Sent: 08 December 2009 18:50
To: UCU activists e-group
Subject: [activists] speakers at UCU meetings

I believe that UCU does genuinely try to put equality at the heart of everything it does, which does not mean that mistakes do not occasionally happen. In general, everyone to whom we provide a platform as part of a UCU event should have a positive record on equality issues or at least not be guilty of making prejudiced or otherwise hate-motivated public statements. I am not suggesting that we vet speakers. However, when information about speakers becomes available we should evaluate it to determine both its reliability and seriousness. With regards to the reliability of the information its source is particularly important.

In this case of Mr Masuku, an invitation to the international secretary of a Congress of Trade Unions should not have been problematical. However, when further information became available from the South African Human Rights Commission we should have acted on this, unless we felt that there had been a miscarriage of justice or that the SAHRC is not a reputable body. I am assuming it is, though willing to be corrected on this. When a speaker who had made homophobic comments was invited to a stop the war conference that we were involved with, we and other trade unions very rightly made representations to stop the war and the speaker was withdrawn.

Her queries are well-made. We would answer some of her comments:

• Mr Masuku’s remarks were publicly available all over the Internet and reported in the South African media. In a Google-search for “Bongani Masuku”, the first result is a report of these remarks, dated March.
• Mr Masuku was proactively invited by UCU to attend the private boycott conference. This was not a situation where UCU simply failed to do its research; it must have done some research on Mr Masuku, otherwise why invite him in the first place?
• Mr Masuku has not denied making the comments in question. He can’t, as some of them are in writing and some of them were recorded at the time.
• The South African Human Rights Commission is a respected body in South Africa, run by veteran anti-apartheid campaigners and human rights lawyers. It is a key part of the post-apartheid settlement in South Africa.

Gavin Reid is a pro-boycott campaigner and UCU activist who chaired the BRICUP event in Leeds last night. Mr Masuku was originally supposed to speak at the event but he didn’t turn up. Gavin Reid answered the UCU Activist above as follows:

Gavin Reid
To: UCU activists e-group
Subject: RE: [activists] speakers at UCU meetings

I chaired a meeting tonight in Leeds ‘Israel, the Palestinians and Apartheid’. Around 200 people attended from the Yorkshire region to listen to speakers from ANC, Cosatu, War on Want and the Palestinian campaign for BDS. I can assure the list that everybody at the meeting contributed with respect for each other’s positions, indeed I made it a requirement of their continuing presence at the meeting. In case the question arises, Leeds UCU did not contribute any funds to the meeting and a collection was taken to cover costs.

Mr Masuku was not present as he has since returned to South Africa via Botswana at the weekend. I understand that he categorically denies any accusations of racism and that Cosatu has issued a statement relating to this in SA today. It goes without saying, I hope, that UCU would not share any platform with any known racist. I certainly would not do so either.

I further understand that the position adopted by the SA Human Rights Commission was apparently taken without Mr Masuku being allowed to refute the ‘charges’ and is, therefore, likely to be subject to legal action in SA. Certainly there will need to be a more careful analysis than that currently being presented as fact by others.

The Pro-Israel lobby tried unsuccessfully to have the meeting banned on the basis of the reports of Mr Masuku’s position. The University of Leeds has a protocol on Freedom of Expression that has provided a strong framework for ‘controversial’ meetings to take place, despite making an almost prohibitively expensive charge for the use of the room!

Mr Reid’s response gives a misleading impression. He says (above):

“I further understand that the position adopted by the SA Human Rights Commission was apparently taken without Mr Masuku being allowed to refute the ‘charges’”

Note the scare-quotes around the word ‘charges’. But the SAHRC Ruling, available online since Friday and in the possession of UCU, speaks clearly in paragraphs 23 and 25 about:

“[Masuku's] response to the allegations put to him by the South African Human Rights Commission”

He also says (above)

“I understand that he categorically denies any accusations of racism”

Mr Masuku does not deny making the comments, comments found by the SAHRC to be Hate Speech. Does UCU believe that someone accused of racist Hate Speech has to actually admit that his comments were racist before it will take action?

