Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£12 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934  www.epsr.org.uk 
No 1491 11th May 2016                                                                          25p fortnightly

Foul “anti-Semitism” accusations against rising left discontent are a further black mark for the Jewish religious freemasonry’s de facto Zionism (meaning all support for the “right to exist” of the “Israeli State” land-theft occupation of Palestine). Bullying suppression of questions about the war-crime terror origins of this racist colonial seizure of the someone else’s country is part of escalating fascist censorship of all revolutionary (“extremist”) stirrings against the non-stop imperialist blitzkrieging and drone terrorising of the planet, to keep it in thrall to Slump-ridden private profit despite its catastrophic failure and bankruptcy. Denying “anti-semitism” is like denying “have you stopped beating your wife” innuendos; a pointless grovel. Corbynista purge capitulation to this outrageous lie underlines the class-collaborating treachery of all Labourism. But “anti-Zionism” of the fake-“left” equally avoids the central question of ending this vile Zionist intrusion, offering hopeless “democracy” confusion and reforms with continued denial  and “condemning” of jihadist revolt - one precursor to world revolution 
  
The most sickening part of the latest “anti-semitism” propaganda onslaught is the across the board capitulation to its demented agenda by Labourites and fake-“lefts” of all shades.
Imperialist reaction, and the Jewish religious freemasonry intertwined with it, needs confronting head on over this monstrous smear and character assassination campaign against all those even halfway sympathising with the endlessly persecuted and genocidally murdered Palestinians.
It is part and parcel of a world turn to dirty dealing and skulduggery from the outrageous “judicial coups” and trumped-up “corruption scandals” organised against half a dozen left-reformist governments in Latin America, to the stridently aggressive chauvinism and poison of the Republican election campaign in the USA itself.
It all aims to suppress and intimidate all the rising militancy and concern being driven to the surface by the unstoppable and intractable crisis collapse of the world private profit making system, and the austerity savagery it is already forcing the ruling class to impose (in order to retain its grotesque wealth and privilege). 
It is particularly aimed at stifling any grasp or understanding of the huge world rebellion which continues to erupt throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the Far East, and at forcing further “condemnation” of such “jihadist” struggles, by condemning the Palestinian national liberation struggle which is a central focus of anti-imperialism.  
The bizarre topsy-turvy Zionist-imperialist conspiracy, insisting all resistance and opposition to its colonialist occupation is “anti-Semite”, would be declared certifiably insane if its fascist intimidation purpose was not so serious.
Ken Livingstone “a Hitlerite” to take one ludicrous example??????????????
Livingstone is an arch-careerist, and a maverick fake-“left” who has ducked and weaved in and out of the opportunist and thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party for his whole political life.
He has a record of anti-communism and pro-imperialist warmongering to match any (supporting the 1998 NATO blitzkrieg of the tiny Serbian remnant of the Yugoslavian workers state for example), along with a legacy of reactionary class-collaboration as Mayor with imperialist City finance in London barely distinguishable from Boris Johnson, (even one time urging the police to crack down on May Day demonstrators).
He is part of the whole lying racket of “left” parliamentarianism which has held workers back from revolutionary politics for over a century and a half and which disarms its understanding of the deadly class war struggles which the crisis is bringing ever closer.
But he is also a sharp and clever populist with a “left” image to protect – certainly too clever to be some kind of shallow “racist”.
To further call him a closet Nazi-supporter is to lose contact with reality or to turn it upside down, Goebbels style. 
Equally unreal is the notion that the entire fake-“left” spectrum of pretend revolutionaries currently jostling for “entryist” influence in the “Momentum” supporters movement for Jeremy Corbyn, has suddenly been revealed to be “secretly more racist than the National Front all along.”
Who knew?   
Well no-one of course. 
There is a huge amount for Leninist-Marxism to expose about the pretend-revolutionaries of the fake-“left” swamp, Trotskyists and revisionists alike, both the Labour entryists and those rejecting the Corbyn movement as “just” a continuation of Labourism (correctly enough but writing off the movement itself as without significance).
That is a vital task.
Their politics are not only a million miles from the understanding and grasp needed by the working class and Third World masses,  particularly as the world capitalist crisis intensifies but an obstacle to genuine revolutionary grasp.
