https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-elephant-in-room-stalinist-legacy.html
Tony Greenstein's Blog

Socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist
24 September 2023

Why does the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain harbour within its ranks an open racist & Zionist Mary Davis?

'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn - the Big Lie'
A friend of mine sent me a copy of the Communist Review (CR), journal of the Communist Party of Britain. In it was an article ‘The contested relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’ (No 108, summer 2023) by Mary Davis.
I wrote to the Editor of CR, twice, offering a reply but I had no response. I then wrote to Mary Davis challenging her to a debate. Suffice to say the good Professor did not respond either, which is no surprise since her article is indefensible.
I couldn’t find Davis’s article on the Internet. I have therefore put it on myself. It is as if the CPB didn’t want to wash their dirty linen in public!
Corbyn made capitulating under pressure and throwing his friends to the Zionist wolves into a fine art
What I did find was another article in the Morning Star The socialism of fools: anti-semitism in the Labour Party?, by Mary Davis of July 27 2019. Davis’ article accepted the anti-Semitism smears of the Labour right and the Zionists that led to the fatal undermining of Jeremy Corbyn and the left leadership of the Labour Party.
For a party that calls itself ‘Communist’ this is shocking. Is the CPB unaware that the ascent of Corbyn to the leadership was bound to set off a reaction in the British Establishment and the form their narrative took was ‘anti-Semitism’?
Despite claiming to be a Marxist Davis ran with the Zionist fable that anti-Semitism had been one unchanging phenomenon for 2000 years. She didn’t attempt to analyse the different forms anti-Semitism has taken historically, in particular the distinction between feudal and racial anti-Semitism.
Briefly feudal or Christian anti-Semitism was from below. For Marxists it represented the economic antagonism between the peasants and the Jews as the agents of within an economy based on use values. With the advent of imperialism in the late 19th century anti-Semitism took on a racial form.
Wilhelm Marr's pamphlet ' The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism, 1879'

In 1879 Wilhelm Marr, who popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’, formed the League of Anti-Semites. To him and his successors once a Jew always a Jew. Whereas the anti-Semitism of Martin Luther ended with conversion to Christianity to the Nazis a Jew was always a Jew. Which is why the phenomenon of the Christian Jew made an appearance under the Nazis. Christian by religion, Jewish by race. They too had to wear a yellow star and they too were destined to be annihilated.
It is as if the CPB has never read Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation. Davis is a relic of Stalinism, which has its own history of anti-Semitism (the Doctor’s plot, Slansky trial etc.). Trotsky was Jewish as were many of the old Bolsheviks who Stalin murdered.
It is not surprising that Davis has no acquaintance with Leon’s book since Leon was a Trotskyist. In this Marxist classic Leon wrote:

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.

Davis and her co-author Phil Katz subscribe to the Zionist idea of 2000 years of unchanging anti-Semitism. The title of their article ‘The socialism of fools’’ was popularised by August Bebel, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party in a speech to their 1893 Congress.
Davis’article is shocking in that it accepts that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was not an invention of the Zionist Right but was actually true. She argued that there was no contradiction between saying that anti-Semitism was weaponised and also saying that anti-Semitism was a problem. This is a typical Stalinist sleight of hand which Orwell described when he spoke of doublethink.
Despite Gordon Brown appealing to backward racist sentiments using a fascist slogan, he was very much opposed to 'anti-Semitism'
These fools never once asked themselves why, if anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party, it was the Right in the form of Tom Watson and John Mann who were its most ardent advocates. Why Gordon Brown, who used the fascist slogan British Jobs for British Workers, was so disturbed by ‘anti-Semitism’. Why the Daily Mail etc. ran with this nonsense given their own racist record including campaigning against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. How it was that the BBC produced a Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ by the racist Islamaphobe John Ware who is now writing for the Zionist journal Fathom?
Wilhelm Marr
Today, with the advent of Keir Starmer we can see exactly where the anti-Semitism witchhunt has led. If you are Jewish in the Labour Party today you are five times more likely to be expelled than a non-Jew. Indeed if you are Jewish and a member of a proscribed organisation you are 13 times more likely to be expelled. However this is no excuse for Davis’ reactionary verbal gymnastics. Davis asked:
‘Is the charge of anti-semitism in the Labour Party a fiction manufactured by a conspiratorial alliance between the Israeli government and anti-socialist forces seeking to discredit Jeremy Corbyn, thereby undermining the prospect of a left-led Labour government?

Davis even mimics the methodology of the Right. She caricatures opposition to the fake anti-Semitism narrative by portraying its critics as alleging that there was a ‘conspiratorial alliance’ between the Israeli government and the Labour Right. But there is no need for a conspiracy when they already agree on everything. There are very obvious contacts between the two in the form of Labour Friends of Israel and the JLM.

As I show in my recent book Frumka Plotniczki, a Zionist resistance fighter was ordered to abandon the fight in the ghettos & escape to Palestine where the real fight, against the Arabs, was taking place

Davis sought to discredit opponents of the anti-Semitism witchhunt on the grounds that Corbyn accepted that there was a problem.

The fact is that the leadership of the Labour Party itself has acknowledged that there is an anti-semitic element within its ranks.

Corbyn acknowledged that there was a problem because he never understood the attack in the first place. Since his strategy was to appease the right he was in the end forced to accept the legitimacy of their fake narrative. I said at the time to every meeting I addressed that Jackie Walker, Marc Wadwsorth, Ken Livingstone and myself were collateral damage. It was Corbyn they were after. Unfortunately Corbyn preferred to throw us under the bus but it didn’t help him because the Zionists main aim was to remove him.

Davis cited John McDonnell to prove her case but she must have known that McDonnell was the arch exponent of appeasement. When Corbyn was called an anti-Semite by Margaret Hodge McDonnell rushed to her defence saying that this shyster, who the BNP had sent a bouquet of flowers to for her Houses for Whites policy, had ‘a good heart’.

The Morning Star's Editor Ben Chako

Mary Davis is ironically an inheritor of the Stalinist tradition of anti-Semitism on the one hand and support for Zionism on the other. It is strange that the Communist Party of Britain, which claims to support the Palestinians, should carry an article repeating the hoary old Zionist smear that anti-Zionism leads to anti-Semitism. After all Ben Chako, the Editor of the Morning Star, was the guest speaker at the inaugural showing of Jeremy Corbyn –The Big Lie at Conway Hall last February.

During the witchhunt in the Labour Party the Morning Star had a generally good record in defending the left. For example they carried a poem by the late and great Kevin Higgins on my expulsion and an article ‘Like the boy who cried wolf’ by me.

The time has come for the CPB to make a choice between supporting the Palestinians, including dropping its support for the apartheid two state solution and harbouring a Zionist cuckoo. It cannot do both. It wouldn’t have given time of day to a supporter of South Africa apartheid so why does it do so in the case of Israeli apartheid?

Tony Greenstein