Iraq Invasion – Twenty Years On

The twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq sees the discredited but still shameless Tony Blair continuing to regard himself as an international statesman.

But for British patriots and campaigners for historical truth worldwide, Blair’s criminal record is clear.

A positive aspect of the entire disgusting charade – whereby ‘evidence’ of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was massaged to create a case for war – is that it added to public disenchantment with the political elite. Arguably the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and even the election of Donald Trump (for better and worse) could never have happened without this mass disillusionment caused by the WMD lie.

The fact that we failed to capitalise on that is partly because, here in the UK, the BNP leadership under Nick Griffin was fatally weak and confused in its response to Blair’s lies. Griffin was never able to decide whether he wanted to exploit the war (and 9/11) merely to attack Islam, or whether he was prepared to ask more serious questions.

Some of those important questions are asked in the video below by the barrister and anti-war campaigner Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani, speaking late last year at a meeting of the Four Virtues Club, hosted by Lady Michèle Renouf and Dr James Thring.

Forthright condemnation of the way intelligence was used to justify the war is no longer restricted to political dissidents. For example, to mark the anniversary the CBS News podcast Intelligence Matters has produced a special edition on the Iraq War which pointed out the way that conclusions were distorted to fit a political agenda:

“Instead of asking, ‘Is it possible that we’re not seeing more because we are wrong?’ the analysts explained the lack of information by saying Saddam was practicing ‘vigorous denial and deception efforts.'”

Michael Morell, former acting Director of the CIA, states on the podcast:
“We were wrong on the chemical weapons judgment, we were wrong on the biological weapons judgment, and we were wrong on the nuclear weapons judgment. Saddam no longer had these programs. He had stopped them. He had disarmed.”

Yet Tony Blair and his apologists are still unable to face these facts.

Labour’s ‘multicultural’ project digs its own grave

Critics of ‘wokeism’ have been entertained in recent weeks by the collapse of Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to build a new Scottish nation that allows men (including convicted rapists) to redefine themselves as women.

Today another aspect of political correctness has fallen foul of inconvenient reality: this time in the Labour Party at Westminster.

Preet Gill is MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench, as “shadow International Development Secretary” (i.e. opposing the minister for overseas aid).

She is also one of two practising Sikhs among Labour MPs. (Another was recently appointed as a Labour peer, joining two other Sikhs in the Lords, and several more Sikhs have recently been selected to stand for Labour in winnable constituencies at the next general election.)

This has had predictable consequences – in that (yet again) there is a conflict of loyalties involving a politician from an ethnic minority.

Liberals and feminists in the Sikh community have for some time been raising concerns about sexual abuse inside Sikh temples (known as ‘gurdwaras’ or ‘guru ghars’). This is related to the broader problem of domestic violence within the Sikh community, which is believed to be related to traditionally high levels of alcoholism among Sikhs.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite her position in the Labour shadow cabinet, Preet Gill has chosen to ally herself with conservative Sikhs against their liberal / feminist critics. Writing on the WhatsApp group ‘Sikhs in Labour’, Ms Gill has repeatedly called such criticisms of Sikh temples “outrageous” and “dangerous”.

Adding to the controversy, Gill is now accused of embarrassing Labour leader Starmer because of her hardline Sikh connections. The Home Office has been handed a dossier including photographs of Gill’s visit with Starmer to her local gurdwara, where they posed in front of a display of photographs of Sikh extremists including Labh Singh, a Sikh paramilitary leader who was once accused of masterminding India’s biggest ever bank robbery in order to raise funds for his group.

While far more attention has focused on Muslim political activism, the much smaller Sikh community has attained political influence disproportionate to its size, not just in the UK but in other Western countries. Nikki Haley (born into a Sikh family and originally named Namrata Randhawa) recently announced her candidature for the Republican nomination for US President. In Canada, the junior party in the governing coalition is led by a Sikh, Jagmeet Singh, and a deputy leader of the opposition Conservative Party is also a Sikh, Tim Uppal.

The most recent census showed that Sikhs represent 0.9% of the population in England and Wales (due to CoViD we do not yet have complete UK statistics): the fourth largest religious group – behind Christians (46.2%), Muslims (6.5%), and Hindus (1.7%).

In Canada, Sikhs are 2.1% of the population, and in the USA 0.2%.

The oligarch who hedges his bets

Today Spanish police seized a £70m ‘superyacht’ belonging to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch cronies.