Many of them are poisonously hostile to the workers states and the working class discipline that is needed both for revolutionary class war and the maintaining of class authority when capitalism has been overthrown  – and all of them will end up on the wrong counter-revolutionary side as the world class war struggles intensify (as already clear from detailed analysis of their anti-communist Trot “analyses” or wooden Stalinist revisionism made in over 30 years of EPSR polemics). 
But on this issue there is no “case” to answer. 
What they do have a “case to answer” for is an almost universal failure to confront the central question raised, the bullying of the entire world by the well connected Zionist lobby threaded throughout imperialism, into forced acceptance of the “right of Israel to exist” and the demented nonsense that challenging that is “anti-semitic.”
First of all there is nothing “racist” about the ever growing world hatred of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Whatever residues of lumpen anti-semitism there are in the world, of the kind deliberately fostered by capitalism for its Slump-war scapegoating in the 1930s (and again as emerging around the Kiev Nazi throwbacks installed by the West in Ukraine for example), they have nothing to do with it. 
Total detestation and hostility is simply the rational response to this land-theft colonial implant on another people’s territory, established and maintained by mass murderous terrorising ethnic cleansing from the beginning and maintained ever since by non-stop military (and freelance settler civilian) oppression, daily murders, physical and cultural bullying, intimidation, imprisonments and torture of both adults and children, non-stop surveillance, siege level border restrictions and consequent poverty, and slave-level work exploitation.
All that is  supplemented at regular intervals with all-out blitzkrieg barbarity using the vilest and foulest of terrifying weaponry, from 2000lb high explosive bombs pulverising local housing, schools, and hospitals to war-crime (for what the term is worth) civilian killing with bone-burning white-phosphorus, “flêchette” flesh-piercing anti-personnel bombs and cluster munitions.
Nor is there anything “racist” or “anti-semitic” about calling for an end to this vile monstrosity of an artificial “state” imposed by the collective wish of Western imperialist diktat through the “official instruction” of the US-stooge “United Nations” soon after the Second World War – a colonialist implant uniquely carried through long after the age of imperialist territorial seizures was over.
Those past colonial annexations were all bad enough in themselves with their dozens of unresolved, near or total genocidal displacements and brutal slaughter of indigenous nations, mass slavery, mass deportations, rape, torture, and sadistic persecution.
And contrary to the hopeless defeatism of much of the fake-“left” that “there is not much you can do about it now”, the need for restitution, compensation, retrospective justice and resolution remains outstanding, from the plains of the US and Canada, and the mountains of Mexico and Latin America to large swathes of slave-providing and colonially plundered Africa, and the Aborigine lands of Australia and New Zealand (among many).
Sorting out all those still live questions is a significant component in the growing worldwide pressure to topple and turnover the whole tyrannical and brutal imperialist monopoly capitalist exploitation order.  
But the imposition of so-called “Israel” is worse still, forced through against the tide of history when rising world national liberation revolt had already shifted the entire world centre of gravity to acceptance of a new age of de-colonisation and the ending of physical empire occupations forever (though monopoly imperialism quickly adapted, and neo-colonial dollar-dominated exploitation continues unrelentingly, just as savagely and with just as much blitzing and barbarity, if not more, with over 400 wars and interventions since 1945).
Furthermore the post-WW2 Palestine Nakba, or “expulsion disaster” and its horrors, is still fresh in minds, including even to this day in the indelible memories of some still alive from the time when their violent ejection was carried through, a burning shame and desire for justice passed on to all the subsequent generations living as refugees, exiles and oppressed prisoners (actually or in all but name).
Hostility for the Zionist fascism which imposed and maintains this barbarity (lavishly supported by its Western imperialist backers), – and which has no choice in the historical impasse it has created by its occupation but to permanently continue smiting and suppressing the inevitably and unstoppable resistance to it, – is no “anti-semitism” or racism either.
It is a central element in the hatred and detestation of the entire tyrannising West shared by the masses throughout the Third World increasingly as the crisis imposes ever worse economic burdens, and the barbarity of non-stop warmongering (dressed up as the meaningless “war on terror”). 
It is a perfectly sound revolutionary-spirit response (increasingly sympathised with by Western masses too) to the tyrannical dominance of both this particular intrusion into the Middle East, and the wider function that imperialism uses it for, as a permanent jackboot on the neck of the entire Arab and wider Middle Eastern world, one of the most crucial resource rich and strategically important regions of the world, and as the model for now non-stop collective punishment blitzings, dronings and “kill them all” imperialist disciplining of world revolt. 
