Defend the sacked Lancashire workers!

County Hall, Preston

The following email was sent to Mr. Ged Fitzgerald, Chief Executive of Lancashire County Council, on 10th July 2009.

To Mr. Ged Fitzgerald, Chief Executive, Lancashire County Council
cc: Prof. William I. Robinson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Cllr. Salim Mulla, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,

Last week you dismissed four members of Lancashire County Council's staff, though you were too cowardly to announce the reason.

According to the Daily Mail, these four workers were sacked for forwarding an email which compared the Holocaust to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

It appears that the email was similar to one which William I. Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, circulated to his students on Martin Luther King Day earlier this year.

Under the heading "Parallel images of Israelis and Nazis", the email included 42 side-by-side photos.

Prof. Robinson wrote in his introduction:

I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw - a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide (Websters: “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group”), a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.

Despite the fact that Prof. Robinson is himself Jewish, the Zionist lobby soon mobilised against him and he faced a disciplinary investigation. Just a few days before the Lancashire council staff were sacked for circulating the same material, Prof. Robinson was found by the university inquiry to have done nothing wrong. According to the Los Angeles Times he intends to take the matter further, pursuing his own complaint against the university for having taken any disciplinary action in the first place, since his case was one of entirely proper academic freedom.

I trust that you, Mr. Fitzgerald, will also face determined opposition to your wholly inappropriate, unprofessional and politically biased conduct in this case. I have no doubt that the workers concerned will pursue an appeal against their dismissal, and that those who care about our traditional freedoms will ensure that they have the financial means to do so.

It is an interesting coincidence that the former leader of Lancashire County Council Dr. Louise Ellman (currently MP for Liverpool Riverside) is one of the Labour Party's most extreme Zionists, chairs the Jewish Labour Movement and is vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

Furthermore I note that Lancashire County Council does not deplore all comparisons between the "Holocaust" and contemporary human rights issues. According to the council's own website, its Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in 2004 focused on Rwanda. It included an online exhibition "accompanied by refugee voices from Rwanda, Afghanistan and Palestine interacting with border and immigration officials as well as the media."

So in the council's eyes it is legitimate not only to use the "Holocaust" for its now customary purpose of legitimising Zionism, but even to make analogies between Jewish refugees and those from other conflicts - even Palestine - so long as the political point involves immigration policy. What appears beyond the pale is to address the root of the Palestinian tragedy: premeditated, criminal Zionist aggression.

Is it any wonder that Lancashire County Council (in common with our other political institutions) is treated with such contempt by its own electorate that only 38% bothered to cast their vote a few weeks ago? If democratic politics is to mean anything we must restore the values on which democracy was based - including a respect for free and informed debate. Your actions last week place you, Mr. Fitzgerald, as a prominent obstacle to that democratic renewal.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Rushton

webmaster, www.jailingopinions.com