As British Jewish community organisations, we believe that racism in all its forms must be confronted. We have a history of working together with allies throughout British civil society, to foster an atmosphere of tolerance and respect where racists are unable to succeed.

We are appalled that the University and College Union brought Bongani Masuku to Britain. The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) recently found that Mr. Masuku’s statements amounted to hate speech against Jews and Israelis. Furthermore, the SAHRC found that he “surely intended to incite violence and hatred”.

UCU hosted Mr Masuku, the International Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, as a participant in a ‘private’ conference on boycotting Israel. During his visit to the UK for this conference, Mr Masuku is also touring the country to promote a boycott of Israel on university campuses.

As the largest Union in Further and Higher Education and a self-proclaimed campaigner against racism, it is irresponsible and grossly offensive of UCU to bring Bongani Masuku to the UK, given his track record.

UCU has chosen to connect its boycott activities to antisemitism by hosting a man who was found to have engaged in hate speech against Jews. It was unacceptable for UCU to ignore Mr Masuku’s well-publicised remarks before choosing to invite him. The scornful dismissal by UCU of Jewish concerns over the presence of Masuku on British campuses is simply not good enough.

Every year since it was founded, UCU’s Congress has voted to boycott Israeli academics. As well as harming both Israelis and Palestinians and putting up unnecessary barriers to peace, such a boycott effectively discriminates against Jews, both in Israel and in the UK. UCU’s own legal advice says that a boycott of Israeli academics “run[s] a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation” and “would be unlawful and cannot be implemented”.

Given this, UCU’s decision to organise and fund an Israeli boycott conference is bizarre in the extreme. A UCU invitation to Mr Masuku, presumably to share his experience and expertise on the boycott is especially troubling as, in addition to the recent SAHRC finding, he has called for the targeting of “any business owned by Israel supporters” in South Africa – a term that includes most Jewish-owned businesses.

UCU’s hosting of Masuku and their refusal to engage with the concerns of the Jewish community follows a pattern: the Union refused to address the resignations of large numbers of Jewish academics from UCU in recent years, and summarily rejected members’ complaints of antisemitism. UCU has allowed its politics on Israel to override the concerns of its Jewish members and students. It appears that UCU simply does not care about the anti-Jewish impact of its activities.

It is now hard to see how UCU can continue to play a constructive role in the Government Group on Antisemitism and Higher Education when its latest actions are likely to encourage antisemitism. The Government should review UCU’s membership of this group as it has failed to oppose antisemitism inside its own structures. UCU cannot credibly be a part of the solution to antisemitism while its activities are encouraging the problem.

Bongani Masuku has made inflammatory and threatening statements against the South African Jewish community because of their support for Israel. Alana Pugh-Jones of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies says:

Specifically, Masuku had openly and repeatedly stated that COSATU would target Jewish supporters of Israel and “make their lives hell” and urged that “every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.

Ami on Harry’s Place highlighted more examples of Masuku’s threats, and ENGAGE reported that South African Human Rights Commission ruled that Masuku’s comments are Hate Speech. If Masuku does not apologise within 15 days, the Human Rights Commission will take him to court. The commission found:

The comments and statements made are of an extreme nature that advocate and imply that the Jewish and Israeli community are to be despised, scorned, ridiculed and thus subjecting them to ill-treatment on the basis of their religious affiliation.  A prima facie case of hate speech is clearly established as the statements and comments by Mr. Masuku are offensive and unpalatable to society.

Fair Play can now reveal that Bongani Masuku is actually coming to Britain as a guest of UCU.

UCU is hosting a conference on Saturday to strategise on how best to boycott Israel. The agenda of the conference is a secret. The venue is a secret, as are the speakers and attendees. UCU has not told its own membership about the conference and has refused requests for further information – perhaps the conference itself was supposed to be a secret too.

