The witch-hunt for ‘antisemites’ at Labour Party conference continues

Under the headline “Throw out antisemitic party members now, Corbyn urged”, the Times has denounced material distributed outside this week’s Labour Party conference by a small group calling itself Labour Party Marxists. The Times reports:

Jeremy Corbyn has been called on to investigate a left-wing group accused of producing and circulating antisemitic literature on the fringes of Labour’s conference. Labour MPs and the Holocaust Educational Trust demanded a personal intervention by the Labour leader to identify and discipline members of the Labour Party Marxists group, which disseminated a leaflet quoting a prominent Nazi….

The leaflet handed out in Brighton discussed the “commonality between Zionists and Nazis”. It quoted Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Final Solution, saying in 1935: “National Socialists had no intention of attacking Jewish people”. Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “I don’t understand how it is acceptable to be handing out such disgusting literature outside Labour’s conference quoting one of the 20th century’s most notorious antisemites and architects of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich.” …

John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw and chairman of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism, said: “The Labour Party Marxists should all be thrown out of the party, every single one of them. We want them investigated and then thrown out. Their scurrilous publication, which contains antisemitic material, is good only for the recycling bin.”

The origin of the “antisemitic material” in question is in fact the transcript of a speech by Moshé Machover, a veteran Jewish leftwinger who was born in Tel Aviv and co-founded Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation. It’s from a talk he gave in May last year, in the immediate aftermath of Ken Livingstone’s suspension from the Labour Party over his claim that in the 1930s Hitler’s policy “was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism”.

As you can see, the quote from Heydrich is intended to establish that in 1935, when he made his statement, support for Zionism was indeed official Nazi policy. This is the full quote:

In the context of its Weltanschauung, National Socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. On the contrary, the recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood, and not as a religious one, leads the German government to guarantee the racial separateness of this community without any limitations. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.

Anyone familiar with the literature (surprisingly, this doesn’t appear to include Karen Pollock) will recognise the source of the quotation. It’s from pp.56-7 of Francis Nicosia’s book The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (see excerpt below). And who, I hear you ask, is Francis Nicosia? He is the acknowledged academic expert on the history of Nazi-Zionist relations and Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. Presumably, according to the Times’ reasoning, he should be denounced as an antisemite too.

From Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985)