Noble but futile

The UK’s Terrorism Act prohibits any form of support for the Palestinian resistance organisation Hamas.

Therefore when writing for a UK-based magazine, the only legal ‘side’ to take in relation to this morning’s events in Palestine would be to join the mindless chorus of ‘condemnation’ of Hamas for ‘invading’ their own country.

Or to take no ‘side’ at all.

Zionists are free to say what they like in support of Jewish terrorists, none of whom are covered by the UK’s Terrorism Act even when they have committed barbaric acts against British servicemen and civilians.

And as we have previously commented, even Robert Misrahi – a Jewish terrorist who planted a bomb in a British servicemen’s club in London, and whose colleagues murdered a young Englishman with a parcel bomb – remains at liberty in Paris today.

One of the few groups to be removed from the Terrorism Act proscription list and made legal (even encouraged) in the UK is the anti-Iranian terrorist group Mujaheddin e Khalq, whose leaders (not coincidentally) are closely involved with the fake patriots in the Spanish kosher ‘nationalist’ party Vox.

But Hamas is one of five Palestinian groups on the UK’s proscribed list (not including the many international Islamist groups).

Aside from this legal question, it’s possible to say two things about this morning’s action by Hamas.

Firstly, that in the very short-term it appears to have been successful in surprising Israel, ironically on the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack, the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

But secondly, that unlike the Yom Kippur War (which at least stood a chance of success) this morning’s attacks seem guaranteed to fail.

In 1973 several Arab states (at least to some extent) sincerely opposed the Zionists, so much so that they inflicted economic damage on the West by imposing huge increases in oil prices to punish Western governments for supporting Israel.

Half a century later, almost every so-called ‘Arab’ government (especially the Saudis, despite their weasel words) has become cynical and is either openly allied to Israel or moving in that direction.

Added to that is the characteristic Palestinian ability to undermine their own cause by unwise alliances. Hamas and other groups have for years stupidly allied themselves to the IRA, which gains absolutely nothing for the Palestinian cause but alienates potential supporters in the UK.

And during the past 18 months many Palestinian spokesmen (and their allies in Damascus and Tehran) have equally stupidly allied themselves to Vladimir Putin, despite the illogicality of defending the oppressed Palestinian nation while supporting the obliteration of the Ukrainian nation.

Putin will of course do nothing to help Hamas or other Palestinians: he and his cynical propagandists (including some British ‘nationalists’) will instead enjoy and exploit the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the retaliatory terror bombings by Israeli forces that are sure to follow.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has his own reasons for this morning’s strong statement of support for Israel. But the vast majority of Ukrainians who have no personal reason to support Zionism, and who might well instinctively support the Palestinian cause, have also now come to see Hamas, Syria and Iran as the ‘friends of their enemy’ in the Kremlin.

Some instant experts have wrongly compared this morning’s short-term Hamas success to the Tet Offensive carried out by the communist Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces in 1968.

The comparison doesn’t work because the whole point about that offensive is that it demonstrated the long-term unsustainability of the South Vietnamese state, at a time when US aid for that state was already becoming very unpopular across the West.

Sadly the inevitable crushing of today’s Hamas offensive will be applauded by almost every influential politician in the West, including those cynics and cranks in the US Republican Party who are openly or covertly pro-Putin.

Rather than Vietnam in 1968, the appropriate comparison is with the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War in 1854. As the British cavalry mounted their doomed frontal assault against Russian artillery, charging into what the poet Tennyson later termed “the valley of Death”, an observant French general Pierre Bosquet commented “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie”. (“It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.”)

Bosquet might say the same in 2023 about Hamas, even though in the UK such words would now risk prosecution under the Terrorism Act.

And Tennyson’s words (though they might seem appropriate) would certainly be illegal if applied to the Light Brigade’s Palestinian successors as they throw themselves against one of the most heavily armed states that has ever existed.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

The war criminal or the anti-terrorist hero: guess which one the Queen has honoured?

Two years ago one of the few outstanding heroes of the war against terrorism was murdered – not by Islamic State, Al Qaeda or any such group but by a US drone strike at Baghdad’s International Airport.

General Qassem Soleimani and his colleague, Iraqi anti-terrorist commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, had been the most successful leaders of the war to exterminate ISIL – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

If anyone doubted that takfiri groups such as ISIL serve the interests of International Zionism, this assassination carried out on the orders of Donald Trump in consultation with his Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, surely confirmed it.

