Much attention is focused on Tony Blair as he testifies before the Iraq Inquiry, but I want to say a quick word about Blair’s sister-in-law, Lauren Booth. A recent convert to Islam, Booth is someone whose politics, like George Galloway’s and Cynthia McKinney’s and Gilad Atzmon’s, can only be properly described as far-right — although all these individuals and their fellow travelers continue to masquerade as progressive.
Via Harry’s Place comes word that Booth will be sharing a bill with Mahathir Mohamed, at a speaking engagement organized by the new Malaysian branch of Viva Palestina (the land-based equivalent of the famously seafaring Free Gaza Movement).
As I’ve noted before, Mahathir, the former Malaysian prime minister and ruthless despot, recently voiced his disappointment that the Holocaust failed to wipe out every Jew. His reading of Jewish history includes the view that “[Jews] had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole Governments to ransom.”
Lauren Booth, in associating herself with Mahathir, is either announcing that she holds the same neo-Nazi views, or that she is stupid and ignorant. Or both, I suppose. And yet on her Wikipedia page, Booth is described as a “human rights activist.”
(Don’t get me started on Wikipedia, which is useless or worse on matters of politics, though this doesn’t stop some from hailing its 10th anniversary with utopian rhetoric that really ought to be embarrassing.)
As habibi at Harry’s notes, Viva Palestina Malaysia has also recycled an article on its website by Michael Collins Piper, a talk-radio host and antisemitic conspiracy theorist who makes Rush Limbaugh look like a hippie.
And it gets better — the link at the bottom of the piece takes you to the website of Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke.
So, Viva Palestina, begun by George Galloway, is a conduit of explicit antisemitism and far-right bigotry and a megaphone for American neo-Nazis and KKK figures. In today’s pro-Palestine movement, all of that is perfectly OK. And if anyone calls you out, just say you’re a “critic of Israel,” that antisemitism charges are always fabrications, and you’re being silenced by the neocon Zionist conspiracy. Plenty of people will back you up.
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