Tango is registered in the British Virgin Islands – one of the favourite havens for shady international tycoons – and belongs to Viktor Vekselberg, son of a Ukrainian Jew and a Russian. Since 1990 Vekselberg has been head of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminium, oil and other sectors. He has been subject to international sanctions due to his close Kremlin ties.

According to several investigators, Vekselberg’s most interesting international role has been as the man who does the dirty work for Sir Len Blavatnik, his business partner, co-founder of the Renova Group and closest friend since their schooldays.

While Vekselberg has been sanctioned, Blavatnik has earned a teflon reputation which might be connected to his remarkable talent for backing opposite political sides and remaining close to power.

Blavatnik has at various times backed pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions in Israel; Tony Blair in the UK; Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the USA. In 2015 a group of international scholars condemned Oxford University for accepting Blavatnik’s money to fund the ‘Blavatnik School of Government’.

Blavatnik however insists that he has distanced himself from Putin, and the likes of Tony Blair and his ‘charitable foundations’ have continued to work closely with the Blavatnik School of Government. Meanwhile Blavatnik has continued to be one of the world’s leading sponsors of ‘Holocaust’ education, including a recent international conference to celebrate “the nearly 1.5 million Jewish men and women who fought in World War II against Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers.” H&D will soon be analysing some of the interesting omissions from this ‘history’!

Perhaps the ambiguities of Blavatnik’s own position will never be fully resolved, but as the Kremlin’s brutality continues in Ukraine, the likes of Tony Blair are feeling increasingly nervous about their ties to Putin’s oligarchs. Whatever their politics, Western politicians (including some so-called ‘nationalists’) have been happy to stick their snouts in the Kremlin trough.

Madeleine Albright and Mossad: the Jewess who ‘thought she was a Catholic’

Madeleine Albright – who served as Secretary of State in Bill Clinton’s second administration from 1997 to 2001, has died in Washington aged 84.

Soon after her appointment to the top job in US foreign policy at the start of 1997, Mrs Albright ‘discovered’ that she was racially Jewish, having supposedly been in ignorance of this for her entire life. Her parents had converted to Catholicism during her infancy.

However the Israeli government certainly knew about Albright’s Jewish roots as early as 1994, soon after her appointment as US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Their source was the British publisher George Weidenfeld, who had been a friend of Albright’s father, Czech diplomat Josef Korbel, when Korbel was in a senior role with the Czech government-in-exile in London during the Second World War. (In this capacity Korbel worked with British propaganda and other secret departments.)

H&D can today reveal a few details of Weidenfeld’s career as a Zionist and later Israeli intelligence operative, which make it likely that Mossad was well aware of Albright’s family background for decades – almost certainly as far back as the 1970s, when she worked as congressional liaison for the National Security Council.

Weidenfeld – this close friend of Albright’s father – was closely monitored by Britain’s security service MI5, who knew of his Zionist intelligence work and were concerned that he might be engaged in subversive activities in London on behalf of the nascent Israeli state.

Although his file has not yet been published in British archives and remains entirely secret, we can reveal today that Weidenfeld had a personal file at MI5 numbered PF 604363.

On 27th October 1949 MI5 recorded a conversation via its regular monitoring of a line at the Israeli Legation (later Embassy) in London. Weidenfeld was speaking with Reggie Kidron, a senior diplomat who was responsible for Mossad’s intelligence work in London.

During the conversation Kidron thanked Weidenfeld for certain “contacts”, referring to a recent lunch Weidenfeld had with the senior government minister Herbert Morrison, who was later to succeed Ernest Bevin as British Foreign Secretary.

Whereas Bevin had been staunchly anti-Zionist, Morrison was far more friendly to the new state of Israel. His daughter married the advertising manager of the Jewish Chronicle (London’s main Jewish newspaper) and his grandson Peter Mandelson (now Lord Mandelson) became one of the most influential, pro-Israeli politicians in Britain during the Labour governments of the 1990s and 2000s.

Weidenfeld went on to work for Israel’s first President Chaim Weizmann as “foreign affairs adviser”, before returning to London where his publishing empire served as a convenient means to pass Israeli funds to favoured politicians, in the guise of cash ‘advances’ for books that were never going to generated the sums paid.

Recipients of this largesse included Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his political secretary Marcia Williams.

As we have recently reported on this site, Wilson and Williams had close relationships with several influential Jewish businessmen who were of concern to MI5, either because of their links to Zionist intelligence, or to Soviet bloc intelligence, or their general criminality.

Several of these characters received either knighthoods or peerages from Wilson, notably in his final honours list in 1976, known as the “lavender list” because it was drafted on the personal notepaper of Marcia Williams. The Mossad operative George Weidenfeld – having earlier been knighted by Wilson in 1969 – became Lord Weidenfeld on this 1976 list.

