In Support of Ken Loach, Free Speech and Democracy
JVL stands in solidarity with Ken Loach who has been subject to widespread recycled, unjustified allegations as a reason to exclude North Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll from the longlist for the newly created role of Mayor for the North East. Our Official Statement is in the form of an Open Letter to MPs and Councillors in that area because they have all been sent the heinous allegations.
Open Letter to Labour MPs and councillors in the North East of England
We are saddened and angry at the Jewish Labour Movement’s letter sent to MPs and Councillors in northeast England about the mayoral candidates’ selection process in the region. The JLM has no right to claim that it represents all Jews in the Labour Party and our organisation, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), was set up precisely because it did not. The c. 300,000 in Britain have a wide range of opinions on all issues, not least on antisemitism and zionism. We note Martin Forde KC’s comment that antisemitism has been weaponised in the Labour Party and used in factional disputes.
The decision to deprive Party members in the North East of the opportunity to consider Jamie Driscoll as a candidate for the forthcoming Mayoral election, with no reason given and no right of appeal, is anti-democratic. It is the very opposite of “defending the integrity of our party” as JLM suggests. As you must be aware, it has been widely criticised by many inside and outside of the Party, not least by the Mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool.
The JLM and others have loudly denounced Driscoll for sharing a platform with Ken Loach on the grounds that he had been expelled by the Party, insinuating that the expulsion was for antisemitism, recycling a catalogue of old allegations against him. Driscoll’s alleged crime was to have taken part with Loach in a discussion about his three latest films. Not only does this take “guilt by association” to an absurd level. It also accepts without challenge a ragbag of allegations against Loach. This conforms to the repeated pattern of attacks on vociferous supporters or Palestinian rights which appear designed to silence them.
Recent charges against Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters fall into the same category. As in so many other such cases, mainstream media have failed to to do basic research to check the facts behind the allegations. This video of a US journalist challenging his own government on the attempts to cancel Roger Waters highlights the near unanimous bias of UK journalism. As Aditya Chakrabortty commented in the Guardian, “anonymous factional briefings are simply machine-pressed into newspaper “facts” then spewed out on TV”.
Ken Loach is a man known across the globe for an unparalleled body of radical, campaigning work in film over more than half a century. From Kes, Cathy Come Home,The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Land and Freedom, to three films recently made in the north-east, I, Daniel Blake, Sorry We Missed You and The Old Oak, he has used his unique art to champion human rights, solidarity and resistance to oppression. His latest film, The Old Oak, premiered to huge acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival last week. It focuses on the racism experienced by Syrian refugees in a village in County Durham where local residents and workers have been “left behind”.
Instead of looking into this background, those attacking Ken Loach have presented the passionately held opinions of this committed, lifelong antiracist as if they were expressions of antisemitism. Because of the seriousness of the allegations against one of the UK’s most prestigious film makers we provide short responses to each of them with links to further explanations of the details. We hope that you will take the time to read them.
The main allegations against Ken Loach have been explored in detail before, most thoroughly and authoritatively by Antony Lerman, former director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research. He set out the arguments in a blogpost in February 2020 after the charity Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC) suffered threats to withdraw its funding and vilification of its staff because it had invited Loach to judge its annual Schools Competition. Loach and his family were also abused. The intimidation was so intense that he and the charity announced, by mutual agreement, that he would not after all judge the children’s anti-racist writing and artwork.
Peter Gregson
In February 2019 Ken Loach responded to a request for support from a GMB union member, Peter Gregson, who complained he had been expelled unfairly from the union merely for expressing opposition to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. When Loach learned that Gregson’s expulsion was actually due to antisemitic comments and behaviour, he apologised unequivocally. His original support was used to attack SRtRC which then said: ‘Ken Loach accepts a mistake in expressing support for Peter Gregson … [It] does not detract from the support we have received from Ken and his own personal commitment to fighting racism. We do not believe that he is an antisemite or that he supports antisemitic views.’ It is disingenuous, at best, of the JLM to resurrect this allegation that was laid to rest three years ago.
Chris Williamson
Ken Loach joined the large number of Labour Party members, including JVL, who defended former MP Chris Williamson for criticising its handling of the antisemitism issue on the basis of remarks he had made that were taken out of context. Loach did no more than defend Williamson’s right to express dissenting views and to remain in the Labour Party. This does not justify the allegation of antisemitism implied in the JLM letter.
Professor David Miller
Loach, as a democrat, questioned the relentless campaign which eventually lead to Miller being deprived of his academic post at the University of Bristol. Miller’s views about the role and workings of the pro-Israel lobby were and remain controversial, but the circumstances around his dismissal deserve scrutiny. Instead, the JLM uses antisemitism allegations to shut down any such scrutiny.