So this Zionism can be nuclear armed and with never a murmur from an imperialism so ready to bully and condemn as a “threat to world peace” say, Iran, or North Korea (which simply justifiably want to defend themselves as everyone else does).
It can maintain one of the world’s most technically advanced, powerful and trained militaries (funded and armed heavily by Washington) aggressively ready to blitz and destroy every effort the hundreds of millions of exploited people in the region make towards national liberation to get out from under international monopoly capitalist dominance and control, or even to prepare for that.
Even without this wider significance (inseparable in fact) the particulars of the Jewish occupation alone are monstrous.
It has seen displacement of a seven million strong Arab people with a proud and cultured history, into a permanent exiled diaspora; or into generations long refugee camp poverty and desperation; or held in an effectively concentration camp existence in concrete hellhole areas like the Gaza strip; or kept in a harried and sabotaged existence on such scrappy and dry land and villages as still remain to them, with even that constantly stolen by further settler intimidation and expansion of “illegal” townships (as if there could be anything “legal” at all about such fascist theft), and subject to non-stop well poisoning, cutting and burning of olive groves, and fragmentation by new roads etc; or just living a second-class, racially-suppressed, humiliated and persecuted apartheid status within Israel itself, excluded from normal life by virtue of not being part of the “chosen people”, a gross racist exclusiveness built on a 2500 year old mystical conceit. 
All else being equal this will continue until the Palestinian people can no longer revolt against this grotesque injustice.
Since they will rightfully never accept their lot, that  means either until they are utterly destroyed and wiped out or reduced to a pathetic fragment like the Australian aborigines or most of the American “Indian” nations (all deserving restitution).
Or until they fight back and overturn this monstrosity as they have no choice but to do, using every possible method they are able, declared “terrorism” by the West but nothing more than the heroic and desperate battling of a suppressed people with no other means to challenge this tyranny than the desperate sacrifices of suicide bombing of the past or the equally desperate knife-attacks of the latest rising Intifida. 
Whether or not these are the methods Marxism would advocate as its first choice for struggle, every revolutionary and Marxist and principled worker everywhere will stand four square with them against the monstrous tyranny imposed on them and against the occupation, and welcome the defeats inflicted on imperialism’s endless smiting “punishment” directly and via its attack dog Zionists. 
The growing impact of, and sympathy for, the Palestinians’ fight, which is a focal point and pivot for worldwide rising struggle, spontaneously erupting from the Philippines and Indonesia to the Middle East and throughout the Middle East in the form of “terrorist jihadism” has led to this clearly coordinated Western demonisation campaign.
Consciously or not it is influencing growing discontent and dismay everywhere at the appalling injustices and unfairness imposed on all the world, the ever widening gap in wealth and resources, and the teetering uncertainties of Slump crisis squeezing even poverty conditions into the floor. 
So these intelligence agency inspired deluges of media and political denunciations are trying to discredit and poison minds against even the most tepid of “left” empathy or sympathy.
An immediate purpose of the latest hysteria was to sabotage any progress in the local, Assembly and mayoral elections (only partially successfully) and more generally to deflate and confuse, the popular anti-capitalist surge which temporarily has pushed “left” Labourite Jeremy Corbyn to the fore.
But beyond that the carefully coordinated and timed propaganda blitzing of deliberate obfuscation and lies also aims to distract attention from the much bigger questions of crisis and collapse which are hurtling the capitalist system into the greatest world breakdown in all history. 
The ruling class knows full well what deadly turmoil it will be facing once the Quantitative Easing temporary suspension of the global collapse can no longer hold back the Slump disaster and economic breakdown that is inevitable from the contradictions in its private profit system. 
The terrifying world finance breakdown which surfaced in 2008 after decades of greater and greater financial lurches, Stock Exchange failures, credit breakdowns, currency implosions, international bankruptcies and wipeout and stagnation of entire economies from Mexico to Japan, is about to implode uncontrollably with a thousand times greater devastation than ever seen in history, as the effect of valueless QE money creation finally runs out in inflationary and credit meltdown disaster. 
The QE “bandage” is already seeping badly and the unravelling of the “free enterprise” system into bankruptcy and Slump unconcealable – and about to worsen disastrously, as the market collapses everywhere accelerate and commodity prices plunge.
All the contradictions of the imperialist capitalist world order are reaching breaking point and driving the masses everywhere ever closer to revolutionary desperation. 
