Reprinted from Wallwritings
Thursday, May 5, elections will be held in Great Britain for four mayors and 124 local councils.
The two major British parties are Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, and the Conservative party, headed by David Cameron, the current Prime Minister.
These two leaders know that these local elections are critical to national elections yet to come.
British-born journalist Jonathan Cook (above) lives in Nazareth, Israel, where he writes The Blog from Nazareth. Cook, now 51, has served as a Middle East correspondent for major publications. He knows this link between local and national elections.
His latest posting, The True Anti-semites, Past and Present, examines the May 5 local elections, one of which will be in London, where the Labour candidate is Sadiq Khan (above left), a member of Parliament and a Muslim with family roots in Pakistan.
Cook finds a familiar "generated anti-semitism" dominating those local elections, in which the Labour and Conservative parties will wage political combat.
Specifically, he warns:
"We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another 'new anti-semitism' crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections."
Cook has seen this rodeo before, three times before, as local and national politics in Britain are drawn into the game of yet another "new anti-semitism" fear.
The players change, but the game is the same, the one in which Israel and its backers, evoke the fear of "a rising anti-semitism," a fraudulent move intended not to confront a non-existent rise in prejudice, but to cover up the sins of Israel's occupation conduct.
Cook looks back at three separate periods when Israel's supporters in Britain increased their "new anti-semitism" smears to attack Palestinian supporters who dared to criticize Israeli policies.
On these three separate occasions, "despite being patent nonsense, were successful enough that [they] cowed the few critical voices in the media -- and terrorized senior editors at the BBC into supine compliance with Israel's narrative." (emphasis added).
(To access the three earlier Cook postings, click here, here and here.)
These campaigns make Israel the victim of prejudice, a tactic designed to deflect attention from the true nature of the occupation of Palestine.
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