MP’s Participation in the Demonstration against the Leadership outside Parliament in March 2018
Ken Loach has never attacked anyone for standing up against antisemitism, as suggested by the JLM. He has explained that he did not intend to suggest wholesale expulsion of MPs who attended the anti-Corbyn rally in Westminster in 2018, but rather made an off the cuff comment that MPs’ behaviour was worse than the imagined actions of the members they were attacking.
Perdition
The JLM makes much of Loach’s direction of the stage play Perdition, intended for the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London, over thirty years ago, in 1987. It was stopped because of allegations of antisemitism. The play concerned the sensational libel case instigated by Kastner, a Hungarian Jewish leader who helped Jews escape from Hungary when the Nazis invaded in 1944. It resulted in 1,684 Jews, including members of Kastner’s own family, being allowed to escape by train to Switzerland in exchange for money, gold and diamonds. Kastner was subsequently accused by two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz, of failing to warn the Jews who remained in Hungary that their ‘resettlement’ meant transport—12,000 a day—to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. The court case attracted much controversy in the 1950s, eventually triggering the fall of the Israeli cabinet. Kastner himself was assassinated.
The play is still considered controversial as demonstrated by Loach’s own letter about the play: The truth about Perdition | | The Guardian and Antony Lerman’s blog when pressure was being put to stop Ken Loach being a judge for Show Racism the Red Card. There are, for example, anti-Zionist socialists who are critical of the play who point to the different contexts for Kastner, a Zionist trying to survive in Nazi Occupied Hungary and Zionists in control of an actual State that is oppressing Palestinians. The play may have been a one-sided polemic as some have argued and Loach himself conceded and it may indeed have failed to locate the choices people faced in the appropriate historical context, but none of this means it should have been banned, or the issues raised not debated. Once again, it is necessary to state that if we believe in the fundamental human right to freedom of expression, we must protect a person’s right to say things we disagree with, and to say them in ways we dislike.
The JLM’s assertion that Ken Loach is guilty of “a decades long history of antisemitism” is an atrocious allegation. Ken Loach is a principled, socialist film maker whose numerous films, whether for the cinema or the television, have highlighted the experience of the downtrodden and disadvantaged.
We call for an apology to Ken Loach and for Jamie Driscoll to be on the longlist for the Mayoralty of the North East; both have effectively been found to be guilty by association, which is a far cry from fairness, due process and natural justice.
Spot on once again in calmers Stalinist tendencies and the suspension of free speech suppression of democracy
I fully support JVL’s statement – and add that allegations such as those made by JLM against Ken Loach seek to silence free speech in the interests of hiding Israel’s unlawful occupation, murder and maiming of thousands of Palestinian children, women and men as evidenced in the United Nations data base since 2008 – United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
Gross slurs against courageous principled people like Ken Loach are the sign of the authoritarian propagandist not of the righteous.
Starmer’s Labour faction are a disgrace.
The comparisons I would like to make between the current Labour leadership and other figures in modern history would have me vilified. That is how bad it is. We, including someone as internationally revered as Ken Loach, can hear, see and speak no evil. I am afraid that bad actors from a foreign state have power over most of our politics, our academia and our writing.This in order to continue their illegal and inhuman oppression of innocents. If they can do that …
I stand in support of Ken Loach, Free Speech and Democracy.
The allegations by the JLM of ‘antisemitism’ against Ken Loach and Roger Waters are simply bad faith accusations that have no merit whatsoever.
I go into the detail of the allegations regarding Perdition in my blog
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/06/perdition-why-ken-loach-is-not-anti.html
The JLM has never opposed genuine antisemitism from the far-right. It has never been involved in anti-fascist activity in Britain. Its sole use of ‘antisemitism’ is against those critical of Zionism and the Israeli state.
The JLM claims it is the successor Poale Zion, which was an affiliated socialist society of the Labour Party since 1920. The reasons that it was allowed to affiliate then were not because it was the Jewish section but because it represented Jewish colonists who were looked on with favour by the then Labour leaders who saw the British Empire as something to be proud of.
As I cite in my book Zionism During the Holocaust Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister and future traitor to the labour movement toured Palestine at the invitation of the Labour Zionist colonists. This is what he wrote on his return:
‘The rich plutocratic Jew ( who) is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities… He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’
This vehemently anti-Semitic passage was printed on page 6 of a pamphlet ‘A Socialist in Palestine’ . Who was the publisher? None other than Poale Zion!