Last week H&D‘s Peter Rushton filed a Freedom of Information request for still-secret official files about this honours list, and the cabal of businessmen and suspected spies surrounding Harold Wilson.

Weidenfeld’s Mossad contact Kidron appeared in a ‘Top Secret’ British intelligence document drawn up in December 1949, listing twenty-five individuals who had wartime access to British secrets but who were now known to be serving the Israeli government. Kidron had been Jewish Agency liaison with the South African armed forces during the Second World War, and was feared to have had access to British military secrets, in addition to his dangerous intelligence work among postwar British politicians via Weidenfeld.

Further aspects of our dossier on the fluctuating relationship between British and Zionist intelligence services, during and after the Second World War, will be published soon.

One strange coincidence which might disturb some on the ‘anti-Zionist’ left, is that the sister of this top Mossad officer Reggie Kidron became one of Britain’s leading Trotskyist activists.

This was Chanie Rosenberg, who died last year aged 99. She was married to the leading Trotskyist in Britain – Tony Cliff (born Ygael Gluckstein), founder of what is today the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Even in old age, Rosenberg was an active militant ‘anti-fascist’, travelling to Burnley in 2002 to oppose British National Party election campaigning.

We wonder whether she ever told her comrades about her close family ties to Mossad?

Putin’s London oligarchs: the dishonouring of Britain’s ‘elite’

This morning’s Sunday Times front page reports that MI5 and MI6 – Britain’s security and intelligence services – objected to the peerage awarded 18 months ago to Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of London’s Evening Standard.

Lebedev owes his fortune to his father Alexander, a prominent oligarch and former KGB officer who was in charge of the KGB’s station in London at the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980s, the period when a young Vladimir Putin was number two in the equivalent station in Dresden. As is often the case in the complex politics of post-Soviet Russia, Alexander Lebedev was briefly an enemy of Putin’s but then changed sides and became what one former MI6 officer has called “a craven supporter” of the Kremlin godfather.

Lebedev junior has been a good friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson for more than a decade, ever since his strong support for Johnson first term as Mayor of London and his re-election campaign in 2012.

According to this morning’s Sunday Times, Johnson exerted pressure on MI5 and MI6 to withdraw their objections to Lebedev’s peerage, and they duly did so. His elevation was announced in July 2020 and he officially took his seat as Lord Lebedev in November that year.

The blatant sale of honours (up to and including knighthoods and peerages) has been an intermittent feature of British political life since the early 1920s, when Prime Minister David Lloyd George marketed such baubles to political donors via a shady coterie of corrupt businessmen including Maundy Gregory, a theatrical producer and newspaper owner who used his network of homosexual associates to obtain blackmail opportunities for British intelligence.

These schemes became so notoriously disgraceful that a special law was brought in to criminalise such behaviour: the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Maundy Gregory himself is the only person to have been convicted under this law – he was jailed for two months in 1933. Gregory’s death remains mysterious. He was reportedly captured by German forces after the French surrender in 1940, and possibly died in an internment camp the following year, but there has never been any official confirmation.

For forty years after Lloyd George there were few if any scandals surrounding honours, until the arrival of Britain’s most pro-Zionist Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson and his notorious political secretary Marcia Williams (herself ennobled as Lady Falkender).

Wilson and Falkender lavished honours upon corrupt Jewish businessmen who had either donated money to the Labour Party or provided them with personal favours. Many of the beneficiaries had ties to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, and at least two of those elevated to the Lords – Joseph Kagan and Rudy Sternberg – were suspected of links to the KGB or other Soviet bloc services.

Heritage and Destiny has carried out extensive investigations into the Wilson-Falkender ties to Israeli interests, as readers will learn in a forthcoming book by our assistant editor.

In one important respect, Johnson’s government is even worse than Wilson’s, whose most notorious apparent sales of honours followed his still-mysterious resignation in 1976 – known as the “Lavender List” because Lady Falkender supposedly compiled it on her personal notepaper.

Despite their corruption, Wilson and Falkender did give in to pressure from the honours scrutiny committee and removed three names. One of those removed was the boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire, who was one of many Jews with shady connections who had donated to Wilson’s party coffers and had been suggested for a knighthood. A later pro-Zionist Labour Prime Minister – Tony Blair – eventually gave Astaire a slightly lesser honour, an OBE, in 2003.

Blair’s own government was for some time embroiled in allegations surrounding the sale of honours, involving several prominent Zionist lobbyists close to Labour’s then-leader.

