    Jews and the Empire

    By Israel Shamir

    (A Talk given in the House of Lords, Westminster, on February 23, 2005)

    Ladies and Lords, Gentlemen, Friends,

    It is a great honour for this small writer from far-away Jaffa to speak
    to you in this ancient abode of democracy and aristocracy intertwined,
    and I wish to thank my host tonight, my dear brother, his lordship Nazir
    Ahmed of Rotherham in the heather-bound Yorkshire. I would give much to
    have another dear friend present here, the late Sir Robin, Lord
    Phillimore for much of my love and understanding of England is due to
    this friendship. I was but a pup, a young journalist, who came to work
    at your renowned BBC, and the Lord Phillimore was my bridge and my guide
    to the good old England of Pickwick Papers, for his home stood in this
    most English swat of land near Henley-on-Thames. Thus England became a
    love of my youth, England of pubs serving Brakespear Old Fashioned ale,
    of neat green squares of Kensington where I lived, of milk bottles on
    doorstep, of the punchy smell of bacon-and-eggs and burned toast in the
    morning, of the pleasant feel of the Guardian pages, of the calm
    bonhomie of English people, of your lovely maidens who are able to
    propose and prepare a nice cup of tea in the least suitable moment, of
    your men with their fair play, the green sweet and somewhat parochial
    England of Blake, Hopkins, Waugh and G K Chesterton, England as opposed
    to the Empire.

    Much as I love England I came to dislike the Empire. The Empire was a
    vile 19th century invention. The Empire ruined Iraq and used poison
    gases against its citizens long before the present Bush-and-Blair
    offensive. No land was too far or too near to be safe from the Imperial
    assaults: from Shimonoseki in South of Japan to Gondor in mountains of
    Ethiopia, from Beijing to Archangelsk, from the fishermen’ city of
    Oriente in Brittany to Baghdad, from Dublin to Kandagar, from Dresden in
    Saxony to Akka in Palestine, the Empire bombed them all. And I do not
    speak of some long gone days of Queen Anne, but of last hundred fifty
    years since the fateful accent of your first Zionist ruler, Lord
    Beaconsfield.

    In our country, in Palestine, much of present sorrows are result of the
    Imperial intervention. The first Intifada, the great Arab revolt of
    1936-1939, caused by the creeping Zionist takeover, was crushed by the
    Imperial forces with great severity. Thousands of native Palestinians
    were killed, executed, hanged, expelled from their land. The Arab
    defeat, al-Nakba of 1948 can’t be understood without the context of the
    previous Imperial war against the Palestinians. The Zionist armies
    administered the coup-de-grace to the disarmed, bleeding, powerless
    rural population whose elite and best fighters were eliminated by the
    Empire.

    Oh, you say, why should we remember it now? We can’t let bygones be
    bygones for the Empire is not a thing of past. Like a monstrous parasite
    it migrated after sucking the juice of the Brits. Its capital was
    relocated to Washington and New York, while England remained a
    subservient part of Empire, a Greece to the New Rome, or rather a Tyre
    to the new Carthage. Not only your RAF assists the Americans, but your
    BBC, once a paragon of objectivity, became a propaganda tool for the New
    Empire.

    I did not come to condemn you but to offer my condolences, for England
    is one of the Imperial victims. I came first time to your land some
    thirty years ago, and since then the Empire eats you up as much as it
    eats everybody else. London became a faceless cosmopolitan city, your
    cinema is destroyed, your streets are taken by international chains of
    shops, your newspapers belong to Zionists, and there is a danger the
    English will be turned into human dust by the Imperial burden as the
    Romans and Macedonians of old, to be followed by the Americans.

    The Empire is not particularly good for people, including the people of
    the mother country. Let us consider Palestine. Thousands of young
    British men died in order to conquer Palestine and give it to the Jews.
    They committed many atrocities, killed a lot of natives, and enforced
    Jewish supremacy in Palestine. They received no gratitude. Elder people
    maybe remember the subsequent Zionist terrorist attacks on the British
    troops, the assassination of Lord Moyne, maybe they remember the two
    British sergeants who were kidnapped and hanged by the Jews, and their
    dead bodies were defiled, booby-trapped by the killers. Menachem Begin,
    our late Prime Minister, was particularly proud of it. Younger people
    won’t even know it, for your media, the mind and the nervous system of
    the nation, is hijacked by Zionists like Conrad Black and Murdock, and
    they won’t allow this knowledge to be remembered.

    But it is vital to remember, for the new empire continues the ways of
    the old. Now in Iraq, the US and its British dependency continue the
    same old fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, for
    England – or even English business – has no need to be in Baghdad and
    Basra. Indeed, in the Middle East we have just one reason for wars,
    terror and trouble – and that is Jewish supremacy drive. In our country,
    Israel or Palestine, we can have peace today, if we were to agree to
    equality of Jew and non-Jew. But this principle, so carefully observed
    in Europe, is anathema to the Jews in Israel. Like in England before the
    reforms of 1832, your predecessors would not agree to equality of a lord
    and a commoner before the law; or in Rhodesia of Ian Smith, the white
    settlers did not want to be equal with the blacks.

    Well, so Jews do not want to be equal. But why should you assist them in
    their pursuit of supremacy? There is an American joke [of Jay Leno]: "If
    God doesn’t destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an
    apology." Indeed, if England keeps supporting the apartheid Jewish
    state, it owes an apology to Rhodesia and South Africa. Why, indeed, it
    does? This is not a rhetoric question. Why the New Empire went to war,
    committed itself to the vast expenses and dangers, antagonised bigger
    part of the world – and all that in the interests of Jewish supremacy?

