We Need a Union-Centred Militia to Defend the Workers Movement and Democratic Rights!
On 18th January, Keir Starmer’s Zionist ‘Labour’ government launched an all-out attack on the right to protest the genocide of the Palestinian people. Two days previously, the agreed route of the national Palestine Demonstration, which was scheduled to begin at the BBC Headquarters at Portland Place, Central London, which has been a regular starting point for the dozens of marches against the genocide that have taken place over the last 15 months, was declared a forbidden zone. On the day, protesters were instead directed to gather in Whitehall. They were in fact blocked in Whitehall and prevented from marching anywhere else by police lines and a large cohort of police vans. Paramilitary cops were mobilised from around Britain – some were spotted from as far away as Wales.
As political pressure built up against this abuse of those who had travelled from around Britain to demonstrate against the genocide, the cops actively allowed marchers to allow a contingent to pass through police lines to march northward to place flowers and children’s clothes at the BBC. Having left Whitehall, that contingent was stopped again in the North-West corner of Trafalgar Square, which is only yards away from the top of Whitehall. They agreed to lay their flowers at that point in Trafalgar Square, but were then attacked by the police, and the chief steward of the march, Chris Nineham, vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition, was arrested in a outrageously physical manner by these thugs. He was kept in Walworth Police Station overnight and eventually charged under ‘Public Order’ legislation with leading an illegal march.
He has been given outrageous bail conditions that amount to a apartheid South African style ‘banning order’ in effect – he is not allowed to attend any kind of protest whatsoever. Now it appears that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Labour left MP’s, are to be ‘interviewed under caution’ by the police for their participation in the march out of Whitehall, which the cops agreed to. It appears that orders then came from above, perhaps from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, or Starmer himself, to set this trap with the police lines and then smash the march up. This after the cops tore up the route of the march from Portland Place, which was agreed with them by the organisers weeks ago, on the obviously politically motivated say-so of Zionist politicians, and their far-right Rabbi friend. What Corbyn and McDonnell may or may not be charged with is anyone’s guess, but this is clearly an attempted extension of the Zionist witchhunt in the Labour Party to the sphere of the state and so-called ‘law and order’. Its completely fraudulent, desperate stuff, necessarily so because in the face of a holocaust committed by Zionists, the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear has little traction outside the circles of true believers in the Zionist cult within the ruling class. So they resort to crude lying, thuggery and frame ups instead
Their fraudulent story is that supposedly a synagogue in Great Portland Street, which is not even on the route of the banned march, would allegedly be ‘disrupted’ on a Saturday afternoon (the Jewish Sabbath) by a Palestinian event in the vicinity. This is clearly a politically motivated fraud, as apart from the Synagogue being a third of a mile away from the BBC HQ, on a different road entirely, the Rabbi in charge, Barry Lerer, is a far-right extremist who travels to Jerusalem for the annual ‘March of Flags’ though the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in East Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia:
“The event, which passes through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter in East Jerusalem, is regularly attended by far-right Jewish Israelis, including the far-right Lehava organisation, and is often accompanied by violence, especially against the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Attendees have been regularly seen chanting racist and anti-Arab slogans such as “death to Arabs,” “A Jew is a soul, an Arab is the son of a whore,” and “may your villages burn”…. Palestinian residents frequently shutter their businesses and homes on the day of the march for fear of being subjected to violence from Israeli marchers, or after being ordered to do so by the Israel Police, who also institute closures and checkpoints in and around the Old City.” ?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Day_march)
Under the incitement of Keir Starmer, whose support for Zionism “without qualification” is a matter of public record, the Metropolitan Police behaved toward Palestine Solidarity Protesters rather like the Zionist cops described above.
The ceasefire in Gaza marks a serious political defeat for the Zionists, and that has driven some of these people into a frenzy. The attacks on democratic rights come from a position of weakness, not strength. The Zionist cult, which appears to have Western politics sewn up, is in deep trouble and could implode. Knowledge of Israel’s holocaust has not been possible to suppress – it is the best known genocide in history thanks to social media.
Crude police thuggery and racism, 1970s style, has made an overt comeback in Britain over the Gaza protests. Video went viral of the cops brutally and repeatedly punching an Asian man, Waseem Yusuf, who was carrying a Palestinian flag at a protest event in Tower Hamlets in July. He was released without charge at the time, though he was injured and subject to medical treatment ever since. Now he has been charged with resisting arrest and ‘assaulting’ the thugs who are clearly visible brutally beating him.
Zionism is as potently anti-democratic and genocidal as Nazism, as millions are learning. And the working class movement does have the means to defend itself against such threats. It comes from the tradition of the Bolsheviks, not British social-democracy. As Leon Trotsky noted in the 1938 Transitional Programme, which crystallised that experience:
“In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defence. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defence, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.
“It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press.”
The fascistic nature of Zionism, and the permeation of bourgeois politics by the cult of Zionism, means that the working-class movement must re-discover the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism in combatting fascism. The future depends on it.
