I have been labelled a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite on Glasgow Friends of Israel Facebook page.
Where does this come from?
It is from the GMB letter telling me I was to be expelled from the union for anti-Semitism. I have shared the letter widely; it contained this charge:
“You should be advised that the Committee does find the materials you have written and promoted as being anti-Semitic in nature, not least accusing Israel of inventing or exaggerating the holocaust. For our Union holocaust denial or claiming the holocaust was exaggerated is simply unacceptable.”
And later..
“.. we believe your anti-Semitic comments are racist in nature.”
(the letter was penned by GMB Scotland President Jim Lennox; see it at here)
Now, I need to make it absolutely clear I am no Holocaust denier. What I object to is Israel’s weaponising of the Holocaust for political ends, in this case masking and sanitising the racist nature of the Zionist project.
“Holocaust denier”? What coswallop!
Let’s consider where this ridiculous slur upon my integrity has come from.
To see that, one needs to refer to the allegations that were put to me by GMB Scotland Secretary Gary Smith in his letter outlining allegations, of the 13th Dec:
In addition to the above, in an email of 3 December 2018 you admit that you are guilty of “Accusing Israel as a state of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”. This I believe makes you a Holocaust denier and in breach of the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism.
This is what I actually said in my email to Gary of the 3rd Dec:
I will agree one thing. I am guilty of “Accusing Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”. It is the exaggerating part I admit to.
But here I must refer you to the words of the Israeli former minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni, who said in a US interview that “anti-Semitism is a trick. We always use it“. The interviewer said: “Often, when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called anti-Semitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”. Shulamit Aloni replied: “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust….”
So if a former Israeli government minister says that Israel exaggerates the Holocaust whenever it suits itself to do so, then presumably that whole example of the IHRA definition becomes meaningless.
(The full letter of 13th Dec with allegations, along with my responses, can be viewed here).
I must make clear that when I said this I meant I was accusing Israel as a exaggerating the importance of the Holocaust and I use the word as it is defined as a way of over-
I’m trying to point out that it suits the Israeli Government to couch everything it does in terms of the Holocaust. The inability of the Jews to defend themselves in the face of mass extermination by the Nazis means the misuse of the word “defence” has become fundamental to Israel’s expansionist aims. The Israeli army is the only army in the world that calls itself a Defence Force. Invading Lebanon, seizing the Golan Heights, pulverising Gaza, illegal settlements, etc – even the Nakba – can thus be framed as necessary for “defence”. And whenever there is a breath of disapproval, immediately the Holocaust is raised as a justification for necessary violence and appropriation.. ie if the West doesn’t want another Holocaust, it must stand by Israel]
I am not disputing the horror visited on Jews in World War II, but its use as justification for ongoing oppressive acts 75 years hence, as if the Palestinians represented a similar threat to that posed by the Nazis.
When I wrote to Gary Smith I chose my words because they were proscribed by the IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism; they are exactly what the IHRA states as being anti-Semitic. But I see this definition as being fraudulent and politicised (See www.tinyurl.com/ihradef)
And I need to make this clear:
To accuse Israel of anything it does cannot be anti-Semitic because the State does not represent all Jews. It only represents some; and obviously those who control the Government represent only Zionists who believe the land is for Jews above others.
We must not fall into the IHRA trap of conflating the Israeli state with all Jews. If I accuse the state of Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, that is what I attack, not Jews. Therefore it cannot be seen to be anti-Semitic. I only accept the OED definition as being valid, which states anti-Semitism is “hostility to or predudice against Jews”.
And that is what we must do – we must quote the IHRA definition if we want to defeat it. To show it is a false definition. If we quote anything else, we will not be breaching it, and so its use to prevent free speech on Israel will continue unabated, and all we will have done is make another statement that can be ignored. There is no other way to beat the IHRA.
But the GMB are utterly wrong to say I am a Holocaust denier. It is a slander that they perpetrate, in order to justify their action in expelling me. I argue that I know far more and care far more about what was done to the Jews than they do – I think I understand more about the greatest crime of the last century than Jim Lennox. Has he been to the house of Anne Frank? Has he visited the memorials in Germany to the Jewish mass transports? Has he read widely of the Holocaust and made the effort to see every film made on the subject? Has he spoken to Germans who lived through the war and challenged them as to what they knew of the fate of the Jews? And why they did nothing? I doubt it. But I have.
And let us not forget: Jim Lennox refused my repeated requests to move to other business for thirty minutes, so that the elderly rabbi who had travelled from Manchester to speak as my witness could address the Committee. He simply demanded that “he should have got an earlier train” and was quite uninterested in the fact that the rabbi had religious duties to perform of a morning which made that impossible. Does that suggest Lennox is somebody who cares about Judaism and those who study the Torah? By refusing to accommodate the rabbi, I don’t think the GMB Scotland President showed much respect for Jews at all.
