I have a pretty bullish response, when I hear the charge of anti Semitism. Ever since I was old enough to pay much interest to the plight of the Palestinians, I heard this charge against pro Palestinian groups and individuals.

From a Muslim perspective, without any real understanding of the complexities of anti – Semitism (which is the majority of Muslims in the world including the UK, including myself at that time and to even some extent now), we saw the whole issue as a pretty simple equation: Jewish people had robbed Palestinian people of their land, not content with that, they massacred them, oppressed them brutally, and even went so far as murdering their children. Then anyone who spoke out against these Jews and what they were doing was silenced by being smeared as anti Semitic.

That’s the understanding I myself had when I was growing up. It’s pretty much correct and true, the problem was my total ignorance of the situation. I know it sounds hard to believe, but I didn’t think any Jews supported the Palestinians, just like I would have choked to hear any Muslim standing up for Israel. Why would they support us?

I wasn’t an activist I was just a kid growing up in the streets, with other Muslim kids. Since then I have met a few Jewish people who have said that young Jewish children too are taught Islamophobic views, and Israel confirmed each others worst fears.

It was a Palestinian man who first taught me, it was wrong to be inactive in the face of Israel’s evil, and he was also the first man that taught me that there were many Jews who fought for the Palestinians and even gave their lives for them. I admit I was shocked, Jewish guys helping us out? It changed the way I looked at Jewish people from that day on. I trusted and respected that old man. MPACUK is his brainchild. I was later to see with my own eyes proof of this, and read it in the Quran.

When I got active I spoke like any Muslim who doesn’t know a thing about anti-Semitism. I used the word “Jew” a lot, and “Jews” when talking about Jews who supported Israel (Zionists), even today I don’t feel it is anti Semitic to use that term. I think non-Muslim Europeans have a fear of it (when talking in a negative sense) for two reasons, they have a racism problem that keeps rearing its head, in this case it ended in the disgraceful acts of the Holocaust (Muslims never did this so we didn’t have the same hang ups). The second is that the Jewish people who feared the Europeans would do it again, made sure they branded anyone who used it as anti-Semitic.

I realised almost daily how differently many Muslims see and perceive anti-Semitism, from the European. When people got mad at Muslims for using the word Jew when talking of Zionist Jews, we didn’t apologise, instead Muslims often used to get mad right back because they felt that if they (Zionist Jews) could use Muslims in a negative context without clarifying it, and no one was demanding they clarify it, why should Muslims have to bend over backwards to get it right. Why should a Muslim be beaten up for it by the press, and demanded they make it clear, when a pro-Israeli Jew could get away with anything about Muslims, often writing for the very Islamophobic press that was so outraged at the Muslim use of lax language!

To many Muslims it seemed like racism, one rule for them and another for us. You see we don’t have the Holocaust guilt, this “white man's Burden”, because we didn’t commit the crime, we are the victims of that crime.

Of course this difference of perception is jumped on by the lobby, and Europeans are often shocked at how Muslims react not realising we don’t have the historical baggage they do. We feel we have been the victims not the oppressors in this recent historical context.

Muslims don’t understand the reaction of the Europeans, seeing it as one sided, biased and anti-Muslim because we feel victimized by attacks against us by Zionists within the Jewish community. Europeans don’t understand the Muslim reaction seeing their own past of anti-Semitism and projecting their fear of it rising again on to us.

What Europeans fail to remember however is that millions of humans are dying or being oppressed right now at their hands too for another small word “Islam”.

I carried on working in MPACUK, not really bothering to delve deeply into understand anything more about anti-Semitism, simply because I didn’t think there was that much to know, I had realised now that not all Jews supported Israel, accepted it, and had personal proof of it.

I will never forget an eighty year old woman standing outside Marks and Spencer who came every week to picket. I always used to be amazed at her, and wonder how these so called “practicing” Muslim women pathetically never attended (they were too busy practicing for God to lift a finger for the oppressed). I am not great at small talk, but when I finally did find something to talk about; she told me she was Jewish. An eighty year old Jewish woman standing in the freezing cold, being attacked by pro-Israeli Jews, sometimes physically and always verbally, for a people that were not even her own. May God bless her, a Jewish woman better and more just than any Muslim woman I have ever met in my life.

