Just a few months ago, I would have denied that the IMT was anti-Semitic. I would have said that, for all my problems with them, I did not see anti-Semitism as one of them. I even convinced myself, for a time, that our position on Israel was ‘moderate’ compared to those of other left-wing sects (even though it still involved liquidating the Jewish State). In hindsight, I have been forced to revise that opinion. Our support for the anti-Semite Corbyn, our uncritical defence of anti-Semites like Jackie Walker, our denial of the problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party (which we alleged were Zionist smears) – all of these constituted anti-Semitism. Even though I never witnessed the direct disparagement of Jewish people as Jews from any member, I was party to more indirect forms of anti-Semitism disguised as ‘anti-Zionism’. A set of articles I have discovered online written by Ted Grant and other IMT members about Israel and Zionism have confirmed me in this opinion, and have led me to the conclusion that the IMT is an anti-Semitic organisation, just like every Israel-hating, far-left cult. It pains me to confess that people I worked closely with and knew personally were complicit in such a vile form of racism, but I must face the truth.
First there was the statement by Militant’s EC on the Six-Day War, written by Ted Grant in 1967. I discuss this in the last post. Beyond that, I have discovered a disgusting set of articles on the IMT website from many years ago, buried underneath the voluminous archives of the sect, and which only people who actively search for them on Google will find.
I first discovered a loathsome article from 2009, written by an Israeli sympathiser/member of the organisation, and which has as its title, ‘Jews of the world: denounce Zionism!’ On Twitter I expose the disgusting arguments in this article. The title in itself suggests that all Jews are collectively responsible for the supposed wrongdoings of the Israeli state. The IMT would never dream of publishing an article that said ‘Muslims of the world: denounce Islamism!’. There is no such subtlety with Jews. The rise in anti-Semitism around the world is blamed on the existence of Israel and on Jewish support for Zionism. Jews are told that unless they distance themselves from Zionism, they can expect more anti-Semitic attacks. Jews who support Israel are accused of putting their fellow Jews in danger. In other words, the evils of anti-Semitism are not the fault of the people perpetuating anti-Semitism, or issuing genocidal threats to the Jewish people – they are the fault of Israel and Zionism! Victim-blaming at its finest. The lie of Zionist-Nazi collaboration is repeated in the article. He argues that Israel must be overthrown in the name of bringing about world socialism. Only this will end anti-Semitism. The writer does conclude, in his generosity, that Jews should be allowed to continue living in what is now Israel once the revolution has been accomplished and a Socialist Federation of Palestine established. How kind of him. Too bad this will destroy the Jewish character of the Israeli state and leave the Jews at the mercy of a potentially hostile Arab majority, but little obstacles like these are overlooked by these Leninist loons.
That was not the end of it. I found another article from even further back – this time, from 2005. (I discuss it on Twitter.) It repudiates the idea of German ‘collective responsibility’ for the Holocaust, blaming it exclusively on the German capitalists who manipulated the German working-class into supporting Nazism. You see, in the Marxist narrative, the working-class is inherently progressive and revolutionary. If workers support ‘reactionary’ causes, it is because the capitalist class has brainwashed them. Instead of the Holocaust being seen as the culmination of centuries-long anti-Semitic hatred, something which predates the existence of capitalism, Nazi anti-Semitism is treated as if it were little more than a ‘superstructure’ of capitalist oppression – an interpretation beloved of hardcore Marxists, and which seems to me to border on Holocaust denial. German workers are portrayed in the article as having been ‘victims’ in the same way that Jewish workers who were gassed in the concentration camps were. This is truly reprehensible. Whilst I would not go as far as to say that every German should feel guilt over the Holocaust even to this very day, it is the height of historical illiteracy to pretend that the wider German population of the 1930s and 40s, which was enthusiastically pro-Nazi for much of that time, was somehow innocent of the crimes that were perpetrated against Jewish people. The Jew-killing death squads of the SS and regular German army certainly had people of working-class backgrounds in their ranks. The writer of this nauseating article even goes so far as to say that ‘The capitalists push this idea in order to cover up for the responsibility of capitalism in this terrible crime and also to hide the fact that millions of German and Austrian workers were opposed to Hitler, and many Socialists, Communists and Trade Union activists also died in his camps.’ With this sentence, the unique evil of the Holocaust is overlooked. Jewish victims were simply part of the general ‘victims of capitalism’ that perished at the hands of Nazi oppression. The idiot who wrote this article is obviously unaware of the fact that those Communist and Socialist activists were complicit in the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and failed miserably in protecting the German Jews – as this brilliant Commentary article from 2014 demonstrates. Whilst we can be appalled at their deaths, this does not take away from the unique evil done to the Jewish people, not because they were enemies of capitalism or anything like that, but because they were Jews. The Nazis did not discriminate between ‘Jewish capitalists’ and ‘Jewish workers’. It is just as well that the Marxist version of the Holocaust is not being taught to our children in schools. There would rightly be outrage if this was the case.
