If there is one thing that I hope I have made clear over the years I have been running this little blog is that I do not subscribe to any particular ideology and prefer to my retain my political independence sticking to trade union activity where I have been able to make a small difference to at least a few people.
That is not to say I am without my own set of views on certain issues and have concentrated on just a few areas of politics (as I cannot possibly comment on everything) ranging from opposition to political and religious extremism, backing a variety of international trade union issues raised by LabourStart, promoting secularism and opposing religious influence over our rights as individual human beings.
I am a freethinker, secularist and atheist.
I also support the fight for an independent Kurdistan and wish to see Tibet free from Chinese oppression.
I also stand up for Israel.
However given my views on the various "isms" I have never thought of myself as a "Zionist". I get called it a lot. I have a Jewish background (via my mother), but have never been part of the wider Jewish community in part because of where I grew up and also simply because I do not believe in god therefore a trip to the synagogue is not on my "to do" list.
That is not to say I do not self identify as a "Jew", it is a part of my ethnicity (the rest being English) and the older I get the more I realise there is a need to stand up to those who hold one of the oldest and most irrational of prejudices.
The first time I came across an anti-Semite was at a trade union conference where a man sporting a "Palestine Solidarity" badge told me he believed in the free movement of all people..except Jews. He was carted off by another delegate before I recovered from my shock and exploded.
It was at this point I realised that the left had a problem with Jews and that "anti-Zionism" was much, much more than opposition to some of the policies of the Israeli government. This was at the time that the left was beginning to adapt to the growing Islam(ist) agenda and the "two states" solution was being pushed aside in their new found alliance with a backwards religion.
Warning signs had been around for a while. It wasn't just the reactionary and underhanded tactics of the Workers Revolutionary Party who took "Libyan gold" to finance their dreadful daily newspaper but had infected other parts of the left. The main organisation purporting to be the Fourth International (Mandel's USFI) had two organisations in Iran one which opposed the hijab and the other supported it.
What has happened under the mad mullahs is clear for all to see. Women's rights have been destroyed, gays are executed just for being of a different sexual orientation. Christians, B'hai's and anyone else that might prove a danger to the Islamic regime persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, raped and/or executed.
Saudi Arabia is the same. Backwards barbarism, and it's growing across the Muslim world. Activists who want freedom and democracy are in daily danger from these despots yet the left remains silent except for the occasional, token rant about the Saudi's being an agent of "Western Imperialism".
The concentration of the left on the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza leaves them ignoring the rights of the plight of the indigenous Sahrawi people denied their homeland by Morocco in former Spanish Sahara or the Nubians in Egypt or Sudan (let alone the plight of the Copts).
Do the left stand up for Kurdistan oppressed by Turkey, Iran and in the past Iraq? Do they call for action to stop the continuing genocide of the ancient Yazidi community.
No they just attack Israel, the only democracy with a properly elected parliament and independent judiciary in the whole of the region. Their call for the destruction of Israel is part of the deluded ideology of "anti-imperialism" which sees the "West" as evil and those who oppose our democratic way of life as heroes despite the obvious crimes of all the countries they give so-called "critical support" to. Actually these days it's not so "critical" as outright pandering to all the tin pot dictators backwards clergy and recidivist communists from Cuba through Iran to China.
The Jews, Kurds, Tibetans and others do not matter in these peoples world view. The fate of these peoples is irrelevant to the cause.
Red fascism by no other name.
And that's why I stand for Israel. I'm not a "Zionist" but neither do I think it's a dirty word.
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