Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, hit out at the apparent Trump victory, claiming it marks a “dark, dark day for people around the globe.”
He said: “This is a dark, dark day for people around the globe. The world’s largest economy and most powerful military will be led by a dangerous, destructive demagogue.
“The next President of the United States is a man who actively undermines the rule of law, human rights, international trade, climate action and global security. Millions of Americans – especially women and minorities – will be incredibly fearful about what comes next. We stand with them.
…
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, struck a similar tone. He said: “I know that many Londoners will be anxious about the outcome of the US Presidential election. Many will be fearful about what it will mean for democracy and for women’s rights, or how the result impacts the situation in the Middle East or the fate of Ukraine. Others will be worried about the future of NATO or tackling the climate crisis.
…
“The lesson of today is that progress is not inevitable. But asserting our progressive values is more important than ever – re-committing to building a world where racism and hatred is rejected, the fundamental rights of women and girls are upheld, and where we continue to tackle the crisis of climate change head on.”
People attempt to extinguish a fire at the site of an Israeli strike on tents sheltering displaced people at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza, October 2024. Ramadan Abed/Reuters
Editor’s note: This article was commissioned by the Guardian US as part of its Rise against fascism series, which was published in September. It was spiked by editor-in-chief Katherine Viner following a disagreement about the author’s use of the term “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza – the Guardian suggested she amend it to “genocide” and she refused. The context of the incident is documented in this report.
Novara Media has decided to publish the piece in full, including the term “holocaust”, following consultation with several scholars of genocide and Jewish history.
The author spells her name in lower case.
Content note: This piece contains explicit references to torture and sexual assault.
United Nations Resolution 3379 defined Zionism as “a form of racism” because at its core it is a supremacist ideology that seeks to privilege Jews at the expense, even detriment and demise, of non-Jews (the resolution passed in 1975 and was revoked in 1991 following pressure from Israel and the United States). Regardless of how one defines Zionism, it manifests, among other myriad ways, in the subjugation or displacement of indigenous Palestinians.
For the past 12 months, Israel has been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but doing so with a gleeful sadism that echos the social media posts of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s close advisor and office manager, who called for residents from Gaza who participated in the [7 October] massacre to be tortured live on broadcast television: “First removing the nails from the hands and feet … cut off [their] genitals and let [them] see [their testicles] fried in canola oil and [force them] to eat them … Keep the tongue to the end, so that it pleases us with its screams, the ears so that [they] can hear [their] own screams and the eyes so that [they] can see us smile.”
Polling data from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies suggests that a majority of Jewish Israelis do not think that soldiers accused of torturing Palestinians should face criminal charges.
In a rare moment of candour, the New York Times reported UN findings of systematic torture, including sexual torture. According to the UN’s report, Israeli soldiers have allegedly kept Palestinian captives in severely overcrowded prison cells, subjected them to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, threatened them with gang-rape, and penetrated or electrocuted male and female prisoners’ genitals and anuses with electrified batons and other objects. Released Palestinian hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza have reported being mauled and sexually assaulted by trained dogs. A lawyer who has been granted rare access to a Palestinian captive inside an Israeli detention centre reported the activation of a fire extinguisher inside the body of a 27-year-old man through a hose inserted into his rectum.
Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent surgeons such as Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, director of the orthopaedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, may have died after torture. Some emerged from Israeli gulags with such trauma that they have reportedly suffered memory loss; some were unable to speak; all of them broken by unspeakable torment in Israeli captivity. And they were the lucky ones who got out.
Starmer announces plan to stop the boats in May 2024 | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The UK immigration system is racist by design. The Border Security Bill will make it worse
Over the past few years of increasingly hostile migration policies, many in the migrant, including refugee, charity sector have looked to the dawn of a new government with eager anticipation. Surely, a Labour government would undo so many of these cruel anti-migration laws and mark a more ‘progressive’ chapter in migrant rights?
While the new government wasted little time in scrapping the infamous Rwanda Plan (and rightly so) it has diverted funds from that scheme into yet another anti-migrant policy in the form of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. The announcement of this bill proves our caution was completely justified. It’s simply a continuation of the UK’s track record of enacting immigration policies that disproportionately impact people of colour.
We only have to look at the record of the last Labour government to see that they are no different to the Conservatives in embedding anti-migrant policies and rhetoric. Let’s not forget it was a Labour home secretary who first coined the term ‘hostile environment’ and it was New Labour that brought in the restrictive Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which laid the foundation for the hostile environment policies of the past 14 years.