Another name that Wilson agreed to remove was Illtyd Harrington, deputy leader of the Greater London Council, whom he had suggested for a peerage. In Harrington’s case there were probably two problems: first he was openly homosexual (which in those days was considered more scandalous than it would be today), and secondly his father had been an active communist who fought with the communist-controlled International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and would certainly have had an MI5 file.

Lord Lebedev is also widely assumed to be a homosexual, but in today’s world MI5 and MI6 objections would not have been related to his private life, unless they were concerned that his famously lavish parties had been used to promote Vladimir Putin’s interests.

When Lebedev’s ex-KGB father first purchased the London Evening Standard in 2009, then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson turned down requests for the British government to intervene. Mandelson is a close associate of another Putin oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.

Now that the Sunday Times has made these allegations, and given that ordinary Britons will inevitably pay a heavy price in their shopping and utility bills for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, it is surely imperative for the Johnson Government to publish all relevant documents about the Lebedev peerage and be completely open about the Prime Minister’s friendship with the Standard owner and fellow oligarchs.

And to show that this is a matter that transcends party politics, we are sure that the Labour Party will support the formal request that H&D is now making under the Freedom of Information Act for similar release of all relevant files concerning the Wilson government and its donors. One such file is catalogued as PREM 19/589/1 – due to be released to us at the National Archives in January this year but withheld, “closed while access is under review” for unexplained reasons.

A formal request for release of this and other documents will be submitted at the start of office hours tomorrow.

We shall of course inform H&D readers of any progress in this long overdue forensic examination of the British state’s decline into dishonour.

Blair’s unusual silence explained

Many readers have wondered why Tony Blair has been remarkably quiet so far about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Look no further than Blair’s very close relationship with one of Putin’s favourite billionaire Jewish oligarchs, Moshe Kantor. Among many prominent positions in international Zionism, Kantor is President of the European Jewish Congress and Chairman of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress.

Since 2015 Blair has been chairman of Kantor’s ‘European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation’, which campaigns for ‘tougher laws against extremism’.

Naturally the extremism Blair and Kantor wish to criminalise involves such things as publishing a magazine or running a bookshop. For this type of extremism the likes of Blair and Kantor endorse the approach of Spanish prosecutors, who wish to jail Pedro Varela for twelve years, or German prosecutors who wish again to jail the 93-year-old Ursula Haverbeck.

Invading a neighbouring country is, by contrast, not ‘extreme’: not if the invader is Moshe Kantor’s close friend Vladimir Putin.

Moshe Kantor also funded the World Holocaust Forum, which provided a platform for Putin to indulge his now familiar ‘anti-Nazi’ posturing.

Israel’s ‘Holocaust museum’ Yad Vashem has repeatedly accepted major donations from Putin’s favourite oligarchs, including not only Kantor but also Roman Abramovich who now faces ostracism in the UK for his close Kremlin ties but is still very welcome in Jerusalem.

Latest woke insanity sees Shakespeare’s theatre issue ‘anti-semitism’ warning

In the latest pathetic display of woke ‘sensitivity’, Shakespeare’s Globe has issued a warning to theatre-goers that The Merchant of Venice – currently being staged by candlelight at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – “contains antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.

We aren’t quite sure what “colourism” means, but we can be sure it isn’t an apology for the Globe having cast two black men and one Asian women among characters meant to portray 16th century Venetians.

As for “anti-semitism” – can anyone planning to see The Merchant of Venice really be unaware that its central character – the moneylender Shylock – is perhaps the most archetypal Jewish villain in literary history?

If the Globe were really concerned about whether the Shylock image is fair or not, then instead of this pathetic cringe perhaps they would care to sponsor a conference or study day to accompany the production? H&D would be very happy to provide a speaker.

For example we could discuss two statements by one of the greatest figures in British political history, Ernest Bevin, who founded Britain’s largest trade union, took charge of labour relations in Churchill’s government during the Second World War, and was Foreign Secretary for almost six years after the war, when he was the co-architect of NATO.

Bevin told the Trade Union Congress during the 1931 economic crisis: “It is a game of Shylock versus the people, with Shylock getting the pound of flesh every time.”

And at an emergency Cabinet meeting soon after the Second World War, by which time war debt had tightened Shylock’s grip. Bevin said in Cabinet (!) that “we [the British government and by extension the British people] are in Shylock’s hands”. This observation was so incendiary that it was not typed into the official Cabinet minutes, but appears in the handwritten notes of that meeting taken by a senior civil servant.