During recent days a series of events across the region have commemorated the martyrdom of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Here in London, with truly sick irony, the second anniversary of these murders was marked instead by an announcement from Buckingham Palace that the Queen was honouring Tony Blair by making him a Knight of the Garter, an order dating back to the 14th century.

This gesture might already have backfired, as it has sparked a surge of outrage even from some Britons who had begun to forget the war crimes of twenty years ago. A public petition to rescind the honour has already reached close to 500,000 signatures – readers can sign the petition here.

UPDATE: A breaking news story that will feature in tomorrow’s Daily Mail will surely add to the pressure against Blair’s ‘honour’. According to Geoff Hoon – former Defence Secretary and once a key Blair ally – he was ordered to burn a secret memo advising that the Iraq war could be illegal.

Read the full story at the Daily Mail website.

Neocon propaganda report targets H&D contributors and ‘Iranian network’ in UK

In June 2021 a neocon propaganda outfit (based in London but named after a notoriously pro-Zionist US Senator) published an alarmist “analysis” of “Iranian Influence Networks in the United Kingdom”.

The report was issued by the Henry Jackson Society, named after Sen. Henry Jackson (1912-1983) who led the most pro-Israel wing of the US Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s.

Author of the report is Dr Paul Stott – once a leading activist in the violent anarchist group ‘Class War’ – who became a supporter of the ‘right-wing’ United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and is now an Associate Fellow at the HJS.

The “Iranian Influence Networks” highlighted by Stott include three individuals who have aired pro-revisionist and/or anti-Zionist views on the Iranian television channel Press TV: Dr James Thring, Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, and Lady Michèle Renouf.

Dr Thring (author of Peace with Iran) was organiser of a scheduled meeting at the House of Lords in 2012 that was blocked after lobbying by the Jewish Chronicle and other Zionist groups.

Stott complains that:
“In 2008, Press TV gave Kollerstrom a platform to present Holocaust denial, in an article for the Press TV website entitled ‘The Walls of Auschwitz’. Here he argued that the massacre of Jews during WW2 was ‘scientifically impossible’. In the cases of both Thring and Kollerstrom, their conspiracy-laden world view finds some accord, or a platform, with Iran.”

(The HJS report does not mention the row that ensued when the Jewish Chronicle attacked Press TV for this Auschwitz article, later publishing letters in reply from Lady Renouf and Dr Kollerstrom. One Israeli settler fanatic then published a death threat against Lady Renouf on a Canadian neocon website, inciting his fellow Zionists to “send Renouf ricin in a get-well card”.)

Stott goes on to quote the US academic Dr George Michael – “The most notable instance of propaganda sharing between the extreme right and militant Islam has been in the area of historical revisionism” – and identifies two very different Iranian presidents (Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad) as supporters of revisionism.

He does fairly and accurately quote from the 2006 Tehran conference as follows:
“In December 2006, Iran hosted the two-day International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust. Among those given a platform was the British activist Lady Michèle Renouf. In Tehran she gave a passionate speech in support of the Iranian government:
“‘I have come to Tehran to congratulate the Iranians, and those people who voted Dr Ahmadinejad as their president. For this valiant statesman, just like my noble revisionist colleagues, whose right of open debate I proudly champion, seek to speak the truth bravely, and no matter for their personal cost in being demonised, ostracised, or even imprisoned as they are in Europe and Canada, for their rational opinions, which we thought was the glory of our civilisation.’”

Stott adds:
“Lady Renouf denies being on the Far Right and declares that she is motivated not by Holocaust denial but by a desire to ensure ‘debate denial’ does not occur. She has justified her positions by saying ‘People should have the freedom to question the accepted view of what happened. That questioning is part of our culture.’”

The operating assumption of Dr Stott and his ilk is that ‘holocaust denial’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ are inherently ‘extremist’ and in this instance part of a sinister Iranian network to promote anti-Zionism.

It would of course be anathema to Stott and the Henry Jackson Society were anyone to present a corresponding notion that the orthodox historiography of the ‘Holocaust’, and the framework of tyrannical laws established to defend that orthodoxy, are themselves part of a long-established network designed to promote Zionism. (It’s probably no coincidence that within days of Stott’s report, the US Government began moves to censor Iranian-owned news networks.)

That such a network exists would seem evident – take the Henry Jackson Society itself. The UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote the foreword to an HJS report on “Global Britain” in 2019. The HJS was co-founded by former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, and has been financed by the American-Jewish heiress Nina Rosenwald and Anglo-Jewish businessman Stanley Kalms (now Lord Kalms), a former treasurer of the Conservative Party. It has also taken money from the Japanese Embassy in London to promote anti-Chinese propaganda.