However, we have learnt that Bongani Masuku is one of the invited speakers, along with Kasrils and Barghouti. The BRICUP tour is only an “spin-off” event. UCU has indicated that is paying for international visitors to the conference; this would mean that it is paying for Masuku’s visit to Britain.

We are shocked that UCU would host someone like Masuku, who incites violence against Jews in his home country, as an honoured guest. However, we are not surprised. At its annual conference this year, UCU voted not to investigate why so many of its Jewish members had resigned. One of the arguments against this proposed investigation was that it would undermine the Union’s ability to campaign for the Palestinians.

So UCU members’ subscription money is being used, we believe, to pay for Bongani Masuku to spread his incitement in the UK. UCU is trying to keep this a secret from its own members. UCU is running closed-door strategy meetings on a boycott of Israel, despite its own repeated legal advice that “making a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation“ and therefore “an academic boycott of Israel would be unlawful and cannot be implemented“. And Bongani Masuku is a key guest at this conference.

UCU no longer has any credibility as an anti-racist organisation.

Our Twitter campaign to David Miliband and Downing Street generated nearly 200 messages calling for the UK to walk out when Ahmadinejad spoke. These included many messages from Iranian democracy campaigners.

Yesterday afternoon, David Miliband responded directly to the Twitter campaign. In response to Khoshkeledoc, an Iranian tweeter who had joined the campaign, Mr. Miliband tweeted:

“You’re right the issue is very serious. Walkout depends on what he says. Massive billboard cruising ny in protest.”

Once Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began to speak, it didn’t take long for his inevitable criticism of Israel to veer into classic antisemitic themes. When he said

“It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the US, to attain its racist ambitions”

then the British delegation walked out of the General Assembly chamber. Sweden, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, some South American countries and Israel also walked out or refused to go in at all.

A spokesman for the UK’s UN delegation explicitly said that their walkout was triggered by Ahmadinejad’s “antisemitic” rhetoric.

Well done to everyone who joined the Twitter campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop Ahmadinejad speaking at the UN. But Governments don’t have to sit there and listen to him. They can walk out, as the UK Government and many others did when he spoke at Durban II.

So we’re arranging a quick Twitter campaign to call on the UK Government to walk out while Ahmadinejad speaks.

The message the Fair Play Campaign (@fairplaycg) tweeted is

“Ahmadinejad stole an election and denies the Holocaust. @DMiliband and @DowningStreet should walk out when he speaks at the UN. Please RT”

Obviously everyone should write their own message, but messages should include @DMiliband and @DowningStreet, so that they get seen by advisors to Gordon Brown and David Miliband. Also try to include some note in your tweet to encourage others to join the campaign.

If you’re already a twitter user, this will be the easiest campaign you ever joined. So what are you waiting for, write your tweet now!

“..we need to be much more active, more vocal, in our condemnation of antisemitism.

One issue where that is especially true is academic boycotts of Israeli academics. Totally unacceptable. Whether boycotters realise it or not these modern-day exclusions, based on nationality and tied to religion, carry enormous historical baggage. My party has made it clear we find them morally objectionable, and also counterproductive: the only route to peace will only ever be through dialogue.”

tak[ing] Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust.

This phenomenon is doubtless familiar to readers of this website; the most recent example of this is the play Seven Jewish Children.

Read Prof. Lappin’s full piece on Normblog, here.

Opposition in Britain to Israel’s recent assault on Hamas in Gaza saw the allegation that Israel is in some way analogous to Nazi Germany become a central plank of anti-Zionist propaganda. Yet there is no serious similarity, in scale, intentions or outcome, between the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and Israeli policy in Gaza; which begs the question why it has become such a popular idea, when it causes deep offence to so many Jews.

