A 404 error and the Stop the War Coalition

This site is a resource for all those who need or want to know what the Stop the War Coalition really says and means.

Got a 404 when you visited the Stop the War Coalition site? That’s because Stop the War has launched a war against its own website. Stop the War Coalition is desperately filleting their web site of incriminating, nauseating and racist material.

If you are looking for an article from the Stop the War website that blames everything on the West, or one written by or referencing an active antisemite, it may now have been deleted.

If so, this site could be for you.

It is a collection of links, references and short critiques that relate to the British Stop the War Coalition. We’ll also be highlighting articles not yet culled that lurk in the depths of the Stop the War Site.

Stop the War’s co-founder and their past chair, Jeremy Corbyn, is now leader of the Labour Party. Pure speculation, but the recent Night of the Long Knives at the Stop the War website may possibly be related to the sudden and uncomfortable scrutiny that STW now find themselves under and the rash of revisions to their published content.

But the truth must out, so this is a record of the Stop the War Coalition’s stupidity, nihilism and pandering to racism.

Enjoy!

Soupy, Saul & our contributors/collaborators at the Real Stop the War.

 

Stop the War & the Mahdi Army: Shia Jihad in Iraq & Syria

This is a stub on an article published by the Stop the War Coalition in 2005 Stop the War published a statement in support of the Iranian backed Shia militia and political grouping in Iraq and Syria known as Al Sadr or the Mahdi Army  – under the leadership of Muqtada al-Sadr.

The article has now been deleted but you can read the statement here:

A commentary will follow shortly.

Stop the War Join with the Muslim Brotherhood “Against the Zionist Project”

This is a stub link to an an article published by the Stop the War Coalition on the 3rd Cairo Conference in 2005 but recently deleted.

A commentary will be posted here shortly.

The deleted article can be found here:

Stop The War and kids who go to war

The Stop The War Coalition website has published  a number of posts about Ukraine. The most egregious by far are by John Pilger.

Pilger methodically repeats a series of Kremlin war propaganda* memes: That the 2014 Revolution of Dignity was a fascist coup (see the response to this pap by Ukrainian socialists and anarchists I link to in my blog post on Corbyn’s Ukraine fantasies); That there were pogroms against Russian speakers – a line lifted from Putin himself and a vicious fantasy.

The idea of NATO ‘expanding Eastwards’ and ‘threatening Russia’ – central to Pilger but also STWC more widely- not only ignores the agency of Eastern Europeans but also

Poetry, racism and Stop the War

On October 25^th 2015 Stop the War published an outrageously anti-Semitic poem by Heathcote Williams entitled “Evil on the Streets”.

The archived STWc article can be found here

This webpage is now one of the many 404 pages on STW’s website.

The poem was inspired by the supposed killing of Ahmad Saleh Manasra, a 13 year old Palestinian boy who attempted to knife to death a 13 year old Israeli boy during the spree of attacks on Israeli civilians and the inevitable response and Palestinian deaths, following tensions around the Temple Mount in October 2015.
Whilst Heathcote Williams and other UK supporters of the Palestinian “uprising” recounted the death of Ahmad, he was in fact photographed alive and receiving successful treatment in an Israeli hospital.

What is striking about the poem is not so much its simplistic, gut-wrenching interpretation of a complex, impossible situation or even its unsubtle parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany

Munich Olympics, dead Jews and Stop the War

On 5^th February 2014 Stop the War coalition published an article on the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The archived article can be found here

The author was journalist/polemicist Alison Weir, who founded the “If Americans Knew” organisation, which argues that American support for Israel is as a result of domination of US media and politics by Jewish interests. A number of Jewish groups now regard this organisation as an openly antisemitic grouping.

Alison Weir regularly appears on the Free American radio show, which is hosted by white supremacist Clay Douglas.

Stop the War: In game of Great Power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea, let it be Russia

This is a stub article pointing to the offending Way Back Machine link. The article is still up on the Stop the War website.

Stop the War: In game of Great Power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea, let it be Russia

Stop the War: We want to abolish Israel but we love Jews. Honest.

In May 2015 Stop the War published an article justifying its position that the State of Israel should not exist.

The article has since been deleted from the Stop the War site but you can read it here:

This is a vintage piece, bringing together all the traditional STW delights of confused “logic”, invented statistics, and startlingly bold omissions of historical fact.

