Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
When Jean Calder joined with the supporters of genocide in Gaza to oppose ‘anti-Semitism’, she symbolised the problems of Western feminism
Braverman’s dream (& apparently Jean Calder’s)
This blog is a follow up to Anita Patel’s Women’s Place UK : Whitewashing Zionism. When you’ve been friends with someone for 40 years it comes as a shock to realise that they have become an ageing reactionary, an Islamaphobe in particular. All in the name of second wave feminism.
I don’t often write blogs about those I know personally and I’m doing it now because, as the old saying used to go, the personal is political or at least it can be.
Jean was elected to Brighton Borough Council for the Labour Party in 1987. Her husband, Andy Winter was elected in the following year. At that time she was a socialist. I can remember her speaking vehemently in opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 and Tony Benn praising the speech. I accompanied her on a fact finding trip to Northern Ireland. She was a strong supporter of the Republican movement.
Although not actively involved in the Palestine solidarity movement she was always opposed to Zionism and the oppression of the Palestinians.
When six Labour Councillors were suspended at the beginning of the 90’s for refusing to implement the Poll tax she and Andy were amongst them. 30 years though is a long time in politics.
Israeli teens tik tok video mocks the lack of drinking water in Gaza - Jean Calder & Andy Winter have no problem with these neo-Nazi videos
Over the years Jean’s feminism, increasingly framed by the belief that Islam was uniquely misogynist, seemed to drive her to the right and like Anita Patel Fay Weldon and other feminists Jean became increasingly Islamaphobic. I can remember her support for the banning by France of face covering by Muslim women. When I pointed out that this was an invitation to racist and sexual attacks by men on women she seemed unperturbed.
We also had disagreements on transgender people. Although I accept that you can’t just say that a transwoman is a woman biologically, clearly people can identify gender wise with the opposite sex. Jean had difficulties accepting that there were many people who genuinely felt that they had been born in the wrong body and that transgender people were a vulnerable minority who were being targeted by the Right and far-Right.
Jean is not alone in this. There are many feminists who see transgender women as their enemy. This was brought home to me at the picket of the drag queen Aida H Dee at Brighton & Hove libraries in 2022 when feminists joined fascists in trying to prevent parents taking their children to listen to story telling.
When Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour leader in 2015 I expected Jean to welcome it. Not a bit of it. She had some grudge against Corbyn over child abuse in Islington children’s homes although this was the responsibility of the Council leader Margaret Hodge, who engaged in a cover up. She was then rewarded by being made Children’s Minister by Tony Blair.
There were other things that disturbed me such as a hostility to refugees because Jean saw them as single men. I pointed out that when Jews came to Britain from Czarist Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries the men usually came first and when settled brought their families over.
It all came to a head when we were having coffee in the Pavilion Gardens with friends when Jean started joking about Suella Braverman, who lost her job as Home Secretary trying to prevent the demonstrations against genocide in Gaza. All in the name of anti-Semitism of course.
I turned round and said that as far as I was concerned Braverman was a ‘racist bitch’. True it was sexist but if you find racism amusing then you can hardly protest against sexism. That was the last time we talked or met.
I then discovered that Jean had been busy writing articles for Brighton & Hove News, an anti-Palestinian and racist Internet rag as well as on her own blog.
Israeli Teens Get Their Kicks from Palestinian suffering
The article Jean wrote The vital light from candles in the heart of Hove (on her own blog The Canary in the Coalmine), a cliché from Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s Zionist gatekeeper. Her articles were an exercise in superficiality. In Yiddish schmaltz – an exaggerated sentimentality. Fat but no meat.
Apparently Jews have a most sensitive antennae when it comes to racism and anti-Semitism is the most dangerous of all forms of racism. A virus no less. Freedland coined this reactionary metaphor when he fronted the fake anti-Semitism narrative against the left when Corbyn was elected labour leader.
It is reactionary because it divorces racism from society. Instead of poverty, housing shortages, pervasive driving racism we have instead a virus that persists regardless of the political and social climate. And if anti-Semitism is a virus then presumably its target is also pathological. Eternal anti-Semitism was the handmaiden of the Eternal Jew, (Der ewige Jude) which the Nazis produced.
