the 1850s (Ameresh Mishra 1857 War of Civilisations – 2008).
According to Gary K. Busch (The forgotten African soldiers in WWII celebrations – 2014) most of the African soldiers were conscribed.
Kenyans returned to conditions little better than indentured servitude and when they rebelled – many of the Mau, Mau were veterans – were confined in a network of torture camps. It took the British 50-60 years to finally compensate what was left of the victims. Professor Caroline Elkins history – Imperial Reckoning (2005) – along with the Kenyan Human Rights Commission is largely responsible for achieving the court win. Quoted on Ch4 New website
““90,000 Kenyans were executed or tortured and 160,000 people detained” – so a quarter of a million in total. https://www.channel4.com/news/britain-accused-of-mass-torture-on-kenyans-in-1950s
Elkins lists the tortures as castration, rape, rape with bottles and – incredibly – rape with rodents.
These practices were not confined to Kenya
Jaye
With Enemies like you, who needs friends
Reminder to Jaye – didn’t the United States also wait to join the war until the attack on Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war against it three days later by Germany and Italy? Not exactly a shining example of allied friendship. Further reminder – it was the only country that came out of the war with a huge margin of profit with the UK finally paying off its debt to the US in 2006.
Well said Gavin.