We’re treated to the hectoring self-certainty that is the hallmark of STW and this can only ferment in the minds of those fortunate few who have never had to face any form of genuine difficulty or discrimination and are thus free to concentrate on enjoying someone else’s. A lack of experience of any kind of insecurity, uncertainty, or vulnerability means STW supporters can make the necessary fine distinctions between  peoples who are entitled to self-determination even at the cost of stabbing old women in the streets, and murdering mothers in front of their children- for example Arabs – and wicked chancers who shouldn’t expect to find national self-determination or basic safety, i.e. Jews. This is not however to be confused with anti-semitism,

According to Stop the War 5000 dead Yazidis never happened.

A tale of two sieges: what have Yazidis in Iraq got that Palestinians in Gaza have not?

On the 14^th August 2014 Stop the War published an article which said that the threat to the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar had never been.

That article has been deleted but you can find an archive of it here.

There was no hunting of the thousands to a trapped death. The water had not run out. The US air strikes that broke the siege and saved them were an illegitimate act of war.

It was, said Stop the War, the ‘false story’ of a ‘Yazidi crisis.’

And why had it not happened?

Because if it had happened, the contrast to the siege of Gaza would have been less acute. There is no other evidence in the Stop the War piece than that.

It is a strange view

An Insidious Form of Antisemitism

‘United States of Israel? How the Great Liar Netanyahu twists America round his finger’ by Matt Carr was published on March 5 2015. It has not yet been deleted by Stop the War.

The title is using an antisemitic trope – playing into the ages-old idea, loved by antisemites, that Israel controls the United States – its banks, its media, or as here – its foreign policy.

The article makes the claim, too, but the hatred is between the lines. On the surface it’s simply an article attacking a world leader, in this case Benjamin Netanyahu –

‘one of the most repellent and dangerous politicians in the world today’, a man ‘who trades on fear and war, a cynical and amoral manipulator without a trace of honesty in his entire body, who lies as easily as he breathes’.

I think this is all fine: it’s not a compelling argument in itself, of course, simply levelling a series of insults at a politician, and personally I can think of many who are more repellent and dangerous.

Stop the War: Has the FIFA corruption crisis saved Israel from vote to expel it from world football?

Stop the War: Has the FIFA corruption crisis saved Israel from vote to expel it from world football?

In May 2015 Stop the War posted an article that made an causal link between FIFA corruption and Israel.

The article has now been deleted, but you can find an archived version of it here:

Geoff Lee of the campaign Red Card Israeli Racism and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, wrote this piece explaining why Israel should be “kicked out of world football.” The title and subtitle hint at a conspiricism so often found with pieces about Israel and which the main text does nothing to substantiate. In this case it draws a connection between the timing of the FIFA corruption scandal and its apparent benefit to Israel at the 65th FIFA Congress.

The main problem with this is that the attempted vote it described wasn’t ‘abandoned’. The Palestinians

Stop the War: Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East

On the 14^th November 2015 Stop the War published an article saying that the 130 victims of the Paris attacks were ‘reaping the whirlwind’ sown by the West and our foreign policy choices.

The article has been deleted but you can read it here:

The attacks on Paris started at 9.20pm on the evening of the 13th. They lasted for hours. After the end of the siege of the Bataclan, it took ten hours more for the bodies to be counted, and the process of identification begun.

What does this mean?

That while young Parisians were dying as hostages in the Bataclan, in the four separate suicide bombings including the Stade de France and the shootings on the rue Alibert, the rue del la Fontaine-au-roi, and rue de Charonne, Stop the War’s writer was sitting down to his typewriter. Before we had an idea of the numbers who had died or would die, or could take the first breath to mourn them, he wrote to blame the victims.

 

The premise of the article was simple.

To Stop the War, ISIL are not the fascists – we are.

Groundhog day in Syria as Mr Benn goes bombing

On the 4^th December 2015 Stop the War published an article on the decision to extend air strikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria.

The article has been deleted but you can find an archive of it here.

The case is made. There is no doubt that the extension of strikes – the extension of the operational area of eight Tornado jets a handful of miles across a border that IS don’t recognise –is the right thing to do.

We need not rehearse the arguments here. We need not talk about the Paris attacks, or the direct appeal made by the government of France to the people of Britain. We need not talk about the treaty relationships or fundamental friendships invoked in order to fight a terrible wrong in the world; the UN mandate; the UN mandate, or the successes against ISIL in Iraq that had driven IS back to Syria in the first place.

In one year of RAF air strikes there, ISIL have been broken up and driven back. They have lost 25% of their land,

Stop the War: Time to go to war with Israel as the only path to peace in the Middle East

This is a stub article pointing to the offending Way Back Machine link.

Stop the War: Time to go to war with Israel as the only path to peace in the Middle East