As Leon Pinsker, one of the earliest Zionists wrote:
‘Judeophobia is a mental disease. As a mental disease it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.
This was the basis for the Zionist belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought. If anti-Semitism was incurable or a virus, then there was no point fighting it. Zionism accepted anti-Semitism as the norm, the constant in the relationship between non-Jews and Jews and this laid the basis for the Zionist solution which was to escape from anti-Semitism not fight it.
The vast majority of Jews in Czarist Russia disagreed and fought anti-Semitism which was why so many became revolutionaries. Zionism appealed to the most reactionary Jews and it is with them that Jean Calder has found a political home.
Anti-Semitism today has changed. Now it is the false anti-racism of the Right, having been redefined, not as hostility to Jews but as hostility to Zionism. It is not surprising that this ‘anti-Semitism’ is the only form of racism that Jean’s hero Suella Braverman was concerned about. The woman who said it was her dream to see asylum seekers deported to Rwanda was apparently concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ when it came to marches against Israel’s genocide.
Braverman was treading a well worn path. Even Donald Trump, when not accusing Jews of being disloyal to ‘their country’ (Israel not America!) was concerned about anti-Semitism. Even Steve Bannon, when not fretting about his daughter going to school with Jews, was opposed to anti-Semitism.
In her article Jean was moved to tears that a small group of Zionists had set up a memorial to remember the Jewish victims of October 7. Not once did she ask why it was that there were no candles or words of sympathy for the thousands of children that Israel has murdered in its genocidal attack on Gaza.
If Calder had retained any of her previous critical faculties she might have questioned the sincerity of these mourners. After all if they were really concerned about Israel’s captives in Gaza then they would have joined us in calling for a ceasefire.
The families of these captives have been unanimous in expressing their fear that it is Israeli bombs, not Hamas, that will kill them. In an article Renewed strikes on Gaza bring fear to families of Israeli hostages the Guardian told how
‘The family of Tal Haimi, who is being held hostage by Hamas, fear that he could be injured or killed by Israeli airstrikes’.
The Zionists that Calder embraced are the most vociferous supporters of the Israeli war on Gaza. Whenever BHPSC has demonstrated in favour of a ceasefire they have opposed us.
CNN reported that
Many, including the families of those hostages still held by Hamas, direct their anger toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who dismissed the terms of a ceasefire and hostage deal put forward by Hamas in forthright terms.
Israel admits to killing its own citizens on October 7
"Mass Hannibal" — We killed Israelis on 7 October, says Israeli air force colonel
These Zionists no doubt included Jewish Chronicle columnist Heidi Bachram who described events in solidarity with the people of Gaza as ‘chilling and threatening’ and the chant ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ as ‘genocidal’. Bachram boasted of having reported me to the police for a speech outside Hove town hall. Free speech and Zionists don’t go together. Calder said that she
lit a candle and listened as a man said Kaddish for the dead. ... I realised that not since I was a child had I prayed for the Jewish people. I didn’t think I still needed to. I grew up among racists in Apartheid South Africa.
And therein lies the irony. Although Calder left Apartheid, Apartheid has not left her. She says that
Individual Jewish people are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, yet they are being condemned as if they are.
Perhaps the reason that a few people wrongly blame Jews for what Israel does is because her Zionist friends insist that Israel is a Jewish state. Every time Zionists defend the actions of Israel in the name of British Jews that cannot help but reinforce the notion that Jews are responsible for what is happening in Gaza.
Washington Post plans hit piece over EI's accurate reporting about 7 October, with Ali Abunimah
Hamas
Calder said that
We also need to question why there have been so few public statements of solidarity in response to the Hamas attack. Faced with the horror of Palestinian casualties in Gaza, many non-Jewish progressives have focused on that, preferring to forget the events of 7th October.
Calder’s article on 22 December was over two months after October 7, when over 20,000 Palestinian civilians had already been murdered. Why I wondered was she more concerned about less than 1200 Israeli dead, a third of them soldiers, than over 20 times that number of Palestinian civilians? People living under occupation are entitled to resist their oppressors. Ctd....
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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