This Marxist attitude towards the Holocaust has a long history. Throughout the Cold War, East Germany refused responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it on German capitalism, and refused to pay reparations to Israel. It also persecuted Jews within its borders and disseminated anti-Semitism, along with the other Marxist states of Eastern Europe, under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’. Far-left crackpots that want to finger-wag about how the Holocaust was the product of ‘capitalism’ forget this. Turns out even ‘workers’ states’ can be anti-Semitic. Of course, even this will be blamed by Trotskyists on ‘Stalinism’ and ‘remnants of capitalism’, rather than on their criminal ideology.
As if the article was not bad enough, it goes on to say that Israel’s existence will provoke ‘a new Holocaust’ (presumably by angry Arabs) and that Jewish Zionists are the pawns of Israeli capitalists. I do not have to explain why this is utterly mendacious anti-Semitism. It also brings up the myth of Zionist-Nazi collaboration (ignoring the fact that the Lehi was some fringe group of extremists disowned by the mainstream movement, that the Nazis did not respond to Avraham Stern’s request for help in building a Jewish state and that Stern vowed to fight the Nazis if they invaded Palestine).
That was not the end of it. I found yet another article, from 2010, written by another Israeli sympathiser/member. I dissected this one on Twitter as well. The whole article is an exercise in demonisation, de-legitimisation and double standards. The article describes the Jewish Zionist settlers who came to Israel from Europe as colonisers, even describing them as ‘Europeans’ (so as to erase their Jewish heritage, thereby denying their legitimacy to the land). The writer alleges that the settlers ‘did not ask permission’! He ignores the fact that Zionist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went to great lengths to raise money from wealthy sympathisers so they could purchase plots of land in Palestine from Arab landlords for settlement. Jews had in fact been migrating to Palestine for centuries, but Jewish migration began in earnest only with the Zionist movement. True, there were Arabs living there already, but there was also a minority of Jews who had lived there for centuries. Yet the Arabs are described as ‘indigenous’, and the Jews as invaders! The Jewish settlers built up villages, schools, hospitals, farming communities etc and sought to live in peace with their Arab neighbours. Not a hair on an Arab’s head was harmed by these people. This did not stop Arabs from making unprovoked, anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish settlements throughout this whole period. Only after a long period of restraint did the Jews form militias to fight back and defend themselves.
Perhaps the most reprehensible part of the article is where he compares the Jewish Zionist settlers to the British colonists who settled in North America and slaughtered the native tribes who already resided there. Peaceful Zionist settlement is equated to the worst genocidal imperialism of the old European empires. A truly disgusting example of anti-Semitism.
Beyond all these horrific examples of anti-Semitism, I thought I would do a little experiment. The far-left is renowned for its obsessive focus on Israel to the exclusion of all other countries. I thought that the best way of testing this would be to see how many articles are published on the IMT website about Israel compared to, say, China or America, countries which are of far more importance on the world stage, and whose politicians are far more corrupt, racist and reactionary than Israel’s.