Zionism never opposed genuine antisemitism. Its hero is Arthur J Balfour who brought in the first immigration legislation The Aliens Act 1905 directed at Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms. The only ‘antisemitism’ the JLM opposes is anti-Zionism and anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Thank you for dealing with the outrageous allegations of the JLM and their attempts to bully local councillors and MPs in such clear detail.
Well said.
Ken Loach is the most respected and accomplished left wing film maker that this country has ever produced and he is being attacked and vilified by people who are best described as ‘centrist political mediocrity’.
He deserves a complete and unreserved apology. Nothing else will suffice.
Matthew John Owen
I stand in complete agreement with this statement.
Guilt by association is the main tactic, and indeed strategy, of Starmer’s clique.
End of…
Perhaps the writer here is being too gentle and therefore skirting around some of the issues the Perdition play attempted to address.
My understanding was that there were consequently two trials in Israel centred around the activities of Rezső Kasztner.
Capitalist Kasztner was accused of having collaborated with Nazi Adolf Eichmann in order to get a small group of other rich capitalist Jews out of harm’s way, by throwing a far much larger demographic of working-class Jews, to the wolves of the death camps.
In the first trial, Judge Benjamin Halevy concluded “When he accepted the Nazi offer to save 600 Jewish souls,” said the judge, “Kastner sold his soul to the devil. Masses were sacrificed for the sake of a few. He broke his trust with Jewry. That was collaboration in the fullest sense of the word.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20090126153731/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807322-3,00.html
The Supreme Court overturned this but not unanimously. One Judge – Judge Moshe Silberg – was still vehement in his condemnation of Krasztner.
“Kasztner, in order to carry out the rescue plan for the few prominents, fulfilled knowingly and without good faith, the stated desire of the Nazis, thus expediting the work of exterminating the masses” (Hecht, Ben Perfidy – 1961- pp. 244–246).
If anyone has better or more sources feel free to chip in. But as far we can tell, Ken had found an appropriate red hot example to explore issues of potential Nazi/Zionist collaboration.
Excellent points. Unexpectedly, Wikipedia is balanced on the Kastner trials in Israel and the 1987 play. But the 1958 trial in Israel in which the judgement in the 1953 libel Kastner trial was overturned apart from one aspect – the genuine collaboration of Kastner with Becht, an SS Officer – is not mentioned. Jim Allen and Ken Loach did not know enough. Perdition was largely based on a historically inaccurate view by Trotskyist Lenny Brenner, who had a political objective to attack Zionists. No one should use terrified Hungarian Jews who escaped, some who paid a lot, to get at Zionists -especially if you get your facts wrong. Yet Ken Loach is being vilified by the JLM who are ignoring what Jewish historians have said about Kastner and are unjustifiably malevolent also for political reasons. A historically more accurate play by Loach’s son about the major issues the Kastner affair raises, did see the light in the 1990s. But the damage had been done. Questions: would any one of us have ‘sold our soul to the devil’ to save over 1,600 Jews including our own family 2. Would any one of us have made public information available that could have raised awareness of the imminent death that awaited hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, if we had been told there was an opportunity to save 15,000 Hungarian Jews? (As Eichmann told Kastner. ) These are the moral choices offered in Hell. Jewish activists in Israel thought Kastner’s soul should be sent straight to Hell because he was assassinated 4 years later. Art based on history has a duty to be accurate. Perdition was not. In 2004 the Guardian asked: can censorship ever be justified? The only respondent who eschews making any judgement because ‘he does not know enough’, is an evangelical Christian.
As a British Jew and an Israeli passport holder I am appalled and sickened by the spate of false accusations of anti-semitism levelled at many respected left-wing Labour members. It is significant that right-wing supporters of Israel have played such a prominent role in promoting such blatant lies. My mother was a hidden child, her grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. These disgusting lies and distortions for political gain are in my view emblematic of the deeper failings of Labour as it has wholesale capitulated to the neoliberal ideology of privatisation and war fro profit. Labour has in my view betrayed not only its own voters but also the nation as a whole by abandoning its revolutionary ambitions and smothering them in superficial shite. They are no longer a progressive party, or even a political party capable of promoting policies that can bring us out of the present political, economic, environmental and war-for-profit crises they themselves have helped to create. As a Jew with some considerable understanding of the way Fascism operates, the conditions from which it arises, I reckon that Jewish people in the UK should consider leaving Labour en masse because this party will ultimately end up burning books and then people (if it is not doing so already, e.g. Ukraine).
Is the cocooning of the Israeli State from any criticism making it even more vulnerable on a humanitarian level and in the long run will lead it to be grouped as a pariah state!
