Now, you might have thought that we’d heard the last of John Rees, the deposed supremo of RESPECT who was drummed out of the Central Committee of the extremist Socialist Workers Party, following his failure to forge an electoral alliance between supporters of the vicious South Asian Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami and his own obscure sect.
You might also have thought that, having had his own political career – such as it was – shredded at the hands of those even more unscrupulous and shameless than himself, he would be steering clear of genocidal antisemitic terrorist movements and their followers.
You’d be wrong.
Here is John Rees, on Monday night, at the rally for Hezbollah’s MP, Hussein El Hajj Hassan and the racist bigot and Hezbollah member, Dyab Abo JahJah. Watch the first few minutes:
Rees starts by offering a ‘special thanks’ to the Quakers for hosting their meeting. He then moves on to this:
They’re due a special thanks today because they’ve been under considerable pressure all day to cancel this meeting. The neoconservatives grouped around the website, Harry’s Place, have been organising today, and have been getting people to email and call the Quakers who run the Friends Meeting House, and trying to pressurise them into abandoning this meeting. I’m very glad to say that the friendship between the Stop The War Coalition and the people in the Friends Meeting House prevented that from happening and we wish to extend our thanks to the Friends Meeting House for allowing this meeting to go ahead.
He then goes on to glory in his success at conning simple-minded pacifists into supporting a genocidal fascist movement that aim to exterminate Jews. Watch the master at work!
Rees realy is a cockweasel, isn’t he?
We did not, in fact, organise anything at all this week. We don’t organise things, by and large – apart from anti-fascist tours of the East End of London. We write articles on a website. We’re very gratified, however, if people have emailed and called the Quakers, to condemn them for hosting a pro-war meeting, in honour of Jew-killing fascists.
I think, as a whole, we’ve rather proved our case. The Stop the War Coalition turns out, in fact, to be a pro war and pro-antisemitism Coalition. John Rees publicly flaunts his political disgrace. And, as for the Quakers.
Well. Here is the Quaker’s “Peace Pledge”:
All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world. That spirit of Christ by which we are guided is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it; and we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight any war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.
Is there a single word of that pledge that the Quakers have not utterly betrayed? I am not a religious man, and I am not a Christian, but I have enough of a sense of who Jesus was, to be able to say with some confidence that the Quakers have desecrated the spirit of Christ.
If they cannot see that, then I pity them.
PS: So, the Government messed up over JahJah, evidently. Well, I expect they were a bit distracted, what with everything going on, and all.
UPDATE
Heck, I’m feeling feisty. We don’t organise things, but how about this? Why not copy this article and send it to as many people as you know who might want to know what happened on Monday night. Let’s see what happens.
David T adds
I’m not in the business of trying the persuade the Quakers not to hire their rooms out to genocidal and racist terrorist movements and their cheerleaders. I have absolutely respect for the right of an organisation to set its own course, decide who it wants to team up with, and follow its own ideology.
I emphatically do NOT support a telephone or letter writing campaign. I think that those Quakers who took the decision to make the Friends Meeting House available to Hezbollah have made it very clear what sort of organisation they are. Why would I want to encourage them to hide it?
The bottom line is this. Those Quakers involved with STWC know exactly what it stands for, and can be under no illusions about Hezbollah, or indeed Hamas, or all the other genocidal antisemitic groups that they provide facilities to.
If an institution has decided that its guiding principle is “Fuck the Yids”, we should be grateful to them for being honest with us.
What’s the alternative? That we write letters to them saying:
“Don’t you worry about how this will look”?
What will that achieve? Nothing other than mutterings about Jew-conspiracies to promote war, demonise the ‘resistance’ and shut down free speech.
The only response to the actions of the Friends Meeting House is to demand nothing. Certainly, however, feel free to let as many people as possible know what sort of institution it is.