However one of the men who co-founded the Henry Jackson Society at Cambridge in 2005, defence and foreign policy consultant Matthew Jamison, has denounced the Society’s recent activities:
“Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that the Henry Jackson Society, when it was founded, would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation, run in the most dictatorial, corrupt and undemocratic fashion and utilized as a propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups. Indeed, the far-right anti-Muslim racist nature of the HJS has helped to lay the intellectual groundwork for much of what President Trump and his Breitbart reading ‘alt-right’ movement is attempting to do against Muslim people and immigrants in the United States. The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam.”

Fredrick Töben (1944-2020)

H&D greatly regret to report the death of Dr Fredrick Töben, the German-Australian revisionist historian. Dr Töben died yesterday three weeks after his 76th birthday, having been seriously ill for the past two or three months.

Fredrick Töben came to Australia from his German birthplace as a ten-year-old boy when his parents emigrated. He studied at Victoria College of Wellington, New Zealand; Melbourne University; and Stuttgart University.

In the late 1970s Töben lived in Rhodesia towards the end of that country’s struggle against Black Marxist revolutionaries. After a year teaching in Nigeria, he returned to Australia teaching at various institutions in the state of Victoria during the early 1980s.

Töben’s dismissal from his teaching post in 1985 led to a five-year legal battle. He eventually won damages against the State of Victoria and relocated to Adelaide, South Australia, where he formed the Truth Mission in 1994, becoming Adelaide Institute a year later.

This produced a series of ‘Holocaust’ revisionist publications, and led to Töben being targeted by Jewish and ‘anti-fascist’ organisations worldwide, while he became part of an international network of revisionists attending conferences sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), and later The Barnes Review, serving on the latter’s Board of Contributing Editors until his death.

In 1998 he was arrested in Germany under that country’s notorious laws restricting free research and discussion of historical topics, spending seven months in prison.

In October 2000 the Australian Human Rights Commission ordered Töben to remove parts of the Adelaide Institute’s website, triggering years of appeals and efforts to enforce the judgment.

Eventually in 2009 Töben was jailed for three months in Adelaide for contempt of court.

Three years earlier Töben had travelled to Iran to speak at the Tehran International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, promoted by then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This event attracted worldwide publicity and intensified the targeting of Töben and other participants.

In October 2008 while in transit at London’s Heathrow Airport, Töben was seized from his plane and served with an international arrest warrant issued at the request of German authorities who wanted to jail him again for articles published on the Adelaide Institute website.

This was expected to be a rapid ‘rubber-stamping’ procedure, but soon after Töben was taken into custody, Dr David Duke telephoned Lady Michèle Renouf in London to alert her to the arrest. Lady Renouf mobilised a specialist legal team of solicitor Kevin Lowry-Mullins and barrister Ben Watson, resulting in a historic legal victory against the Federal Republic and their Crown Prosecution Service allies.

After a month in Wandsworth prison awaiting the London court’s decision, Töben was freed and returned to Australia.

Persecution by the usual suspects continued, and a legal action for court costs (related to a series of Australian cases) resulted in Töben being declared bankrupt and having his passport confiscated in 2012.

While there was a short period in 2018-2019 when there were serious disagreements between Dr Töben and H&D, these differences were resolved long before his death. We salute Dr Fredrick Töben’s memory as a valiant fighter for historical truth and justice.

Gangster president declares war on Iran

Gangster president Donald Trump has this morning effectively declared war on Iran by ordering the murder of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the most significant state-sponsored assassination since Czech SOE agents killed Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 – and the most significant such assassination ever to take place outside wartime.

It is immaterial whether Trump’s action was dictated by his slavish devotion to the State of Israel, or was partly inspired by the need to distract attention from his own impeachment for criminal misdeeds.

During his election campaign four years ago, Trump gave American voters the impression that he would end the era of US entanglement in foreign conflicts. Instead he has today embroiled the US in what will be a far more serious conflict than the Iraq and Afghan wars combined.

The US now stands alone, without its NATO allies, as even the British Foreign Office rushes to distance itself from the White House Godfather.  The only cheers have come from Trump’s fellow crook Benjamin Netanyahu and the neocon cabal whose influence Trump once promised to end, but who now enjoy more control over US foreign policy than under Reagan, Clinton, or Bush.