As MPACUK grew with increasing ferocity we were targeted unjustly for anti-Semitism. The more unjust the smear, the more hard nosed I became at the term anti-Semitic.

To me it was a weapon Zionists used to gag anyone who stood up to them. The average English guy believed the smear attacks because they didn’t know how it was being used. It was the Muslims who got the brunt of the attack, because we were at the receiving end of their hatred.

I always knew they used it like a club to discredit anyone who spoke up, but how organised and how determined they were at making a link that I can honestly say - shocked me.

It was almost like a machine, watching you for any mistake, and determined to link you with tireless desperation to anti-Semitism. They had used this same strategy since the creation of Israel and even before, it was a brilliant tactic to stop Palestinian voices being heard by key influencers. Politicians or media people would not want to be linked to anti-Semitism themselves. Silencing anyone who could get to them with a racist slur was as good as gagging them; a tragic and efficient attack against freedom of speech that is never highlighted.

The more I realised that they (Zionists) didn’t honestly care if you were or were not anti-Semitic, all they cared about was smearing you with a label for their own agenda, the more I realized that I was not going to play their game or tip toe around them. I had seen for too many years, people running away from that club. There was no point running, I never met anyone who could out run them, so just be honest and fight them head on without compromise was my opinion.

To this day I believe that any pro-Muslim or pro-Palestinian person charged with anti-Semitism is almost definitely innocent. If ever I heard that they were calling someone anti-Semitic, I no longer believed it, and I still don’t. I may have got it wrong with Irving, but I’m not taking any blame for that, the way I see it is you can’t blame a man for not believing a compulsive liar because one time he was telling the truth. The Zionists were always lying and smearing people. For once they told the truth and complained when people didn’t believe them.

I would advise anyone who fights against anti-Semitism in this world, the first thing you need to do is stop Zionists abusing that term, because it is now almost impossible to know or believe as far as I am concerned (and many others I know) anything they say. If you are honestly campaigning against anti-Semitism then prove it, take that word back from them, and clean it up and let it be a word for good and not to silence good.

The machine plotted and worked it seemed almost day and night to smear us. We were given a no platform policy by the NUS, after the UJS (Union of Jewish students) lied and smeared us, unbelievably even linking us with Al- Mahajiroun (a group we demanded be arrested after they held placards calling for the beheading of non-Muslims). To this day, it’s disgraceful that no pro-Palestinian Jewish or non-Muslim student group stood up for us or even asked if these smears were true, they just accepted it without question.

More charges were to follow. A picture of a monster with horns on his head under an American flag was deemed “anti-Semitic.” It was obtained after typing words like “Zionist power” into a Google image search. I can’t believe MPACUK pulled the picture due to the pro-Israeli lobby complaining about it. How can a monster with a flag be anti-Semitic? The Zionists are monsters (they kill kids), and they have influence in America (AIPAC), what’s the problem?

I realise that maybe 60 years ago some German may have used monsters to depict Jews, did that mean we could no longer use monsters to depict Zionists?

It didn’t matter anyway, the honest gesture MPACUK did was reported by them not as a sign that MPACUK was willing to listen to people who were offended. Instead Zionists accused MPACUK of trying to hide it, and cover our anti-Semitism by pulling it off! It once again proved they were not interested in the truth or our willingness to listen.

It got so crazy that at one point in a talk with Alan Hart, a Zionist blogger accused us of anti-Semitism because we had a Spiderman picture on our website. I was honestly baffled? Was the man who made Spiderman a Nazi or something and were we going to be accused of knowing his history and using a Nazi superhero. It felt like you needed a degree in anti-Semitism to make sure they couldn’t get you on it.

It turned out that 60 years ago or something some spider was used by the Nazi’s to represent Jews, so they accused us of knowingly putting Spiderman up. So you need a degree in Nazi history to work this stuff out!

We used an image from a neo-Nazi website and that is another charge. Even this was crazy to me. For a start, I don’t believe anything I hear from the Zionists at all, as I have said before. If they used such machinery on MPACUK, I would be a fool to think they were not using it on all their opponents. Right now somewhere out there they are claiming MPACUK is a neo-Nazi website or anti-Semitic or a Muslim extremist or hate website, any old thing to label us. If they could claim that about us, they could claim it about the next website. See now how tainted they have made the word anti-Semitic.

