For the left, conspiracies tend to revolve around Jewish political influence in Washington and London. When the Jewish National Fund established a Bill Clinton Reservoir in Israel, rebel Labour MP George Galloway described it as "his just desserts, no doubt, for sterling services in the Israeli cause and a reminder of services to come from Hilary (sic)". The left-wing Palestine Solidarity Campaign complained in one of its leaflets that the British government uses Lord Levy, a "wealthy British Jew", as an envoy to the Middle East. For many on the left, the idea that American foreign policy is driven by secretive and malevolent Jewish power is all too easy to accept. Even the universally admired South African human rights advocate former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in an article for the quality left-of-centre newspaper, The Guardian, compared the US Jewish lobby to the governments of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin as a force for evil in the world.
The broad-based anti-globalisation movement uses the various Indymedia websites around the world as a central resource, for contact, discussion and organization. Activists use the sites to give notice about events, campaigns and demonstrations. Thus, while we might ordinarily dismiss posters on such sites as cranks, to do so in this case would be to misunderstand and underestimate the importance of the Internet for left-wing organizing. Left-wing messages about Israel or the Jewish community reveal a worrying pattern of antisemitism. One posting on the UK Indymedia website claimed the Rothschilds are behind the drive for war in Iraq; according to another, "Jews/Israelis/Zionist (sic) call them what you will, they control the worlds media…there should be a serious debate about Jews and their role in the world". Another post, opposing the creation of an Eruv in London, argued: "What right do these people have to occupy part of our capital city for their own ethno-religious activity? If they want wire fences whey don't they go to Auschwitz and stay there." In July 2002 an anti-globalisation march in Strasbourg came to a standoff when some of the marchers wanted to attack a synagogue on the march route, and other marchers had to physically prevent them from doing so.
Left-wing liberation politics treats victimhood as the ultimate badge of honour for any oppressed people, and for some years after the Holocaust, the Jews held a special place for the left as the ultimate victims of fascism. The fact that the central message most Jews derived from the Holocaust was a Zionist one therefore creates obvious problems for the modern left (despite the fact that their political forebears supported the creation of Israel in 1948). So the delegitimisation of Israel has inevitably included a denial of Jewish victimhood, most commonly expressed through the equation of Zionism with Nazism, and the description of Israel as a genocidal state perpetrating a new Holocaust on the Palestinians. What originated as a Stalinist propaganda slogan has become almost mundane in the literature, and on the demonstrations, of the far left - most of whom, ironically, abhor Stalinism in their political outlook. For some, Israel is actually worse than Nazi Germany. According to Ray Davies, a Labour politician who is vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Wales, "Hitler's Nazi regime occupied Europe for four years only. Palestine and the West Bank have been occupied for 40 years". The former Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally in London, claimed that "Zionism had exceeded Nazism". Others accommodate their conflicting views of Jews by differentiating, in the crudest of terms, between the good Jewish victims of history and modern-day bad Jewish oppressors: a letter in the left wing Morning Star newspaper claimed that "Israel, and all that Israel has done and is doing, is an affront to all those millions who fought and died fighting fascism…the good Jews were all killed in the concentration camps."
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