Only the most ruthless intensification of exploitation and cuts in conditions offer any of the world capitalist ruling classes the chance to survive the inter-imperialist cutthroat battles for markets already tearing things apart with price collapses everywhere and brutal competitive dirty dealing.
So a panicking ruling class is desperate to head the working class away from even the shallowest of fake-”left” revolt or rebellion that might stall its cuts, let alone anything remotely resembling the revolutionary politics which are urgently needed and inevitably going to emerge everywhere – or even which might open the door to the kind of rebelliousness that would eventually stir up such politics.
All the old games of “left reform” and “left”-pressure “to defend the working class” have to be torn up or be whipped into class collaborating line more tightly than even in the last century of Labour-TUC collusion and treachery, which sold the hoodwinking “parliamentary democracy” racket to the working class, keeping it away from the only real path out of capitalist crisis and disaster, the revolutionary overturn of this whole stinking corrupt, incompetent and callously unequal society. 
The real fear is not of “safe” Labourism or even “renewed left” Labourism (just as “safe” for the ruling class in fact as any past posturing pretence), but that the necessities of the crisis now heading into the greatest Slump disaster ever, will rapidly drive this surprise left surge right past such pretences and posturing.
The disillusionment with corrupt and degenerate “parliamentary politics” is irreversible as the election turnout figures once more illustrated – for example in the supposedly hugely important “victory” for the figurehead London mayor, elected on 44% of a 44% turnout i.e. just 19% of those whose could be bothered to register (the un-registered number knocking the overall “support” substantially lower still). 
In many extraordinary forms, from doctors’ strikes, and parental exam hostility to the “luvvies revolt” over the BBC and the public outrage at Osborne’s disability Budget cuts (forcing rapid U-turn) there are astonishing straws in the wind of social breakdown and challenge to ruling class control (or rather the lack of control its incompetence is demonstrating). London’s unaffordable housing crisis is another.
None of these are a working class movement and certainly nothing like “the revolution” but they are seismic signals of growing pressure  that, with much else, will eventually have to come to a Marxist grasp of the world.
To fragment and break up such philosophical and political development, any lies will do, however laughable, as long as they can stir up division, confusion, conflict and hatred.
Hence the outrageous bullying of this astonishing “anti-semitism” campaign, using the endless special pleading of the worldwide Jewish religious freemasonry, deeply embedded within imperialism, as a weapon.
The monstrous opportunism of the “moderate” Labourites – all shades - has immediately gone along with this fascist campaign, none more than the arch-careerist and mountebank, Sadiq Khan, ready to abandon and deny all his past “left” posturing and Third World sympathising in order to make his “soundness” known to the ruling class in pursuit of the London mayorship i.e. his willingness to support and maintain the capitalist order, just as all Labourism always has done and always will.
He was one of the first to put the knife in against “left” activists with poisonous and irrelevant lies about “racism”, a stinking hypocrisy particularly in the light of his own complaints of the racist anti-“muslim” campaign waged by the Tories against him.
The knifing task is also eagerly embraced by his fellow reactionaries and Blairites in Labour, who far from celebrating the great boost to Labourism in recent months from public opinion discontent with the crisis, have pitched in increasingly with this anti-”left” hate campaign.
They have been showing their true colours ever more clearly as class-colluders with Big Business and the fatcat establishment, after keeping the threadbare and corruption riddled “parliamentary democracy” racket on the road for the last 20 years with their spin-doctoring meaningless and draconian anti-working class moralising (indistinguishable from Tory “pull your socks up” workhouse savagery), and with their direct service in setting up imperialism’s world war mayhem in the Nazi-NATO Serbian, Afghanistan and then Iraq war blitzings, and subsequent invasions like the destruction of Libya and the western instigated, and provoked civil war in Syria, armed and funded via the reactionary Gulf states. 
Now, straight from helping get going this world-war destruction “escape route” for the ruling class from the disastrous humiliation and failure of the collapse of the private profit making system, they have become active reactionaries determined to break up and disrupt the clear popular left movement that is underway, albeit hamstrung currently by illusions in the Labourite “lefts”.
Their deliberate defeatism, talking down, and demoralising poured out on Corbyn’s head on TV and in the press is a vicious campaign of astonishing sabotage.
These Blairite scum are showing themselves to be as reactionary as the Mosleyite movement which emerged in the 1930s, again from a class collaborating “Labourism” turned more vicious in Slump conditions than the Tories themselves.
