From the river to the sea!

by New Worker correspondent

Hundreds of Palestine Solidarity members from branches across Britain packed into London’s Conway Hall last weekend for their annual general meeting to decide on the direction of our movement for Palestine. We will never stop protesting, lobbying, boycotting & campaigning until Palestine is free.
Meanwhile Scotland other campaigners are demanding that Scotland's regulatory body revoke the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund — highlighting the organisation's role in land dispossession, support for settlement expansion, and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians, and pointing to the precedent set in Canada, where authorities recently revoked JNF's charitable status over concerns about its activities.  Two weeks ago activists from across Scotland marched to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) in Dundee to demand action against the JNF – the oldest fund-raising organisation in the world supporting Israel, dedicated to, among other things, what is described as “land reclamation”.

MH17 Call for Justice!

by New Worker correspondent 

In July 2014 a Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine during the fighting between the Donbas partisans and the fascist militias loyal to the US puppet regime in Kiev.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and all 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. A Dutch-led investigation said the plane had been downed by a missile fired by the Donbas resistance or the Russians – a claim that the imperialist media has unquestioningly repeated in its efforts to demonise Russia and the anti-fascist Ukrainian resistance movements. 

            Three Russians and one Ukrainian are going to be tried in their absence on 9th March in The Hague. But there’s another side to the story and that was heard at the Conway Hall in London on Tuesday when Bonanza Media and the Global Rights for Peaceful People movement screened a documentary that challenges the whole Western narrative on the tragedy.

The film presents massive evidence that the Dutch-led investigation into the crash was a total fraud which had already decided that Russia or the Donbas partisans were to blame. A tech expert showed that phone intercepts by Kiev regime intelligence officers purporting to record Donbas partisan commanders talking about the event on the day were spliced together from unconnected conversations. Huge pieces of crash site debris were not picked up by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) which refused to include Malaysia in the JIT for six months.

MH17: Call for Justice is the first detailed documentary to challenge the Dutch-NATO version of events about the tragedy. It includes wide-reaching and exclusive interviews, including the Malaysian prime minister, one of the suspects accused of shooting down the MH17, and the Malaysian colonel who travelled to Ukraine to collect the black boxes. There are also testimonies from witnesses, evidence from experts, and previously unseen footage from the crash site in Ukraine.

• MH17 Call for Justice video

Defend Corbyn: Time to Fightback

 

Christine Blower opening the meeting

By New Worker correspondent

 

The Conway Hall was packed to the rafters this week to condemn the vicious efforts of the Blairites and Zionists  to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. Hundreds faced a barrage of abuse from a Zionist gang as they piled into the meeting in central London on Tuesday while a hundred more late-comers were turned away on safety grounds.

            Inside, the 400-strong audience heard speaker after speaker uphold the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and  slam the smears that brand Corbyn and the Labour left as “anti-semitic”. Called by the Corbyn, Antisemitism & Justice for Palestine campaign, the meeting was chaired by Christine Blower, a former teaching union leader and the panel included a number of well-known Palestinian and Jewish socialists as well as the author Tariq Ali.

Campaigners, including Lindsey German of the Stop the War coalition and Tariq Ali, called on the left to close ranks around Corbyn and defeat attempts to define any criticism of Israel as “anti-semitic”.

Richard Kuper of Jewish Voice for Labour said: “That the Corbyn project is under attack is in no doubt — from a large proportion of Labour’s MPS and a large proportion still of Labour’s bureaucracy…Labour is also under assault from the pro-Israel lobby which has been alarmed for some time about the prospect of a leader who is in favour of Palestinian rights”.

Huda Elmi,  who is running on the Corbyn slate in this year’s Labour NEC elections, said the mainstream media focus on ‘anti-semitism’ deliberately ignores the Palestinians. “The problem is Palestinians have been completely erased from it. They’re trying to subvert our ability to be loud and unapologetic about being anti-colonial”.

 “Talk about the human rights abuses against the Palestinians. We have to turn it back to that. We have stood consistently shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian people. We can’t take steps back from that.”