The Nazi comparison wasn’t just something that appeared on the fringes of anti-Israel activity during this period. George Galloway MP, addressing the crowd at one anti-Israel demonstration in London, had this to say:

“In April and May of 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were surrounded by barbed wire fences, by the occupiers of Poland, and they faced a choice, in the words of the song of the partisans: ‘They could die on their knees or they could live forever’. And they chose to rise up against their occupier, to use their bodies as weapons, to dig tunnels, to fight, not to die in ones and twos of hunger and typhus, but to die as free men and women. Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw Ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943.”

The British Muslim Initiative, one of the organisers of the demonstrations, put it on their placards:

As did the Palestinian Forum in Britain:

And lots of marchers even made their own versions at home.

Plenty of others have weighed in: Gerald Kaufman MP, Ken Livingstone, even a senior figure at the Vatican. There are many more examples. A charge that had previously sat on the fringes of anti-Israel campaigning has taken centre stage, superseding the Apartheid analogy that had previously driven much anti-Zionist discourse.

This is partly because analogies with the Holocaust fit what David Hirsh called “ready-made ways of thinking about Jews”. It’s easy, and it’s lazy, to reach for the Holocaust as the first source for a historical parallel to events involving Israel or antisemitism. But equating Israel to Nazi Germany also serves a political purpose.

Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, invoked the Israel/Nazism comparison because “you have to shout to be heard”: accusing the Jewish state of behaving like Nazis gets attention, even if “The references to the Holocaust and to the Nazi policies were not meant to be literal comparisons”.

Martin Shaw, Research Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex, concedes that it is an “extreme comparison” with several factual flaws, but argues that it is not “objectionable in principle” because “the use of an exaggerated comparison [is] a common ploy in political campaigning”.

John Wight of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, argued that it was appropriate to describe Gaza as a “new holocaust” because “The irony of perpetrators of crimes against humanity claiming to represent victims of one of the greatest ever crimes against humanity is what gives the word ‘holocaust’ in relation to Gaza particular resonance – again, at least for those committed to ensuring that the horrors of the Holocaust are never repeated.”

So Wight, who has previously identified an actor called “international Jewry” that is part of the “hydra-headed monster” known as Israel, thinks that the Holocaust analogy should be used specifically because of the connection between Israel, Jews and the Holocaust. Falk and Shaw acknowledge that Israel is not the same as Nazi Germany, but think it is OK to use the comparison because it provokes a response. No surprise there: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany provokes a response precisely because the Holocaust has a “particular resonance” for Jews.

You might think that an anti-racist would see this as a reason not to make the analogy. But let’s leave such sensitivities to one side for now. More interesting is the idea that, even if the facts don’t fit, the comparison is valid because it has political utility. As Wight explains, Israel “is a state which claims to represent the victims of the Holocaust, which largely derives its moral legitimacy from that monstrous crime, and which has been able to violate and flout international law with impunity in its treatment of the Palestinians as a direct consequence of the international guilt which pervades the ruling classes in Europe and the US over the Holocaust.” Take away the moral weight of the Holocaust, so the argument goes, and Israel loses its right to exist, or least to act as it wishes.

We’ve seen this line of thinking before.

In 1980, Canadian Holocaust Denier Ernst Zundel wrote an open letter to the Muslim world:

The Islamic world has the financial means to publish, broadcast or otherwise disseminate the historical, factual data leading to the truth…. There are at this moment already in existence organizations which, if properly funded, could become the nucleus of an independent, worldwide information network capable of countering the now virtually unopposed Zionist disinformation and hate propaganda networks. One such example is the Zundelsite, a United States based website that has exposed the so-called “Holocaust” as an extortion tool…that yields Israel the money, power and excuse to occupy the Palestinians and to intimidate its neighbours such as Syria, Lebanon, Iran and other Arab nations…. Take the Holocaust away, and you will have severed the financial water well that feeds an evil oligarchy and repressive system!

Or as Scottish Islamist writer Yacub Zaki put it, rather more succinctly:

“David Irving has the right idea, destroy the Holocaust myth and you have destroyed Israel.”

