The lynching of Jackie Walker
TONY GREENSTEIN 12 October 2016
https://www.opendemocracy.net/tony-greenstein/lynching-of-jackie-walker
The attacks on Jackie Walker and others are political, a determined effort by the Israel lobby to make Britain’s Labour Party safe for Israel and Zionism.
Jonathan Brady/Press Association. All rights reserved.
At the end of last week Jackie Walker, who was Vice Chair of Momentum’s Steering Committee, was suspended from the Labour Party. Although no reasons were given there is little doubt that it was as a result of allegations of anti-Semitism made by the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM].
The Jackie Walker affair began in May of this year when a private Facebook discussion between Jackie and a friend of hers was broken into by the Israeli Advocacy Movement. The IAM, which describes its purpose as to ‘counter the increasing hostility Israel suffers at the hands of the British public’, has no visible means of support. It is likely that its operations, including two staff, are funded as part of the campaign against Boycott Divestment and Sanctions run by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs [MOSA]. MoSA’s remit includes co-ordinating and organising anti-BDS activities globally. It has a $50m budget.
Jackie was suspended in May and after an outcry was quickly reinstated about three weeks later. This was a decision that the Zionist movement and the JLM have never accepted.
What was Jackie Walker’s offence?
In the course of a complex and nuanced Facebook conversation Jackie Walker declared, ‘I will never back anti-Semitism but neither am I a Zionist’. The friends spoke about her combined Jewish-African heritage, the suffering involved in the slavery movement, and ‘the Holocaust’ as a debt owed to the Jews, to which Jackie responded:
I hope you feel the same towards the African holocaust? My ancestors were involved in both – on all sides… millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues to this day on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews and many Jews, my ancestors too, were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade… so who are the victims and what does it mean . We are victims and perpetrators, to some extent by choice. And having been a victim does not give you a right to be a perpetrator.
In the light of subsequent accusations it seems clear that Jackie wasn’t saying that only Jews were financiers of the slave trade, but acknowledging that her Jewish ancestors were amongst those prominent in financing the African slave trade. One side of her family had been involved in the enslavement of the other side of her family.
The Israel lobby in Britain doesn’t do nuance. Their role, with the aid of the mass media, is to shout down all opposition with megaphone propaganda. The Jewish Chronicle which was handed the transcript of Jackie Walker’s Facebook comments went to town in the best traditions of the tabloid press, leading with the headline ‘Labour suspends Momentum supporter who claimed Jews caused ‘an African holocaust’.
On the basis of this egregious lie, the campaign against Jackie Walker, a dedicated and long standing anti-racist activist, began. Stepping up the hype, the Community Security Trust’s Dave Rich claimed in The Left’s Jewish Problem, that what Jackie Walker wrote was an echo of a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship - Between Blacks and Jews. In an act of calculated hyperbole, he quotes the American historian of slavery, Eugene D. Genovese, when Genovese says that this book “rivals in… fantasy and gross distortion”, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – rightly termed a ‘warrant for genocide’.
There is a longstanding academic debate on ‘Jewish involvement in slavery'...
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