Am I an anti-Semite? For criticising Israel? The only way that I might be seen as such is by those who take the IHRA definition seriously. Fortunately, folk are beginning to understand that it is, as the Palestinian trade unions observe, a politicised and fraudulent definition of anti-Semitism. Criticising Israel and criticising Jews are two quite different things. Criticising a supremacist violent state for its selective reading of history and its persecution of those whose lands it has appropriated cannot from any perspective be seen as being critical of Jews per se. For around 50% of Jews do not support Israel; they are not complicit in its crimes. And most Jews prefer not to live there.
So in this case, our language around Semitism has been hi-jacked by Nakba-deniers: racist foreign powers, in distant lands.
The Oxford English Dictionary holds the true definition, which states anti-Semitism is simply “hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. Of that conduct I am most completely innocent.
To conclude, here is what I said in my press statement of the 28th Dec:
PETE GREGSON STATEMENT OF 29 DEC 2018
“The GMB are expelling me for anti-Semitism. For, according to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism at tinyurl.com/ihradef, I am a Jew-hater. What I actually said was that Israel was a racist endeavour. I also said that Israel tends to exaggerate the importance of the Holocaust for its own political ends. For the record, I am a Holocaust educator; I have studied it at length; I want everyone to know about it; I studied it in Berlin just last summer. However, Israel has a tendency as a nation state to ignore the other factors involved in the persecution of Jews. And the irony is that Israel now persecutes the minorities, especially the Arabs, living within its borders. Most especially in Gaza. And so the racism that Jews suffered during the war is now practised by many Israeli Jews themselves. The Israeli State backs this – there are 60 laws saying Jews have greater rights and in July that approach was incorporated into Israel’s basic law with the “Nation State” law. But it’s wrong to transplant one Holocaust for another.
The Israelis have been working since 2004 to redefine anti-Semitism so that they can stop the BDS movement; they know their apartheid system is at risk. So now anyone who calls it out as such in the UK is an anti-Semite and will be expelled from whatever body they are in or are employed by for telling the truth about Israel. Because most public bodies in the UK have adopted the IHRA.
Netanyahu appears to have re-written the GMB rule book, along with everyone else’s.”
It’s the Nakba deniers that we need to challenge.
PETE GREGSON STATEMENT OF 7 JAN 2019
“As most will know, I am trying to row back from something I said which, as some friends have pointed out to me, I should not have said.
Rather, in my appeal to the GMB Exec, I shall say that I chose the wrong words when I said “Israel exaggerates the Holocaust.” I say I am not accusing Israel of exaggerating the numbers of those who died, but I am accusing the Zionist movement of exaggerating its importance for political gain. Indeed that the further away we get from the Holocaust the more important it becomes for the state to keep that atrocity fresh in everyone’s mind. I say the state of Israel misuses the Holocaust with its obsession for defence used in an aggressive fashion and in justifying gross abuses of Palestinian human rights. I consider it is used as justification for ongoing oppressive acts 75 years after it happened, as if the Palestinians represented a similar threat to that posed by the Nazis.
I shall explain that in my enthusiasm to show how fraudulent the IHRA definition was, I picked the wrong example to challenge. I shall say I regret the impression I gave when I said Israel “exaggerated” the Holocaust because what I meant was that Israel “overemphasizes” the Holocaust, as a justification for all it does. There are many definitions of the word “exaggerate”, one of the most well-used in the English language. A fair few online dictionaries define it in the way I intended:
Cambridge = more important
Merriam Webster = inappropriately heightened
Macmillan dictionary = more important
Vocabulary.com and Dictionary.com = overstate
I think Israel overstates the Holocaust as a justification for what it does.
Nevertheless, I shall apologise for getting my words wrong in the letter to Gary Smith on the 3rd December, whilst making all the above clear in my appeal to the GMB. But I regret nothing else I have said.
I shall now seek to move back to my original purpose, which was to highlight how the IHRA definition is an attack on our freedom of speech. How no other country in the world has the protection that Israel now enjoys, where to criticise its racist nature is now an offence serious enough to warrant expulsion and dismissal.
It is this removal of our freedom of speech that I must focus on – it is the only aspect of my case that I can count on support for.”
POSTSCRIPT
I’d like readers to consider Mr Lennox’s words. Has anyone noticed that he has written Holocaust with a small “h”? This is problematic. Those who seek to challenge the prevailing narrative on Israel’s perspective on the importance of the massacre of 6 million Jews in WW2 typically use the small “h”.
The dictionary definition of the word with a small “h” is as “a Jewish sacrificial offering which was burnt completely on an altar” or “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war.” However, in the context of what was done to the Jews in WW2, a sign of respect to the enormity of that act is that the “h” is capitalised to “H”.
I rather suspect Jim Lennox actually knows very little about the Holocaust. Indeed, this kind of fundamental error indicates to me that he and the GMB really care little and understand less about the Holocaust. They seek purely to shut me up because Rhea Wolfson has asked them to. But she has clearly not penned this letter, or even checked it on Lennox’s behalf; one might ask: does Mr Lennox really have so little understanding of the importance of the Holocaust that he chooses to spell it with a small “h”?
What is ironic here is that this man has the nerve to accuse me of downplaying the importance of the Holocaust, while unconsciously doing the same himself. This is the calibre of man that the Glasgow Friends of Israel herald as their champion in ridding the union of a supposed “anti-Semite”.