In the past year itself, now-prime minister, Keir Starmer, has made plenty of not-so-subtle signs indicating what approach his government would take towards people seeking safety, including a promise to treat so-called ‘smugglers’ like “terrorists”.
Fast forward one year and these ideas have materialised in the form of the new Border Security Bill. The bill was announced as part of the King’s Speech and is part of a turn towards approaching migration through counter-terror, making space for even greater surveillance of and denial of rights for migrants, including refugees.
This dangerous bill would introduce powers previously been confined to alleged terror offenders, including travel bans and restrictions in the UK and abroad, restrictions on access to the internet and banking, and the ability to apply these measures before someone is even convicted of smuggling offences.
UK’s immigration policy has always been racist
Successive UK governments have essentially tried to ‘outdo’ each other when it comes to making the lives of migrants, including refugees, and racialised communities unbearable. In fact, these rafts of policies stem from a long history of targeting ‘unwelcome’ groups based on colonial constructions of the ‘threat’ and who are considered to be of ‘good character’.
In the Migrants’ Rights Network’s new Hostile Office report, we demonstrate that from the 1905 Aliens Act to the inhumane Migration Act 2023 (Illegal Migration Act), as well as the suffering of the Windrush victims and the government’s ability to deprive people of their citizenship, it should be evident to all of us that immigration laws are underpinned by a desire to limit the presence and freedom of racialised people in the UK.
Proposed powers in the new Border Security Bill would enable border force officers to search people and examine and seize their belongings, including copying data from and retaining people’s mobile phones, without a requirement for reasonable suspicion. It mirrors Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, where someone can be arrested and convicted for refusing to hand over sensitive and personal information, including passcodes to devices, in addition to failing to answer all questions or refusing to provide biometric data – all without the need for reasonable suspicion.
However, implementing counter-terrorism policies into immigration is hardly surprising or new. It marks just another chapter of an increasingly cruel, racist and Islamophobic trajectory in the immigration system.
Take citizenship laws, for example. Deprivation of citizenship and counter-terror laws are linked: most cases of deprivation on ‘public good’ grounds have been justified using counter-terror legislation. We have been campaigning against the expansion of deprivation of citizenship powers and highlighting the racist, Islamophobic nature of them.
Since the 2003 ‘Hamza amendment’ to the British Nationality Act 1981 (an amendment that was passed specifically to deport one man, Abu Hamza, a naturalised British citizen), of those who have had their citizenship revoked since 2002, the majority of people affected have been British Muslims.
Our findings show that between 2002 and 2022, 85% of those stripped of their citizenship had, or were deemed to have, nationalities of countries in Africa, South Asia or West Asia (the Middle East) and 83% were from former British colonies. Of this, 41% were South Asian, all being Pakistani or Bangladeshi.
It is, therefore, not a huge leap to understand that the presence of counter-terror measures serves to limit the freedom, security and sense of belonging for racialised people in the UK, particularly those from a Muslim background.
Meanwhile, in December 2023, the Home Office published an Independent Review of Prevent’s report and the government’s response by William Shawcross (Independent Reviewer of Prevent) in which he recommended the Government explore extending Prevent into the immigration and asylum system. Make no mistake, linking the racist criminal (in)justice and counter-terror systems will further the harm and punishment to people seeking safety and a new life. It will do nothing to target the true roots of why people migrate and are forced to make dangerous border crossings.
The answer to a lack of safe routes is not further criminalisation through the introduction of counter-terror powers, which are often opaque and almost impossible to challenge. This lack of safe routes is why brokers exist, to capitalise on people’s desperation.
The Border Security Bill, and the counter-terrorism approach as part of a package deal, will just continue a long tradition of punishing people of colour at the UK border.
Original article by KIT KLARENBERG republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Ever since July 29, Britain has been plunged into crisis, with incendiary far-riot rights sending towns and cities across the country spiraling into states of emergency. Vast mobs of armed, angry thugs, motivated by racist, Islamophobic animus, have vandalized homes, property and places of worship, violently clashed with police, and targeted hotels housing refugees with arson attacks in apparent stabs at mass murder. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and counter-protesters have taken to the streets in profusion to counter the upsurge of hatred.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged those responsible will face the “full force of the law” for their actions, and several perpetrators have already been sentenced to years in prison. Still, the situation remains gravely tense. Furthermore, in keeping with so many prior explosive, unanticipated episodes in modern British history, a vicious mainstream blame game has erupted, with ultimate responsibility for the upheaval being apportioned to a wide range of domestic and foreign actors and causes.