    In my book – that is the one I came to promote – I try to explain why
    the Jews have a special place in the Imperial conscience. Superficially,
    one can explain it by personalities, by the special position of the
    Neo-cons in Washington and of the Jewish media-lords in the US and
    elsewhere. Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media,
    this mainstay of Imperial thinking; just last month a Rothschild bought
    the French daily Liberacion, and an Israeli citizen bought a TV 4
    channel in Sweden. This is a valid observation, but not sufficient.

    The New Empire, even more than the old one, is infused with Judaic
    values on an ideological and theological level. This is the thing I try
    to deal with, because preoccupation with ethnic or religious origins of
    a person is not only improper but often misleading. Indeed, the
    strongest enemies of the Judaic values are often people of Jewish
    origin. Allow me to mention St Paul, Karl Marx and Simone Weil to make
    my point clear. Another example can be provided by Sir Carl Popper, a
    colleague of yours who referred to the Judaic concept of chosen-ness as
    ‘vile’. He also rejected an approach of a Jewish Year Book to have him
    included, for he said, he does not believe in race and has nothing to do
    with Jewish faith or values – despite his Jewish origin. Do not
    concentrate on ethnics, look for ideology. In your case, Michael Howard
    is less Judaic than Tony Blair, for the first objects to removal of
    British liberties and to sweeping anti-Muslim legislation, while the
    second brought this country into the Iraqi war for Israeli interests.

    While a Judaic tendency is just an ideological tendency, a special
    feeling towards Jews is a symptom of certain pro-Imperial
    predisposition. For instance, Tony Blair is a great supporter of the
    Empire. But even if we would not know that, we would be able to guess:
    for he expressed unlimited support of the Jewish state. The Jewish state
    is the country where a Jew has more rights than a non-Jew. Three to four
    million of our native residents have neither right of vote nor
    citizenship rights for a single fault: they are not Jews. Do not forget,
    Rhodesia was dismantled for the equal sin of ethnic or racial supremacy.

    This feeling that ‘Jews are special’ found now its expression in the
    story of Ken Livingstone and his sin coming hard on the heels of Prince
    Harry and his mishap. Actually, I have heard that at the next costume
    ball, Prince Harry will be dressed as Ken Livingstone. The Ken’s story
    is simple: the Mayor was rude to a hack. Being a journalist, I
    sympathise with the journalist; but being rude to is our professional
    hazard. However, the insult was blown well over normal proportions. If
    Ken would be equally insulting to a member of Royal family, he will be
    forgiven if not encouraged. But here – even the Students’ Union decided
    to ban Ken.

    Your anti-racist feelings do not come into it. Some time ago I watched
    the Hard Talk with Tim Sebastian on the BBC. Tim was grilling a Uganda
    Asian businessman living in England. He told him: well, you Asians in
    Uganda were heavily engaged in the black market activities, smuggled
    hard currency abroad, despised the natives and refused to marry them.
    Actually the same accusations were traditionally levelled against Jews.
    If Tim would just try to say it to a Jew he would be kicked out of his
    job same day. But applied to the Muslims – they did not cause a stir. It
    was just a Hard Talk. So it is not ‘anti-racism’. In my view, this
    unbelievable out-of-proportion response to Ken’s affair shows again a
    mysterious connection of Jews and the new Empire.

    One reason is that Jews like an Empire. If there is a choice between an
    England and an Empire, the Jews prefer an Empire. Benjamin Ginsberg, the
    Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University, wrote a book
    on this subject, called Jews and the State: The Fatal Embrace and he
    attests to this Jewish love of Empire. Any Empire: Franz Josef, the last
    Emperor of Austro-Hungarian Empire, used to say that Jews are the most
    loyal of his subjects. In your country, Disraeli was equally proud of
    his Jewish ancestry and devoted to the Empire-building.

    A Jewish joke tells of two Jewish brothers in revolutionary Odessa; one
    of them emigrated to England and became a peer of the realm, another one
    remained in Russia, suffered as much as anybody, and eventually the
    Russian brother was invited by his British brother to London. The
    brother arrived, received English citizenship, had whale of time, went
    to Covent Garden, maybe to the Palace, at night the brothers come home,
    and the Russian brother began to cry. “Oh do not cry, told him the
    English brother, you had your life, I had mine, it could happen other
    way around.” “You did not understand me, - says the Russian brother, - I
    weep for India we have lost”.

    This love of Empire explains the easiness Jews change their allegiance –
    indeed, the same people who were all for the Russian or French or
    British Empire now became ardent supporters on the new American Empire.
    Simple minds call it ‘treacherous behaviour’, but it is actually love of
    Empire per se, and it does not matter who is the titular head of this
    Empire: Jews are good for an Empire, as long as they feel the Empire is
    good for them.

    Now, there is a large and thriving Muslim community in England. In my
    view, Islam is a form of Christianity, even nearer to the Nicene Creed
    than some Pentecostals or other American denominations. What is more
    important, they are now on the side of freedom, against the Empire, and
    they are not afraid of enforcers of Judaic values, Jewish or Gentile.
    This community is very important in order to turn the tide. Let us hope
    that its introduction will be important for England’s future.

    This is the right time to overcome left-right divide: if Michael Howard
    stands on the right –for liberties - and Blair stands on the left – and
    for anti-Muslim legislation, for police control and for war, the terms
    have little relevance today. There are friends and enemies of the Empire
    in all your major political parties, and equally all the parties are
    Zionist-infiltrated. There is a need for new realignment in order to
    unite anti-Imperial forces for full withdrawal of British troops from
    overseas, for independence of England from the American Empire.

    In the Apple Cart by Bernard Shaw, the US makes a bid to take over
    England, and a wise monarch keeps its independence. Disentanglement of
    England from the US embrace is much needed, an answer to the Boston Tea
    Party is called for.