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This is a cross-post by Dave Rich

Palestine Telegraph is currently in the news because one of its patrons, Baroness Jenny Tonge, was sacked as Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman for her comments about allegations, in an article on the Palestine Telegraph website, of Israeli organ harvesting in Haiti. Palestine Telegraph is run by a Gazan called Sameh Habeeb and has two patrons, Tonge and the journalist Lauren Booth. On Sunday it published an article titled “Whose world are we really living in?” (Google cache link), an all-encompassing conspiracy theory whose explanation of world events is best summed up by these two paragraphs:

It turns out that WW1 and WW2 were planned in advance for the sake of a group following the dictates of Zionism, a non religious socio-political Ideology which puts their leaders at the top of a Pyramid, while the rest of mankind, their “servants” are piled in a heap right at the bottom, unaware of what is being instigated at the pinnacle of this structured pyramid!! It is not too dissimilar to a Social Class Ladder: the working class, that is the masses or, I prefer to use a stronger and more apt term, the Servants/Slaves; then we have the Middle class, the middle men who in turn receive their delegated orders from the higher echelons of society, their MASTERS, the Elite, Aristocracy, the “Illuminati Factor” in fact, the billionaires in Power, who are covertly controlling our world and our communities and lives, choosing methods that are abhorrent to a fair, just ethical moral Society.

These Masters, controlled by such luminaries as the Rothschild Dynasty, have been working in the wings establishing their Corporate Financial and Imperialist ,Colonialist Empire, getting richer by the day, their power increasing by the hour, while their servants, their minions, their puppets do all the hard work, shed blood sweat and tears, and physical and mental sacrifice.

The whole article is a typical example of a standard conspiracy theory that should be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the genre, albeit couched in the language of Zionism, Israel and the Middle East, rather than Jews. However, another Palestine Telegraph article published on the same day is much more explicit. Ostensibly about anti-Muslim racism (Google cache link) and the hijab, it wastes no time in identifying Jews and the Talmud as the source of all the problems:

To veil or not to veil, that is their question? Much ado about nothing- the continued constant petty jibes against Muslims, day in, day out, hidden behind the real veiled agenda of these Zionist inspired politicians, all playing their very own racist cards for their personal electoral gain. Having probably come to the realization that they have now actually all lost the Muslim vote, their next ambitious target naturally is to crawl on their backsides and sucker up to the very groups they know will applaud their daily Muslim bashing, rantings, namely the so called White Christian/Jewish Right wingers such as the racist British National Party,(BNP) followers and those Jews who have close leanings to Zionist Talmudic ideology and political thought who are the true blue Israeli Firsters among the influential Jewish lobbyists in the UK, such as the Lord Janner’s, Lord Levy’s, the Majors’, Maureen Lipman, Esther Rantzen’s of this world, along with the rest of the Friends of Israel lunatic Brigade, whose support for Israel and its savage oppression of Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese is unflinching and fanatical.

[…]

Just as we are constantly subjected to hourly and daily reminders of WW2’s Holocaust with its inflated figure of 6 million, limited to only one ‘privileged’ influential minority, which if truth be told, involved the massacre, and yes, the ‘holocaust’ of millions of other people of all cultures/nationalities and not just the minority that continuously receive endless tiresome publicity, at the tragic expense of the other forgotten millions, who also sadly perished in this inhuman war- the 20 million Russians, the Gypsies, Romany’s, the Catholic Poles etc…and we must also not forget the million or so German citizens who perished in Dresden at the end of the war and the terrible deaths metered out to Japanese civilians at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, all courtesy of the catastrophic bombs dropped by the Allies, led by none other than today’s tyrannical protagonists, the modern day State Terrorists, hiding behind their veil of freedom and democracy, the USA and its Jewish/ Zionist Mentors. After all, WW2 was to benefit these Judeo Zionists, enabling them to create their infamous State of Israel based upon Racist ‘Jews only’ concepts…Never mind that unlike Jews, it is Muslims who actually believe in God and in the Prophets, including Jesus Christ whom they hold in the highest esteem, unlike the Judaics who see Christ as a ‘bastard child of a whore’ according to one of their Rabbis in their so called’ religious book, the “Talmud’*(http://www.talmudunmasked.com/contact.htm– Mischna, Gemarah, Tosephoth, the marginal notes of Rabbi Ascher, the Piske Tosephoth and the Perusch Hamischnaioth of Maimonides, all collected into one, constitute a vast work which is called the Talmud.) which upon close examination, has absolutely not an ounce of holiness in it and does not represent the words and teachings of the Divine, but instead constitutes the dogmas of successive Rabbis who believed themselves and their kind to, arrogantly, be ‘divine’ in their own right, whilst the rest of Humanity, the “Non- Jews”, the Gentiles or Amalek or whatever term one prefers to be labeled in this day of persecution and lambasting are deemed lower than animals, even as low as excrement!

[…]

These people used the tragedy of their own well oiled and pre planned and meticulously executed terrorist attack of 9/11 to set the ball rolling for their ultimate control, domination of the predominantly Arab/Muslim world where ironically God bequeathed the world’s richest resources!! In hot vengeful pursuit, the Westerners, Jew and Gentile alike, sought their deadly revenge against the Muslim ‘infidels’, fulfilling the Purim vengeance ideologies of the Judaics themselves, sacrificing ‘Gentile’ soldiers for the greater cause of the mythical Eretz Israel- wreaking death, destruction, genocide, holocaust of innocent Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the constant 60 year Judaic war against the indigenous people of Palestine who they are to the present day, holocausting on a daily basis, 20 dead here, another 15 there, men women, children and babies- bombed, tortured and starved to death.

This kind of vicious antisemitism normally appears, and remains, on the fringe websites of the neo-Nazi far right. Yet here it is on a website which has, as its two patrons, a Liberal Democrat peer and a mainstream newspaper columnist. I have no idea what the readership of Palestine Telegraph is in the UK, but I would expect that it contains people who consider themselves to be anti-racist and left wing or liberal in political orientation. Will there be any protests about this article, with its Holocaust Denial and vile antisemitic slanders, or will it yet again be left to the Jewish community to complain?

Sameh Habeeb is the founder, Editor in Chief and Chair of the Board of Directors of Palestine Telegraph. On 1st March Habeeb is helping to organise a meeting in Parliament about Gaza, held by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East and the Palestine Return Centre. Those listed as being scheduled to speak at the meeting include Lord Nazir Ahmed, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Richard Howitt MEP, Gerald Kaufman MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews QC MP and Baroness Tonge. If the founder and editor of a neo-Nazi journal which published articles like those above was involved in the organisation of a meeting in Parliament, about Gaza or anything else, nobody would come.

Earlier this month CST published a report (pdf) showing that the number of antisemitic incidents recorded in the UK last year hit an all time high. This was, in part, because of the amount of anger and hatred felt by some people in Britain over the Israel/Palestine conflict. One way to try to reduce this impact is to keep public debate about the conflict within reasonable limits. This does not mean that people should not campaign for the Palestinians, or for Gaza; but it does mean that they should do so without using language that incites hatred. It seems ridiculous to even have to say it, but it must be possible to campaign for the Palestinians without endorsing, even indirectly, wild conspiracy theories about “the Purim vengeance ideologies of the Judaics”, or denigration of the Talmud, or Holocaust Denial. There must be boundaries to this language, and journalists, MPs and other opinion formers have to show leadership in providing it.