But the grovelling capitulation of the treacherous “left” Labourites dutifully thrashing themselves with agonised “confessions” about supposed “racism”, at ruling class behest, is just as repellent.
Trapped by decades of PC single-issue diversions – from feminism and “gay rights” to “anti-racism” – (to evade the need for revolutionary understanding) the “left Labourites” cannot find any way to sharply attack this nonsensical propaganda blitzing for the coordinated Big Lie hysteria it is, and end up going along with its basic lying premise.
Inquiries have been set up, individuals “disciplined” or expelled left, right and centre (at least, “left”) and articles are trotted out to “prove” that their politics are “not part of this”.
Its knee-jerk defensiveness over this “anti-semitism” campaign is not simply feebleness and capitulation to bourgeois pressure but a proactive class collaborative reflex, a declaration of “loyalty” to the establishment that is little different to the Blairite aggression in the end.
Forelock-tugging willingness to suspend member after member on these ludicrous “anti-semitism” charges is the culmination of a series of retreats, betrayals and St.Peter-style denials that in just eight months have rapidly given the measure of the supposed new Corbynite “leftism” – nothing but the same old craven class collaboration and treachery that the utterly bourgeois Labour Party (Old and “New” Labour) has always been and nothing else.
The “free” vote on bombing “terrorists” in Syria was an effective collusion with the Tories; the joining of the secretive and thoroughly undemocratic Privy Council a slap in the face for Corbyn’s professed republicanism (and a statement of “loyalty” to the still semi-feudal privileged ruling class); John McDonnell’s public retraction of support for the Sinn Féin Irish republican struggle a craven opportunist ditching of “old friends” when career prospects hove into view; the “commitment to maintain “budgetary discipline” a double treachery, firstly in accepting “austerity” and secondly in maintaining the illusion that capitalism can be rescued, regulated and controlled, instead of making clear the irretrievable and unsolvable nature of its worldwide collapse (see Marx quotes p6); the “free vote” again, on Trident is a second abandonment of all “anti-war” principles, since it leaves all the reactionary Blairites open to vote with the Tories to pass its renewal.
The continuing appeasement of the blackguarding Blairites is all part of the same opportunism itself. 
And now such is the readiness of the Corbynistas to witch-hunt alleged “anti-Semitism” that it might be thought they actually want the excuse to force out more “extreme lefts” and or whip them into line.
But however cynically it is being done, it remains the opposite of what is needed.
That is to tell the working class that this bullying insistence that everyone must declare in favour of the Zionist maintained “Israel” or be deemed “anti-semitic” is the real fascism. 
It is part of the growing police state universal surveillance, censorship and “anti-extremism” repression, a crackdown not simply on “radical Muslimism” but on all opinion or philosophy which does not side with capitalism (via lavishly funded state brainwashing programmes like “Prevent” – and decades past of heavily funded secret Cold War anti-communist propaganda and media manipulation, which has filled heads with lurid and gruesome lies about the Soviet Union etc – see recent bourgeois press reports on the “Ricu” secret propaganda eg).
Alongside Labour, most of the swamp fake “revolutionaries” – all desperate to parasite the Corbyn movement themselves with renewed “entryism” – have grovellingly conceded that “yes, there probably is a problem with anti-semitism and hidden racism on the left” while busying themselves trying to “prove” they are not anti-semitic or racist themselves even though they are “anti-Zionist”.
So they all avoid focussing on the critical question at the centre of things – how the “state” of “Israel” came to exist in the first place – that this barrage of hysterical accusation is designed to prevent anyone asking or discussing and which is the crucial issue.
All except Ken Livingstone that is, in one of the “left”-feint flashes of apparent principle that such mavericks (another is George Galloway eg) are occasionally capable of when not directly playing the usual opportunist game for themselves. As reported:

Ken Livingstone has described the creation of the state of Israel as “a great catastrophe” and said Jewish people should have been resettled in the UK and America after the Second World War.
The former Mayor of London was suspended from the Labour Party after he invoked Hitler to defend a colleague over anti-Semitic remarks and claimed that there was a “well-orchestrated campaign” against the party by the “Israel lobby”.
However, in an interview broadcast in Arabic by TV station Al Ghad Al Arabi on Wednesday, he said the creation of Israel had been “fundamentally wrong” and led to a situation with the “potential for nuclear war”.
In the clip, Mr Livingstone said: “The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong, because there had been a Palestinian community there for 2,000 years.”