Now, it should be stressed that Wight, Shaw, Falk and the rest are not Holocaust Deniers. On the contrary, they think it is the worst crime ever perpetrated. But what they share with Zundel and Zaki is the idea that any political campaign that aims to significantly change the way Israel is viewed in the West must cut the link between the Holocaust, Israel and the Jews. Instead of denying that the Holocaust took place, it is instead appropriated for anti-Zionist purposes. In this way of thinking, Europe’s outstanding moral debt from the Holocaust is to the Palestinians, not to the Jews, who, having abandoned the universalism that so failed to protect Europe’s Jews from the Nazis, should not expect any special protection from Europe as a consequence of Hitler’s genocide.

So much for the theory. What impact does all this have?

Despite the fantasies of British anti-Zionists that they are contributing to the Palestinian struggle, their anti-Israel activity has a much greater impact in Britain than it ever will in the Middle East. The unprecedented number of antisemitic incidents in Britain during the Gaza conflict has been widely reported. Less tangible, but in some ways more worrying, is the growing sense of vulnerability felt by many British Jews. There are lots of people in Britain who express their hatred for Israel by attacking Jews. And before anyone suggests that Jews should therefore, as a defensive measure, distance themselves from Israel: the attackers don’t stop first to ask their victim what they think of Gaza, or Olmert, or the occupation. The answer to antisemitism is not to tell Jews to change their behaviour.

The greater the hatred for Israel, the greater the hatred for Jews; and nobody is more deserving of hatred than Nazis. In our post-Holocaust, human rights world, it is generally considered a good thing to hate Nazis, who, by their morals and values, stand outside and in opposition to mainstream society. Efforts are made to deny them platforms, disrupt their activities and even attack them physically. If Israel is a Nazi state, then anybody who does not oppose Israel is morally no better than a Nazi. There is only one place this train of thought can end: with the demonisation and social isolation of the vast majority of ordinary British Jews.

It means that when mainstream Jewish community leadership bodies organise a rally with the slogan, “Stop Hamas Terror: Peace for the people of Israel and Gaza”, and launch a Jewish community fundraising campaign for hospitals in both Gaza and Israel during the fighting, Richard Seymour accuses them of “cheerleading the massacre” and concludes that anybody who goes on the rally “ought to be shunned, and treated as the moral and political degenerates that they are.” It means that a research paper published by the School of Oriental and African Studies to investigate “legal aspects of economic and trade issues arising from Israel’s occupation of the OPTs” lists the names, addresses and contact details of kosher food shops in London and Manchester.

Once the central argument of anti-Israel campaigning in this country is that Israel is Nazi Germany, then this is no longer an anti-Zionist movement: it is an antisemitic one, with an antisemitic politics as its driving force.

John Mann MP has put down an Early Day Motion promoting the London Declaration and opposing antisemitism. Write to your MP and ask them to sign EDM 829!

For our guide to EDMs, click here
To find your MP, enter your postcode here

EDM 829

LONDON DECLARATION ON COMBATING ANTI-SEMITISM

That this House notes the inaugural conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition on Combating Anti-Semitism, the attendance of 125 MPs from 40 different countries and the resulting London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism; believes that anti-Semitism is on the rise, at the highest levels since records began in the 1980s; supports the recommendation that every country should have comprehensive hate crime legislation where anti-Semitism is treated equally as a racially or religiously motivated crime, incitement to hate laws and prosecutions of those hosting, unloading or commissioning hate on the internet within their jurisdiction; agrees that more should be done to tackle anti-Semitism on university campuses, ensure better reporting and to secure more convictions for the anti-Semitic hate crimes that take place; calls on all politicians to sign the London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism and for the Government working group to consider how Britain can best implement the Declaration; and calls for a Council of Ministers meeting on the issue of anti-Semitism.

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.

Jeremy Newmark notices the first comment on the article’s webpage (image below).

Read his full piece on EISCA’s blog

Also see Engage’s review of the Indy’s letters page the next day, responding to the article.