The unrest’s actual, and perhaps most apparent, sources have been mysteriously overlooked. For one, average Britons remain gripped by an ever-worsening economic cataclysm, in which the cost of essentials ever rises while living standards precipitously decline. The newly-elected Labour government has not only practically pledged to do nothing to alleviate the misery – by maintaining if not intensifying self-destructive austerity policies – but already exacerbated the dire situation significantly by slashing winter fuel payments, leaving millions facing life-threateningly freezing cold, without state support.
History shows that this milieu is invariably a fertile breeding ground for fascism to take root. With no mainstream alternative to the neoliberal status quo, desperate, disillusioned and dispossessed working-class Britons look to “outsiders” and extremists like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson for salvation in ever-greater numbers. And their remedy, as always, is to blame migrants, refugees and “the other” for all of society’s ills and their own personal deprivation rather than ruling elites.
Even more ominously, though, there are unambiguous indications the anti-Muslim fervor that has torn through Britain in August is being stirred up by unseen spectral actors in service of the Zionist entity’s ideological, political, and military interests.
‘GET THEM GONE’
For all the flurry of claims and counter-claims about how and why the riots started, there is no dispute they ignited on July 29 following a savage knife attack at a children’s yoga and dance workshop. Three children were killed and eight others injured, with five still in critical condition. Two adults present were also severely harmed. News of the shocking event rapidly spread far and wide, promptly followed by wildly incorrect conjecture and disinformation about the suspect’s identity.
Within mere hours, a popular anti-lockdown account posted on ‘X’ that the attacker was named “Ali al Shakati” – “an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year…on an MI6 watch list.” While this false information was deleted within an hour, the damage was thoroughly done. Multiple far-right influencers instantly leaped upon these claims, adding further groundless, incriminating details of their own to the mix. Among them was Robinson – aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon – a notorious fascist activist of some standing.
He declared the Southport knife attacker was an “alleged Muslim,” adding, “They always target women.” The next day, an aggressive crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, chanting Robinson’s name, along with the offensive Islamophobic slogan, “Who the fuck is Allah?” – a common fixture at far-right demonstrations. Attendant law enforcement officers were attacked, objects were hurled at the mosque, and police vehicles were set on fire. This malign spark produced copycat events and incidents across Britain, leading us to where we are now.
Protesters attack a Holiday Inn Express beillived to be housing asylum-seekers in South Yorkshire, August 4, 2024. Photo | AP
In almost every instance, police were quick to identify the rioters as members of the English Defence League (EDL), a now-defunct far-right organization comprised of hardcore anti-Islam agitators and football hooligans. Robinson, the League’s former leader, rubbished these allegations via X on the grounds that “there’s has [sic] been no EDL for over a decade.” Nonetheless, in a video published while the Southport riot was ongoing, he seemingly traced the violence back to the group he once headed and the streetfighting dogma it espoused:
Before people…condemn the ‘angry men’, that anger is justified. I’m surprised it’s took [sic] this long…you’ve actually encouraged the scenes you see tonight. You’ve done this, your government has done this, the police have done this…You care more for Afghanis, Somalis, Eritreans, Syrians, Pakistanis. They’re a danger to us. Stop the f***ing boats! Get them out of them [sic] hotels! Get them gone! Send them back! They shouldn’t be here ! Men will rise up, they were always going to rise up, they have to rise up, to defend their families!”
On August 8, intelligence-adjacent “independent” outlet Byline Times published a lengthy probe into “the real UK race riot instigators,” mapping “the key players and Transatlantic network” around Robinson. It argued he may have instigated the recent British upheaval at the behest of a sinister nexus of wealthy far-right figures in Europe and North America, including wealthy Donald Trump supporter Patrick Michael Byrne. Markedly, not once were Israel or Zionists mentioned – far more plausible candidates for directing Robinson’s incitation to Islamophobic violence.
‘FOREIGN PRESSURE’
The EDL burst onto British streets in June 2009. Describing itself as a “human rights organization” and touting the slogan “not racist, not violent, just no longer silent,” Robinson and his confederates consistently claimed to be simply standing up for white working-class citizens and raising legitimate concerns about extremist Islam. However, the behavior and chants of its members on regular EDL marches through British towns and cities told a very different story.