“The creation of the state of Israel was a great catastrophe. We should have absorbed the post-World War II Jewish refugees in Britain and America.
“They could all have been resettled, whereas 70 years later, the situation is still very tense, and there is potential for many more wars, potential for nuclear war.”
He also made the claim that Hitler originally “wanted to deport all the Zionists to Israel”.
Mr Livingstone said the situation in Iraq today is “worse” than what it was under the rule of Saddam Hussein and that western interventions in the Middle East had “nothing whatsoever to do with introducing democracy.”
“I believe that the endorsement of double standards in the Middle East was one of the causes that led to the development of the terrorist Islamic groups today,” he said.
“We imposed harsh sanctions on Iran for over a decade, because we believed that it was developing nuclear arms [...] On the other hand, Israel has possessed nuclear arms for 40 years. It is the first country to introduce nuclear arms to the Middle East.
“But we have still not acknowledged that, and not imposed sanctions upon it.”

“Principles” with the likes of Livingstone only go so far and he is as much lined up here as any of the remaining fake-“left” with bolstering the fraudulent notion of “democracy” (it just has not been done right, he pretends) and with the demonisation of rising Third World revolt, if not directly “condemning terrorism” and Islamic jihadism, then implying it is a “problem” and by extension one that has to be “dealt with”.
“Condemning” terror undermines all anti-war pretences of opposition to imperialism’s warmongering since the “justification” of the (meaningless) “war on terror” has been the main excuse underpinning nearly two decades of Western blitzkrieg to “police the terrorists and rogue states”; it is in reality an excuse for the suppression of all anti-imperialist revolt by barbaric violence, a major instrument for whipping-up kill-them-all chauvinist war frenzy and for the intimidation of any other capitalist power resistance to American empire diktat through “shock and awe” example.
Livingstone’s point on nuclear sanctions highlights Western hypocrisy but is also utterly ineffectual if supposed to be a serious option for “reining in” Zionism.
It is avoids the obvious conclusion, that the revolutionary answer, of overturning this Zionist monstrosity, is all that is possible.
Most of the fake-“left” meanwhile does not even go as far as Livingstone, who has also refused to back down on exposures of the Zionist Hitler collusions of the 1930s (which incidentally are not about Hitler supporting Zionism but about the mutually reactionary nature of both sides).
Most of them are still talking of the “state of Israel”, without any querying quote marks, implying their acceptance of this fascist occupation as some kind of “official” country (Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism eg), or if they do declare themselves to be “against” the Zionist occupation as a “racist settler colonial state” (Tony Greenstein in the Weekly Worker)  still not calling for its destruction.
Instead they flounder around drawing fine distinctions between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Jewishness” – declaring that “plenty of Jewish people are anti-Zionist too” and in the process conceding that there is some basis to the Zionist claims of inherent “anti-semitism” because anti-Jewish views are expressed.
But this is not “anti-semitism” in any past sense of the term.
The distinction in modern times (since the establishment of “Israel”) between the Jewish religious freemasonry and its great network of influence and connections within imperialism, and Zionism and its connections has no sensible meaning any more.
To quote past EPSR analysis (No 1213 16-1303):
What these self-righteous Jewish sneers about “racism” are in fact defending so indignantly is the idea of being Jewish. 
Many of them of course make a point of not defending the Zionist tyranny practice of effectively putting the Palestinian nation into a fascist-military concentration camp.
But this is all a ludicrous fraud and philosophical-logical nonsense. Of course it is possible for all Jews to get on their high horse and convincingly shout “anti-semitism” when it is the idea itself of what it is to be Jewish (prayers and dreams of a Jewish homeland Utopia one day). But just let them or anyone else try to conjure up in practice any alternative way in which the “promised-land” ideal might be realised (other than the path which the one real “Israel” has had to follow in order to survive at all), and they will find it impossible.
The mere idea of the “promised land” can never be anything else other than a totally unrealisable fantasy.
The practice of a real “Israel” can never be anything other than the brutal fascist tyranny, genocidally expelling the Palestinian nation, that all rational minds recognise and despise.
...Either the return of everything to all of the Palestinians, all of them coming back to reclaim their homeland, — which would obviously mean an overwhelmingly majority Arab state, with just a tiny minority of religious fanatic Jews living on as best they could.
Or the effective eviction of the entire Palestinian nation only two-thirds accomplished so far.
The “two-state” fraud is just a sanitised version of total cleansing, — a permanent police-state tyranny over a few surrounded and isolated Palestinian reservations, just as the original North American inhabitants ended up.