Thank you for sharing this well argued and well informed letter. I have always enjoyed Ken Loach’s work and am disappointed yet again in the direction of travel Starmer’s leadership is taking the party.
It was the news about Jamie Driscoll that prompted my search for more information. I thought I was just having to fight Johnson and the Tories but this somehow seems worse as I have been a life long Labour voter. The long speech from Roger Waters was also shocking but again very informative.
I left the UK as I could no longer cope with Brexit, the Tories surge to the extreme right and all the lies which were being broadcast as unchallenged facts. Ironic that I chose Germany to move to who adopt a grown up approach to fascism. My father fought in the Second World War to defeat Nazism. Now I am questioning whether I can continue to support a Party which itself is undermining democracy in its treatment of Jamie Driscoll who in the words of Yanis Varoufakis seems to be the only “adult in the room ”
Keep up the good work and I look forward to your future posts
full support for ken loach and Jamie Driscoll.. It seems that forms of McCarthyism are alive and well in Starmers so called Labour party.What a total mess He has created.
Ken Loach is a decent human being, dedicated to opposing the cancer which is fascism. Ken is but one in a long list of those who were systematically picked off one by one by those who would seem intent on legitimising Israel apartheid and closing down debate on the inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinian people. Should the campaign reach its full trajectory then it will be career ending and worse to openly criticise Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
Ken Livingston
Jackie Walker
Marc Wadsworth
Tony Greenstein
Jeremy Corbyn
Chris Williamson
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
David Miller
Ken Loach
Roger Waters
Unless someone sets up a campaign to sue those who knowingly publish falsehoods or which damage reputations by threatening to remove funding of organisations on the basis of falsehoods then the list of those smeared and vilified will only grow longer.
Another shocking example of how the party is targeting known opponents of racism by branding them anti-semitic and in this case by association.
I really fear the forces behind this – if they succeed with this what else will they want
Thanks to Tony Greenstein for the reminder about the Labour Party’s long loving relationship with colonialism. It flies in the face of assertions we hear a lot from the Labour left that Labour was only bad when it became ‘New Labour’.
Note from Website team: We have allowed this comment to exceed the 300 word limit because of the detailed information it contains.
As Rosie Brocklehurst says, it is important to get one’s facts right, but unfortunately she didn’t follow her own advice.
There was no Kasztner trial in 1958. There was an Appeal in January 1957 and a verdict the following January. An Appeal is not a trial. Likewise the libel trial was in 1954 not 1953. Kasztner went to Nuremberg to testify for SS Col. Kurt Becher not Becht. The Appeal did not disagree with the factual findings of the original trial, it simply drew different legal and political conclusions.
Eichmann did not save 15,000 Jews. I presume that Rosie Brocklehurst is referring to the 18,000 who were saved by deportation to Strasshoff, Austria. This was because of the urgent need for labour to dig anti-tank trenches although Kasztner believed that he had been responsible. It was, in the words of the Eichmann trial judges a ‘simulated concession.’
It is not a question of ‘getting at’ Zionists. Kasztner sought to save the Zionist elite and the bourgeois leaders of Hungary’s Jews. That is why they were called ‘the Prominents’. Kasztner was prepared to keep silent about Auschwitz AND EVEN MISINFORM THEM OF THE REAL DESTINATION OF THE DEPORTATION TRAINS. This was unforgiveable.
You don’t need to take my opinion for it. The speech by Attorney General Chaim Cohen in his appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of Kasztner stated:
“If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions … that was his duty… IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN OUR ZIONIST TRADITION TO SELECT THE FEW OUT OF MANY in arranging the immigration to Palestine … Are we to be called traitors?
Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the Prominents to be saved, that the Train of the Prominents was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people. … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.”
Supreme Court Judge Moshe Silberg took issue with Cohen’s argument that if Kasztner believed that there was no hope for Hungary’s Jews and kept the secret of Auschwitz from them:
‘then he acted innocently and cannot be charged with collaboration with the Nazis in facilitating the extermination of the Jews, even if he, de facto, contributed to this result.
I must say that I cannot accept this argument. Is this ‘innocence’? Is there ‘representation’ of despair? Can a single individual, even jointly with some friends, despair on behalf – and without the knowledge – of 800,000 people?…. The burning question of ‘By what authority’ and ‘quo warranto’ is an adequate answer to such a claim of Bona Fide.’
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Rosenberg, two genuine Jewish heroes, had escaped from Auschwitz precisely to warn Hungary’s Jews. The Vrba-Wetzler Report, which revealed the existence of Auschwitz as an extermination camp in detail for the first time, was handed to Kasztner at the end of April 1944 but was suppressed.
There is no doubt that if they had been widely distributed thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Hungary Jews would have survived.
