Colin ShindlerBriefing Paper: Labour Party Inquiry on Anti-Semitism Who am I? I am an emeritus professor at SOAS, University of London. My book, Israel and the European Left was published in 2011 and I have long been interested in this area. I have therefore written this briefing paper which traces the road which has led to … Read more
The Black Door:Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers By Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac Collins, £30 British prime ministers have never been neutral towards the intelligence services. Intelligence historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac have written an accessible book, indicating how different premiers reacted to intelligence reports – and often bypassed their own … Read more
In May 1926, a Jewish watchmaker approached a middle-aged man sporting a cane and attending his favourite restaurant in the Rue Racine in Paris. The watchmaker asked the man his name and, after hearing the response, pumped five bullets into him, adding two more as he lay dying on the pavement. The dead man was … Read more
Last year, the spiritual mentor of Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave a sermon in the Great Mosque in Mosul. The advance of Daesh will not stop, he proclaimed, “until we hit the last nail into the coffin of Sykes-Picot”. He was referring to the secret agreement, concluded 100 years ago this week by the Conservative … Read more
The signatories to the letter do not mention that not one single Bundist was ever elected to the Sejm, the Polish parliament during the inter-war years. The Zionists and the ultra-orthodox were far more successful. In 1939 the Bund depended on an electoral arrangement with the Polish Socialist party for its municipal election gains. Those … Read more
Many Labour Jews voted for Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London with a heavy heart. Khan’s past association with unsavoury Islamists who were not shy about peppering their views with anti-Semitic tropes undoubtedly jarred. Yet during the election campaign Khan went out of his way to court the Jewish community and instantly denounced the view … Read more
Last week’s revelations in the national and Israeli press that Associated Press (AP) had ”co-operated” with Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry during the 1930s and 1940s was astounding. The German historian, Harriet Scharnberg, discovered that photographer SS-Oberscharführer Franz Roth of the Propaganda Ministry, whose work regularly appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party daily, was … Read more
Ingrid Carlberg’s Raoul Wallenberg is a painful book to read. The story is known. The outcome is known. But history cannot be unwritten. This well-researched, detailed account relates the saga of Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in wartime Hungary in 1944. This long book conveys every morsel of information – from the important to the trivial … Read more
One hundred years ago a small group of Irish men and women staged a military uprising from Dublin’s General Post Office in a futile attempt to throw off the British yoke and achieve Irish independence. The leadership of the uprising were foolishly executed after courts-martial. They became martyrs in a religious country which believed in … Read more
“Like their fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended,” So wrote a JC special correspondent from Buenos Aires in … Read more