As the EPSR has explained, the only “Jewish” view worth giving serious respect for henceforth, — (in the light of the actual fascist-warmongering tyranny that “Israel” could only turn out to be, given the historical circumstances of being an implanted armed Western colonisation in the era of anti-colonialism, and in the light of how US imperialism’s wider international warmongering agenda is now using the emotive fraud of “defend Israel” as a useful stunt to justify ever-increasing repression of Arab and Muslim nationalism of every kind), — is the Jew who campaigns for the destruction of the state of “Israel” as soon as possible for the sake of humanity.
From admittedly limited practical observation, there do not appear to be any ordinary Jewish adherents anywhere who are openly calling for the wiping out of this catastrophic historical abortion called “Israel”.
Given the history and character of this particular religious freemasonry (not much different from most others, in fact), this absence of any really serious “anti-Israel” Jewish movement is hardly surprising.
In which case come EPSR observations that the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” has no further use, and is just a deliberately confusing deceit, henceforth.
And where does the “racism” come into all this????
It is brought in by the Jews themselves, as explained.
First they cry “racist”, purely on the basis of uncomfortably hating how their defence of maintaining just the abstract idea of some “promised land” sometime, somewhere, has been exposed as just a piece of posturing self-righteous philosophical conceit.
Secondly, in practice behind this moralising about “defending the abstract self-determination right for a Jewish homeland, while not defending everything ‘Israel’ does in reality”, lies an actual justification of this one and only real “Israel”.....which just happens to be an openly racist state and a colonial tyranny, — one of the nastiest in all imperialist history.
The state’s racist essence, is intact now quite uniquely horrific and disgusting by any standards in all modern history.

Or this (No1212 09-12-03):
The test is that until a sizeable volume of Jewish opinion publicly starts campaigning against the existence of “Israel” (which in factual political terms is nothing but an anachronistic armed Western-imperialist colonisation directed at the very heart of the Arab Middle East) as the only possible way forward from the WWIII warmongering crisis which demented US imperialist circles are now threatening the planet with, — then it will remain inescapable that in the late 20th century, the Jewish religious freemasonry, ended its long self-protection history by becoming just a stooge for renewed Western imperialist blitzkrieging as a “solution” to insoluble-economic crisis).
Inevitably in these circumstances, anti-semitism will spread like wildfire too, virtually indistinguishable from anti-Zionism.
But there does still remain a vast difference.
Let a single state of Palestine become one country again, letting EVERY Palestinian return to their old property, wherever possible.
Then let every Jew in this probable Arab majority state stay on as a fully participating citizen if invited, and make as much of the desert bloom as is legal, and be as religiously at home in “God’s promised land” as any “chosen people” could wish to feel.
And as some smarter “Israelis” are already arguing (from a purely defensive point of view), if this colonising settlement land-grabbing genocide goes on for much longer, it will be impossible to physically separate the Jewish and Palestinian existences anyway, sooner or later.
So why not make a virtue of this and declare one state for all right now, whereby the Jews would at least massively benefit for generations to come from the huge skills, networking, organisational, political, and financial advantages they have already, — much of which would be a tad unfair for the Palestinians, but only a comparative disadvantage, easily digested in the face of the huge transformation in Palestinian lives that the establishment of a single state of Palestine, with returned lands and citizenship for all ousted inhabitants (since 1948, and even decades earlier under British imperialist tyranny) plus all their offspring, would achieve. 
But nothing like this is going to happen, of course (emphasis added - ed).
...the Jewish religious freemasonry has the imperialist-era conquest-chauvinism in its nostrils; and just like any imperialist-nationalism mentality (the USA’s for example, which has been the mainstay in every way of “Israeli” jingoism), this empire-building can only now tyrannically drive on UNTIL DEFEATED.

Recent figures quoted by the Guardian’s resident Zionist Jonathan Freedland, that 93% of Jews in Britain see “their identity completely bound up with the existence of Israel” bear out the argument – and the more so when obviously most of the remaining 7% are not active campaigners against “Israel” either.
Virtually all of them defend “Israel” and are willing to accept the Zionist promise of the right to go there and settle at any time, obviously possible only at the expense of the original Palestinian owners.
But more important in the above quote are the revolutionary implications expressed in this last paragraph which are avoided by all the “boycotters” and the “anti-Zionists” of the fake-“left”.