Still, the League was ever-keen to flaunt its non-racist, diverse credentials. From its inception, the EDL had dedicated divisions for its Cypriot, Greek, Hindu, Jewish, LGBT and Pakistani Christian supporters and other minority groups present on marches besides. The League’s “Jewish” wing was always the movement’s most visible, even if barely acknowledged by the mainstream media. The profusion of Israel flags routinely found in EDL protests also went largely unremarked upon during the group’s five-year existence.
Yet, indications that the EDL’s activities served quite another nation’s interests were always unambiguously hidden in plain sight. The League never operated as a charity or political party in Britain, but two separate commercial entities were registered under its name. In June 2011, Robinson’s compatriots launched a company, the English Defence League. A month later, this was updated to the English and Jewish Defence League. Meanwhile, a firm known as EDL English Defence League LTD was registered in December 2010.
Two years later, the company’s name became the Jewish Defence League and one of its directors, Roberta Moore, a belligerent Zionist, established links with Jewish Task Force, a far-right U.S. organization. Founded by Victor Vancier, it espouses a hardcore, fundamentalist Zionism. Despite raising money for illegal settlements in the West Bank and avowedly seeking to “save” Israel, Vancier was banned from entering Tel Aviv for his involvement in 18 bombings in New York and Washington, protesting Soviet treatment of Jews during the 1980s.
In the early years, the EDL regularly partnered with the Zionist Federation to host demonstrations in support of the Israeli Embassy.
The head of the EDL's Jewish Unit Roberta Moore is pictured here with Jonathan Hoffman, the vice chair of the Zionist Federation at the time. pic.twitter.com/0vQUUoSXGB
This connection was reportedly too “extreme” for EDL higherups, who subsequently distanced themselves from Moore and their “Jewish” wing. However, this is difficult to rationalize with Robinson’s own views. In February 2019, a leaked video depicted the former League chief declaring his love for Israel and discussing how, on some occasions, he is forced to “get [his] Zionist card out, which says that [he is] a Zionist.” The clip ended with him proudly declaring:
Palestine?! F*** Palestine. Why would you support Palestine? If there was a war tomorrow, which probably there would be, I would be there on the front line fighting for Israel”.
Five months later, Robinson was jailed for 13 months for contempt of court after he exposed the protected identities of accused sexual groomers while they were on trial in May the previous year. Once imprisoned, notorious hardline Zionist lobby think tank Middle East Forum announced it had not only helped fund his legal expenses but financed and organized 25,000-strong solidarity protests in his honor. An accompanying statement revealed:
MEF is helping Mr. Robinson in his moment of danger…[MEF] is aiding Mr. Robinson…diplomatically, by bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure [his] safety and eventual release.
The statement was signed by MEF Director Gregg Roman, who previously worked in the Zionist entity’s Defence and foreign ministries. There are no prizes for guessing from which country the “foreign pressure” to release Robinson emanated.
‘GOING UNDERCOVER’
In the EDL, Robinson and Moore were not alone in having deep and cohering ties to Israel and a pronounced affinity for Zionism. One of the group’s key founders, “Paul Ray,” whose blogging on race was cited in the manifesto of Norwegian Islamophobic mass murderer Anders Breivik, had a highly dubious history indeed as an infiltrator of Palestine solidarity movements in Britain. Whether he was a volunteer or state agent remains unclear today, but he evidently inflicted enormous damage on his targets.
In September 2006, Islamophobic U.S. website FrontPageMag published an “exposeé” on how one of its British “volunteers” had infiltrated the International Solidarity Movement’s London wing a year prior. ISM is a pro-Palestinian campaign group dedicated to nonviolent protests, with chapters around the world. It trains and dispatches volunteers to the Occupied Territories to assist with nonviolent protest activities. Despite this, in 2003, two ISM activists – Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces.
Investigative journalist Asa Winstanley, a veteran Palestine solidarity activist, has revealed that British intelligence has long penetrated ISM. Ray—real name Paul Cinato—was among the spies who infiltrated the Movement. As the FrontPageMag article reported, he “had prior experience going undercover for the police in the UK” before targeting ISM. The outlet added, “Photos and intelligence [Cinato] brought back are proving invaluable to intelligence agencies watching ISM and [are] in official hands.”
Again, there are few prizes for guessing the location of the “intelligence agencies watching ISM” that benefited from Cinato’s activities. Other British spies who infiltrated the Movement very clearly passed what they learned on to Zionist entity authorities. By 2008, Tel Aviv had obtained such precise intelligence on the group that its volunteers were either deported after entering Israel or blocked from entering altogether. As ISM’s primary raison d’etre was to get people into the Occupied Territories, its value and impact were significantly curtailed.