This was at a time when British soldiers and police were fighting Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and although it took almost three years, ‘American’ pressure eventually forced the British government into acquiescence in the creation of Israel in 1948.

So if the Globe really wants to discuss the question of ‘anti-semitism’ and Shylock in a British context, let’s start with Ernest Bevin and discuss whether his views reflected ‘racism’ or reality.

Or is the Globe interested only in woke posturing rather than scholarship?

Happy New Year to all our readers – 2022 presents an open goal for nationalists

All at H&D wish our readers (whether online, in print, or preferably both!) a very happy new year in 2022.

In this week’s Spectator, former UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn points out that the present ‘Conservative’ government is failing to take advantage of the opposition Labour Party’s extremist pro-immigration policy.

He writes: “The Labour party’s bizarre attitude towards immigration policy ought to render it utterly incapable of depriving the Conservatives of a parliamentary majority. And yet the Conservatives are conspiring to undermine rather than underline their own natural advantage on this crucial issue.”

And adds: “pretty much all the Conservatives need to do is make a good fist of immigration control and they can cement in place their winning electoral coalition of traditionalist shire Tories and working class Red Wallers.”

Yet they fail to do so, and this failure is a repeat of exactly what the Tories (and their transatlantic equivalents, sometimes referred to as ‘Republicans in Name Only’ or RINOs) have been doing for decades.

As we have documented in previous H&D analyses, the Tories have repeatedly talked tough about immigration, then once in office continued to steer the ship of state onto the rocks of multiracialism.

This situation ought to be an open goal not so much for the Conservative Party (who are in some ways more responsible than Labour for our present situation, having been in power for 46 of the 76 years since the Second World War) as for racial nationalists.

Will 2022 be the year in which British racial nationalism gets its act together?

Future issues of H&D will debate the way forward.

Westminster Bubbles – can any politician cast the first stone?

Following the resignation of Health Secretary Matt Hancock over breaching Covid regulations in connection with an extra-marital affair, Westminster and Fleet Street rumour mills are working overtime.

The two frontbenchers most in the spotlight are Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove. Coincidentally Rayner has been responsible for shadowing Gove ever since Labour’s misfired reshuffle.

But the rumours have nothing to do with politics.

Rayner split up from her husband, union official Mark Rayner, last year and has for some time been very close to her former campaign manager, Ilford MP Sam Tarry – a former employee of the ‘anti-racist charity’ Hope not Hate. Both Tarry and Rayner are married with children: indeed Rayner (though only 41) is a grandmother.

Hope not Hate boss Nick Lowles sprang to Tarry’s defence before the 2019 election when his former aide was accused of having links to ‘antisemites’ in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

At least Rayner and Tarry are involved in a straightforward, old-fashioned, extramarital affair.

The Tory scandals are far more exotic, involving swingers’ parties, cocaine, and perhaps their very own Philip Schofield about to ‘out’ himself.

Covid regulations make this sort of thing much more complicated: at one time a Tory MP might have thought ‘lockdown’ had something to do with Miss Whiplash in a Shepherd Market flat. But now even the highest in the land are subjected to the Daily Mail‘s middle-class morality.

Fortunately for Michael Gove (who once shared a flat with gay businessman Ivan Massow and gay Tory Nick Boles) a large part of the British media belongs to Rupert Murdoch, who has always seen Gove as his man – so you can guarantee that whatever stories break this week, they won’t be Sun exclusives!

Mr Gove has in some respects always been proud of swinging both ways. In February this year he was challenged in the House of Commons about his claims to have sung The Sash, but professed that in addition to this loyalist anthem he also sang the republican favourite Fields of Athenry and the Scottish nationalist Flower of Scotland.

Labour councillor resigns after porn charges

A Labour councillor for the Hollinwood ward of Oldham Council has resigned and last week appeared in court facing charges of downloading child pornography.

Martin Judd, 25, entered not guilty pleas at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court to three charges that between February 2018 and Febriary 2020 he had downloaded fifteen Category A (the most serious) images of children, twenty-three Category B, and 48 Category C.

Judd was committed for trial in Manchester next January.

Born in New Zealand, Judd was elected as a Hollinwood ward councillor in 2018. A year earlier he had been elected in Manchester as the youngest every President of a Rotary Club. (He worked for Waitrose in Manchester city centre.)

Some H&D readers will remember Hollinwood ward from the early 2000s: Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy polled 24% in the ward at the 2002 elections.

Since those days of curse Oldham BNP has ceased to exist, and in any case there can be no by-elections for the time being due to Covid-19.

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