Again it was found using a Google search and I believe the article was emailed to us. Now how can an image be bad because of where it comes from? So if the boxer Muhammad Ali was put on a website, even assuming the website was questionable, is that image now tainted with some mystical neo-Nazi power?

A similar Google word search on the publishers of the Danish cartoons reveals the pro-Israeli newspaper owner. They accused us of using an article from a Holocaust denier’s website. The article was actually written by the Guardian Newspaper, and reproduced on Irving’s website. Is that somehow altered because it appeared on Irving’s site? It can now no longer be used, or do we have to copy and paste it from the “correct website” to make the article legitimate, even if it’s the same article? Of course this type of warped logic is nonsense.

If you are smart what you do is go and copy it from the Guardian website so they don’t smear you. The real question however is missed, why the hell are they trying to smear you in the first place and why is no-one standing up and saying “hold on a minute, what is the problem here? That’s a bit far fetched to accuse someone of anti-Semitism for using a Guardian article copied from the wrong site?”

The content is important, what it is actually saying, and not, where it came from. An anti-Semitic article is anti-Semitic whether it’s on the BBC or on any other website. And the same applies if it is not. Content not place of content makes something anti-Semitic!

I know what people are thinking, “but why give them any ammunition to slur you”, and I get the point, but where will they let you stop? They will slur you no matter what, they have to or they lose. Get it – it is part of the strategy to silence a group or individual.

Baroness Jenny Tongue the Liberal Democrat Whip was recently and disgracefully attacked for being anti-Semitic because she said the pro-Israeli lobby has too much influence in Britain. It is true and she is right, that didn’t help her, she didn’t get any images from the wrong place, no Spiderman mistakes, or Guardian articles from the wrong site. She made a statement of fact, the smear machine kicked in and she was attacked by her own party! You want me to go on, Ken Livingstone, George Galloway, Robert Fisk, Brian Whittaker, Christian Aid, Edward Saeed, the MCB. The list is endless. None made the mistake we did, all were accused of anti-Semitism. When they want to get you, they will manufacture something to get you on.

Of course we don’t intentionally go and get images that offend or come from neo-Nazi sites (if that’s what they really are), it’s a mistake, we are all volunteers and we don’t spend our lives tracking every site and what it stands for, and then even more time seeing if the accusation against the site is true or just another smear. If the article looks reasonable, we may use it. If it’s wrong, call us or email us and we will investigate and take it down. (If it is anti-Semitic at which point they will accuse us of hiding or covering it up – you can’t win).

I know that people may not believe how desperate pro-Israeli lobbies are to smear people of anti-Semitism; or that it is really an organised smear campaign. This may sound untrue to people who have not fought for Palestine or against Zionists, but I would urge them all to read the book “They Dare to Speak Out” by Paul Findley. It documents how the Zionist lobby targets and smears every person they feel is a danger to Israel. I say without a shadow of a doubt it is an organised constant campaign of monitoring and smearing – it’s a machine.

At any time if these people were sincere (and it was not a constant planned smear campaign), they could have picked the phone up as I have said before and talked to us about an image or an article and explained what was wrong with it. We might not agree, but we would listen. Of course that is the last thing they want – real dialogue, so we minimise mistakes that really offend honest Jews. They want to smear, smears help Israel, dialogue does not.

To me anti-Semitism is simple – hating Jews, for nothing more then being Jews. You don’t need a degree in Nazi history to work it out; you don’t need spurious links, or images from the wrong website to make some pathetic link. When it gets to that, you can bet it’s a stitch up.

I know I don’t always get it right, but it is better then doing nothing. I’m sorry if I have offended Jews or non Muslim people who are sympathetic to Muslims and especially Palestinian Muslims, by making mistakes in my battle to defend Palestinians and Muslims.

If anyone wants to speak to MPACUK, from the Jewish community or anti racist campaigners and advise us to help us get it right, we are more than willing to listen and learn.

*Please note I wrote this not because of any pressure from the Irving smear, because I don’t care what these Zionists think of me. But after reading a Blog by a sincere non-Muslim who seemed to stick his neck out for MPACUK (conscientious blogger at Lenin’s tomb). I thought the least I can do is tell him and others like him where I am coming from, and why I made any of the mistakes I made in the past and may make in the future.

It is simply in my journey to freedom with my people.

---