Don’t take my word for it. Elie Wiesel, as ardent a Zionist as one could imagine but also a survivor of Auschwitz asked
‘‘Why didn’t we know?… To this day I try to understand what happened. If ever there was a tragedy that could have been prevented, it was that one.’
A second Supreme Court Judge David Goiten refused to exonerate Kasztner and only upheld the appeal for technical legal reasons.
If there was any doubt about Kasztner’s guilt it was that AFTER the war he voluntarily went to Nuremberg and not only exonerated Becher but also testified in favour of Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny, two mass murderers who had organised the destruction of Greek, Slovakian and Polish Jewry amongst others.
Halevi was absolutely correct.
As someone who has posted here using cited sources and invited other to do the same, I am not sure what Rosie is doing invoking unsubstantiated victim numbers apparently in support of Kasztner and against Ken.
And resorting to wikipedia without other substantiation hardly helps!
Clearly the victimisation of Jews Kaszner was implicated in had a class dimension, which she chooses to ignore. But even members of Israel’s courts found repellent. Is it really so hard to remember when Jews were among the working-class, and this contributed to their marginalistion?
I’lll offer another source/timeline of Kaszner’s collaboration including the bribes invovled here.
https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0172_Kasznter_Jews.html
Of course they won’t apologize. Instead, as per the established playbook of calumny and disinformation, in confident expectation of compliant meja responses, where mainstream journalists are supine to the Israeli lobby’s demands (apeing allegations without investigatioin of evidence), they’ll double-down on the lies, defaming any and all who speak in defence of Palestinian Arabs, against an apartheid policy of violent oppression + mass incarceration. Their trademark smear is to falsely equate antizionist critique with antisemitism. It’s the upside down world of #UKLabour: fraudulent defenders social injustice + state-racism purporting to be heroes, villifying defenders of social justice for Palestinians, or any other matter, in guilt by assocaition, that infringes the authoritarian conformism of Starmer’s neocon + neoliberal party.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism is being accepted by the Labor Party in Australia. The Zionist lobby is pushing it and subsequently stopping any discussion about Palestine.
One fact that gives me hope is that a ‘witch-hunt’ as the left is being subjected to today, from being supremely powerful can in a flash, crumble and become totally discredited in the way during a single court case McCarthyism was destroyed. A bit like the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It will eventually become obvious to everyone.
This is a calm, factual and well-reasoned rebuttal – and therefore so much more authoritative – of the accusations against Loach.
Keir Starmer’s campaign to rid the party of its left wingers who stray from the ‘true path’ has sought out any excuse or supposed reason to achieve this aim. A party leader who has built such a climate of unease, even fear, now uses one unjust expulsion as ‘evidence’ for expelling others, so creating a flood of injustices constructed on precious little.
I really find it hard to understand Starmtrooper’s paranoia. Yes, he is weak and unprincipled, but his censoring of anybody who does not parrot his narrow little view, however well justified, actually makes his weakness and lack of principles even more obvious.
It saddens me to say this but by keir Starmers and his leadership Teams action the party is sliding blindly into a form of mccarthyism. Those who toiled to make a Labour Party a Broad Church Party will be turning in their graves. Please stop this evil madness. Martin NIEMŐLLER words should be a forcefully reminder
I predict Sunak will be portraying Starmer as Stalin (remember they mocked up Corbyn as Lenin) and smearing him with bad stuff Stalin did by innuendo and association. I dont need to point out the examples they will use to make the association, unfair and disproportionate though it be.
I support Ken Loach and Jamie Driscoll.
Readers are entitled to air their knowledge and views on the play ‘Perdition’.
But the issue is free speech. There have been plenty of vilification in the theatre and on film in Britain over the following years; precious few have been censored. One example would be most of the reviews of ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’.
And on the subject of vilification; readers are entitled to be critical of Joseph Stalin and his leadership of the Bolshevik party and Soviet Government. But there is a deep chasm between him the Bolshevik Central Committee and the current leadership of the Labour Party. As usual Lenin put it in pithy language; referring to a Labour Party leader slightly more left-wing than Starmer, “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”.
Gavin criticises me for no good reason. Wikipedia was as I said, surpisingly informed. But he assumes too much. I did read a lot around the subject and of course read Tony Greenstein as well. I only had a limited number of words. What does he mean about unsubstantiated numbers of victims? I do not say I supported Kazstner. What I say is I do not know. Neither does he. And the Judges in the 2nd trial overturned the verdict after Kaztner was assassinated. I ask what would you have done or what would I have done when faced with the possibility of getting a trainload of Jew people out of Hungary?