Seth Mandel: Return of the kingmaker
Indeed, Sharpton had become a fixture in Obamaworld. The seeds for that alliance were planted in 2007. Obama had been getting flak from Jesse Jackson and others for supposedly not supporting black activism enough. Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett was looking for someone from the world of civil rights advocacy to fill the void. That’s when Rev. Al stepped up, reported Jillian Melchior, then at National Review, in 2015. “In late 2007 or early 2008, Jarrett negotiated a simple deal with the reverend: Sharpton would discreetly support Obama for president, working mostly behind the scenes; he wouldn’t publicly criticize Obama, but he also wouldn’t back him in a way that aroused attention.”
That helped change the narrative that the black establishment was with the establishment candidate, Clinton. But Sharpton’s value to the campaign would skyrocket when controversial comments by Obama’s family pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became too much of a headache to be ignored. Obama distanced himself from Wright. “Behind the scenes,” Melchior reported, “the Obama campaign relied on Sharpton to reach out to influential black pastors across the U.S., persuading them not to revolt against Obama for his treatment of Wright.” That earned the trust of "Team Obama," and the relationship continued into the White House.
“His counsel was invaluable,” Jarrett recently told Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times, especially when it came to “pushing back on people he thought were not constructive and unfairly criticizing President Obama.”
Just having Sharpton around, in fact, was a boost for Obama’s standing among black activists, according to Emory University expert on African American politics Andra Gillespie. “There were some concerns that Obama would be symbolically important but would not advocate for substantive change to help the African American community,” Gillespie told the LA Times. “The fact that Rev. Sharpton, who clearly came from an activist background and put race at the forefront and was unafraid to speak out on behalf of African Americans explicitly, put him in a position to lend an air of credibility to the Obama administration.”
Louis Farrakhan heaps praise on antisemitic Ilhan Omar pic.twitter.com/oiqUXBsCPV
— Eye On Antisemitism (@AntisemitismEye) June 26, 2019
David Collier: Fifty-six antisemitic conspiracies- by members of the Labour Party
You are about to enter a twilight zone, a place deep in antisemitic conspiracy. Everyone mentioned has implied that they have been members of the Labour Party. Many explicitly say they joined because of Jeremy Corbyn. Because of the antisemitic nature of these conspiracy theories, ‘Israel, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jewish’ are used interchangeably.Michael Doran: Red Light, Green Light
There will be two images on each conspiracy, the first evidence that the poster is affiliated to the Labour Party, the other an example of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that they shared.
I have created this compilation for a simple reason. Antisemitism is not about what one person says or believes. Antisemitism is a way of seeing the world, an ideology, and the pieces need to be put together for the dangers to be understood properly.
The antisemitic conspiracies
One of the most widespread claims is that Israel did 9/11. I could fill an entire report with images just containing this antisemitic conspiracy theory, however I intend to provide just one example from each of the claims:
Israel is ISIS
Or just fund ISIS:
Israel was behind Charlie Hebdo:
Responsible for the November 2015 attacks in Paris:
The Zionists are behind the attack in Brussels too.
Incredibly, some believe the Zionists even control the Labour Party. Sheem Bari is also admin for the FB Group ‘the Labour Party Supporter‘:
The Mossad blackmail MPs to get them to defend the indefensible:
Review of Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power by Yaakov Katz
Rolling the dice of war is the loneliest decision of any leader, but for an Israeli, rolling them without superpower support is especially harrowing. Every Israeli leader knows Ben-Gurion’s dictum: Never go to war without great power support. It is easy for Israel to start a war alone, but nearly impossible to bring the conflict to an end on favorable political terms without help from a powerful backer in the international arena.
Israelis tell a story about what happened, in 1967, when Ben-Gurion schooled then–chief of staff General Yitzhak Rabin on the necessity of great power support. President Lyndon Johnson, preoccupied with the Vietnam War, had refused to take any significant action against Nasser in the lead-up to the Six-Day War. “You won’t have to go it alone, unless you go it alone,” he famously told the Israelis. In other words, the United States would not stop Israel from attacking, but it would not support the war. If things went wrong, the Israelis were on their own. During the tense waiting period between the Egyptian remilitarization of the Sinai and the Israeli decision to attack, Rabin visited Ben-Gurion, who was living in retirement at his home in Sde Boker in the Negev. Ben-Gurion, so the story goes, castigated Rabin for preparing to launch a war without American backing. Following the dressing down from Ben-Gurion, he suffered a nervous breakdown that incapacitated him for two weeks.
Bush probably never heard this story, but his own experience had taught him the loneliness of ordering men and women into harm’s way. He offered Olmert the emotional and political support needed to face any adversity that lurked ahead. Among American presidents, Bush surely ranks as one of the most supportive of the Jewish State. Nevertheless, his administration still harbored very serious doubts about the Israelis’ chosen course of action. The al-Kibar episode thus reminds us, among other things, that algorithms do not determine how best to secure national interests, people do.
Although the bet that Olmert placed on Bush entailed some risks, he always held a trump card up his sleeve: the IDF. Olmert was confident from the outset that even if the Americans would oppose military action, Israel still possessed the tools to get the job done. One of Olmert’s colleagues, Katz reports, had been working for years to keep this fact at the forefront of the Israeli thinking. Major General Eliezer Shkedi, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, had distributed a dramatic photo to countless Israeli soldiers and airmen. The photo captures the moment when three Israeli F-15s, operating on Shkedi’s orders, defied the Polish authorities and flew low over Auschwitz. Shkedi had personally inscribed most of the photos, “To remember. Not to forget. To rely only on ourselves.” Shkedi was the man responsible for planning the al-Kibar operation.
This exhortation to self-reliance is laudatory, but as practical advice to prime ministers it probably requires a slight revision: “To remember. Not to forget. To rely, when necessary, only on ourselves.” Olmert was wise to seek assistance from Bush, and he did so shrewdly, but his readiness to go it alone in very trying circumstances was his greatest asset. Without that, Bush’s red light would never have turned to green.