I came up with the following estimates:
Israel: over 250 articles (I think I got to 259, though I may have missed a few)
China: 152 articles
United States: 645 articles
Russia: 117 articles!
If you want to know how I calculated the figures, I counted all the articles about Israel one by one as they appeared in the ‘Israel’ category of the website’s search results, using my phone. For China and the United States, I did it much more quickly. Since every ‘page’ has approximately 15 articles (with the exception of the very last page), I just multiplied the number of articles by the number of pages. If you don’t believe me, you can do it yourself:
https://www.marxist.com/israel-and-palestine/
https://www.marxist.com/china.htm?types[0]=1&start=0
https://www.marxist.com/united-states.htm
https://www.marxist.com/russia.htm?types[0]=1&start=0
These figures are incredible. China, which is the world’s second-largest economy, which is America’s main rival along with Russia, which is rapidly gaining influence throughout the globe, which is run by a repressive, totalitarian dictatorship, which is committing genocide against a large minority group, only has 152 articles dedicated to criticism and analysis of its political and economic situation. Russia (contemporary, post-Soviet Russia) has even less. By contrast, tiny Israel, which is of limited significance on the world stage, has a whopping 259 articles dedicated to demonising and attacking it. That is to say, the amount of IMT articles about Israel is 40% higher than the amount of IMT articles written about China. I can anticipate what excuse will be made for this discrepancy. The IMT leadership will probably excuse their disproportionate focus on Israel by saying that China’s totalitarian state prevents them from getting sufficient information, whereas information from Israel is more forthcoming. This excuse should be taken with a pinch of salt. Firstly, if true, then it would just show that Israel isn’t the repressive tyranny they make it out to be, thereby undermining their attacks against it. But apart from that, their disproportionate focus on a tiny Jewish state in the Middle East compared to the articles they run on a behemoth like China is very instructive on the kinds of prejudices the IMT seems to have towards Jews specifically. Moreover, China is an enemy of the West, and, like Russia, used to be a ‘workers’ state’, so it is not criticised as harshly as a state allied to ‘Western imperialism’ might be. Now and then, the IMT will run an article denouncing Chinese capitalism and Chinese imperialism, but nowhere near as regularly and vigorously as they denounce Zionism and Israeli ‘imperialism’.
Now, when we compare Israel and the United States, it is the other way around. America, in absolute terms, has a lot more articles written about it, just as we might expect. However, the gap is nowhere near as stark as you might expect. There are around two and a half times as many articles about the U.S. as there are about Israel. That is actually much smaller than you might imagine. When you consider the fact that the U.S. is the world’s only superpower, whilst Israel is just a regional power, it is surprising that the proportion of articles about America relative to Israel isn’t even higher than it is. A quick Google search shows that Israel only has 1.8% of America’s GDP, and only 3% of its population, and only 0.23% of its total landmass, yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the IMT’s constant stream of articles attacking the country. You would imagine that Israel and America were almost equal in their commitment to promoting world reaction. You would forget that it is Russia that is undermining liberal democracy worldwide and propping up a murderous Middle Eastern despot in Syria. You would forget that it is China that is committing genocide against part of its population. You would sincerely believe that the hand of Israel is behind all that is bad in the world. You might even think the Israeli embassy had a hand in undermining Jeremy Corbyn.
The International Marxist Tendency is an anti-Semitic organisation. All the evidence that I have shown here and elsewhere proves it, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It happily publishes articles by anti-Semites filled with the most reprehensible anti-Israel propaganda. It appears to promote Holocaust denial. It enthusiastically backs anti-Semitic political figures like Corbyn, Williamson and Walker. It wants to dissolve Israel and replace it with some pie-in-the-sky Socialist Federation, where Jews will be a permanent minority. It blames Jews for anti-Semitism because of their support for Zionism. Its founder called Zionism a ‘crime’ and equated it to the Holocaust. The evidence is there in black-and-white. There is no denying that this accursed cult, this sinister sect, is among the sordid promoters of anti-Semitism on the far-left, and should be expunged from civilised society.