Tommy Robinson poses with IDF troops during a visit to Israel. Photo | Twitter
It must not be forgotten either that the deranged “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was a core precept of the EDL during its five-year-long lifespan and remains promulgated by Robinson and Britain’s fascist rioters in the present day. This narrative posits that Western elites are covertly engaged in a dastardly connivance to flood Europe with Muslims and destroy local culture in service of creating “Eurabia,” an Islamized mega-continent and caliphate.
The originator of this profoundly racist, fantastical drivel was “Bat Ye’or” – the nom de plume of former Mossad operative Gisèle Littman. In 1961, she and her British husband David led Operation Mural, a sickening Zionist operation to kidnap Jewish children from Morocco to become settler colonists in Israel. She spent three months in Rabat posing as a Christian aid worker, gaining the trust of young targets to assist with their unwilling extraction.
The pair went on to be involved in a variety of Zionist organizations and leading lights in the Islamophobic Counterjihad movement. Despite their sordid personal and professional history being well-documented, Gisèle Littman’s obscenely hypocritical “Great Replacement” theory quickly became popular with right-wingers in Europe and North America. As a 2019 Guardian long-read put it:
Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the West.”
Littman’s “theory” is just one way in which the Zionist entity has over decades normalized and legitimized everyday discrimination and xenophobia towards Muslims while dehumanizing and demonizing them in pursuit of its putrid, genocidal settler colonial project. Having insidiously poisoned Western information spaces with surging Islamophobic hatred via assets such as Tommy Robinson, it appears the pot is finally boiling over in Britain.
That there is a mainstream omerta on these fundamental truths indicates Europe and North America’s media and political class are determined to let the Zionist entity get away with it.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
Original article by KIT KLARENBERG republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
dizzy: Britain’s Fascist rioters promote the theory of ‘Two-tier Policing’. There is obviously a two-tier justice system in UK as anyone who has experienced it will have undoubtedly learned but not in the way that the fascist rioters’ propose. I’ve suffered enough abuse from police – although not too much recently – and tried to get them to investigate former Met Police boss Ian Blair. There was absolutely no chance of that. I’ve been before enough judges – mostly but not all magistrates and civil ones two or three times – to recognise that they are prejudged and biased.
Ridiculously harsh sentences for non-violent Just Stop Oil protesters v. fascist rioters? Will Zionist Tommy Robinson be tried for his inflammatory social media posts? I somehow doubt that under UK’s Zionist establishment.
The fuse may have been set alight by online disinformation and secretive social media channels, but this explosion of far-right violence has been decades in the making. And while Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and his mob of far-right agitators are its immediate instigators, much of Britain’s political and media class is complicit in laying the groundwork for this eruption of hate.
This truth of how we reached this point flips the normal classist narrative about racism in Britain. The reality is that racism isn’t a bottom-up expression of popular discontent, but a top-down project propagated by people in positions of power.
Or think how Conservative politicians normalise far-right rhetoric, dehumanising people and spreading hate. From “one nation” Conservatives such as David Cameron who as prime minister described migrants as a “swarm”, to the likes of Suella Braverman who as home secretary said there was a migrant “invasion”. Rishi Sunak’s “Stop the boats” slogan is now a far-right chant andjust this week the Tory party leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick said the police should “immediately arrest” people shouting “Allahu Akbar” on the street, the Arabic phrase meaning “God is great” – the equivalent of a Christian saying “hallelujah”.
This rhetoric was propagated further by the privately educated, former City trader Nigel Farage, who claims to be a man of the people. In the general election campaign, he said many Muslims didn’t share “British values” and this week promoted the “two-tier policing” conspiracy.
But it’s not just rightwing politicians, pundits and publications at fault. So-called centrists too often refuse to push back against this hate as well, sometimes peddling the same dangerous tropes or dismissing the concerns of those subject to this hatred.
I was confronted by this painful reality just this week. On Monday morning I was invited on to ITV’s Good Morning Britain to talk about the recent racist riots, only to be interrogated – and it did feel like an interrogation – about why I, a Muslim MP, thought it was important to call the recent racist violence Islamophobic. “Why is it important to use that specific word?” Kate Garraway repeatedly questioned me.
Almost before I could answer, and behaving with the same sneering condescension he did throughout the segment, the former Labour shadow chancellor and now broadcaster Ed Balls repeatedly interrupted me, seemingly incredulous that I thought this hate should be called by its proper name. The show has now been hit with more than 8,200 Ofcom complaints about that morning’s episode, many of them about his handling of my interview.
