More on the Manchester murders

On Wednesday I walked Big Moor with an old friend. No one was getting wed but a vastness of myrtle green and bracken brown spread before us, flecked with heather still purple under skies of rich brooding intensity, the air to the southwest warm with rainful promise. Below and to our left, swathes of autumnal burnish dropped to a steep cleft lined with birch and stunted oak busy surrendering leaves of orange and gold to a Bar Brook racing, foam flecked and peaty black, to the shrunken reservoir that once slaked Chesterfield’s thirst and now plays host, with no season off limits, to the hardy wild swimmer.

Two red deer does watched with silent intensity before cantering, satisfied we’d walked on by, across the track behind us to vanish in an instant. My camera at home, along with a collection not short on deer pics, I couldn’t be bothered to take a phone shot, and of course regretted my indolence the moment they’d disappeared into the bracken.

Between meditations on two of the many stone circles, late neolithic, dotted around the peak, we spoke of Palestine. I opined – both of us having Jewish friends, and me a follower of many Jewish (and one or two Israeli) critics of the rogue ethno-state – that equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism was itself a darkly anti-Semitic trope. ¹ My friend agreed.

Not twenty-four hours later, the slayings at a Manchester synagogue had front page treatment across the Western world. I gave my reaction, and that of Caitlin Johnstone, the following day.

In light of that ‘darkly anti-Semitic trope’, now try Jonathan Cook.

Who’s really encouraging attacks like the one on a synagogue? Look to our leaders

The attack in Manchester is evidence not of a rising tide of antisemitism but of something else entirely: a growing and dangerous political illiteracy being cultivated in our societies.

It’s well past time to burst the highly manufactured narrative bubble that says terror attacks like the one yesterday at a Manchester synagogue are proof of a rising tide of antisemitism.

They are not. They are evidence of something else entirely: a growing and dangerous political illiteracy.

This kind of political illiteracy conflates Jews and Israel. It’s disastrous. So let’s see who is encouraging it?

1. Israel very much wants such political illiteracy – and has been actively cultivating it for decades. Israel does so by falsely describing itself, and legislating itself, as a state that supposedly represents every Jew in the world – even those Jews who despise the ethnic supremacist ideology of Zionism, which has rationalised for so long the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, apartheid rule over Palestinians, and now the genocide of Palestinians.

Israel proudly boasts that its dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people, its settler-colonial agenda, is done in the name of all Jews in the world, whether Jews approve or not.

2. This political illiteracy exists because it has been nurtured by Jewish public figures in Britain like Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who constantly identifies the Jewish community with Israel and its military; who lauds the Israeli military’s crimes against Palestinians, even its slaughter of children; and demands that protests in solidarity with Palestinians be outlawed to protect Israel.

3. This political illiteracy exists because Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tells the public that Zionism – a settler-colonial, supremacist political ideology that absurdly claims “Jewish liberation” depends on the ethnic cleansing, apartheid and now the genocide of Palestinians – is a normal state of affairs …

Continue reading on Jonathan’s substack …

* * *

1. Since the piece replicated here, Jonathan has written scathingly – on the day of the third mass defiance in London’s Parliament Square of the designation of a non violent direct action group as terrorist, making public support for it a crime – of a call by (among other genocide apologists) Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley:

   Rowley demands supporters of Palestine Action cancel or delay their protest today, after the Manchester synagogue attack, because the timing appears “antisemitic”.

   How to untangle this nonsense?

   The only possible way to interpret Rowley’s argument is that he believes every British Jew identifies and supports Israel’s mass slaughter of children in Gaza and therefore, out of respect for their grief at the Manchester attack, we ought not to protest against the slaughter in Gaza. That undoubtedly makes Rowley the antisemitic one.