The once-revisionist and now more biliously Trotskyist than the Trots, CPGB Weekly Worker group for example has spent the last two years in endless agonies over its alleged “anti-Zionism” without once ever mentioning the central issue of the formation of “Israel” and the need to end this artificial state; it postures mightily about calling for a “democratic secular (one) state solution” but without even considering such basics as the need for the restoration of all Palestinian property.
So this central focal point of the most barbaric fascist colonialism in modern times, and a crucial instrument for world imperialist domination, is suddenly going to have “free and fair elections” (as if there ever were, or could be, any such thing within capitalism anyway - another nonsense fostered by these mountebanks) drawing in all the Palestinian population, presumably having sorted out as best as can be achieved the return of all Palestinian land and homes?????
Just to posit the notion demonstrates its absurdity.
This is a hyper-posturing divorced from any grasp of the real world, exactly in line with the WW’s petty bourgeois utopianism and hatred of real world struggle, poisonous detestation of all and every actual workers states, and particularly its long-running condemnation of Hamas as “reactionary Islamists” (of which more below).
Staggeringly, it plays the same “anti-semitism” game as the Zionists, and when one of its regular fellow travellers, Ian Donovan, trespassed a bit too close to the question of overturning Zionism, and on pinning down the role of the international Jewish religious freemasonry and its undeniably powerful links and influence within imperialism, he was expelled for alleged “anti-semitism” himself, ejected from the CPGB’s factionalising group inside “Left Unity” (all now cast aside like an old toy in order to pursue supposedly more fruitful riding on the back of the Corbynistas), making a mockery of the CPGB’s long postured pretences about open debate.
Donovan’s complicated rigmaroles about Jewishness being a new form of stateless national bourgeois are hopeless academicism too, in keeping with the anti-communist Trotskyism of the Socialist Fight group he has joined, and never quite get round to the straightforward understanding needed of the need for a revolutionary ending either. 
Neither do the assorted boycott campaigns, which while they may attract well-meaning  are actually hostile to the revolutionary solution to this Zionist occupation. 
Much noise is made of it but the FRFI and its single-issue front “Palestinian Rights Campaign” (and the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign it backs) go no further than liberal reformist sloganising about “victory to the Palestinian People” without any explanation as to what such victory would entail, or what struggle would be needed to achieve it.
It particularly avoids any analysis of the great “jihadist” ferment which Hamas and Islamic Jihad are both part of and inseparably bound to, nor of the world  crisis collapse which is driving it all. 
Like all the “left” groups, it says nothing of the huge expansion of anti-Zionist sentiment which is a major component of the gigantic upheavals of the Arab Spring and particularly the staggering Egyptian mass revolt of 2011, now headed off and suppressed by the General Sisi military coup, reinstating an imperialist backed and funded dictatorship of utter barbarity, slaughtering thousands of civilians in cold blood in the street and imposing mass death sentences on the thousands of political detainees.
As such it is just a hopeless reformist diversion from the real struggle, one that not only does not take up and explain the real revolutionary movement underway in the world but which leaves the RCG exposed as completely out of touch with any real revolutionary understanding and in fact yet another posturing pretender to “Marxism” lined up, like the rest of the fake -“left”, with the imperialist warmongering “anti-terror”.
The Stalinists are equally exposed by this “anti-semitism” onslaught, caught out by their capitulations and condemnations of the rising world struggle, all denounced as “head banging Islamism” (except Hezbollah) and alleged “imperialist mercenaries”, and a dozen mistakes before that including their celebration (!!!) of the Sisi coup in 2013 (still left unexplained), a regime which has shut down all support for the struggling Palestinians, most notably by its collusion with Zionism to shut down the cross border tunnels into the Gaza strip, lifeline for the huge population trapped there.  
Their wooden and undialectical focus on outright support for the bourgeois nationalist dictatorship Assad regime in Syria (instead of calling solely for defeat for imperialist intrigue against Assad – as Leninism does) has led them to denounce all the Islamic revolt – except Hezbollah which has lined up with Assad.
But what about Hamas Mssrs Lalkar/Proletarian??? They are “headbanging Islamists” too and opposed to Assad to boot.
But they are also Palestinians, in a national liberation struggle against Zionism.
Are they to be supported? Condemned? 
What about their allies in the Sinai who have been fighting the Sisi regime?:
Gunmen shot dead eight plainclothes Egyptian policemen in the Helwan district south of Cairo, the interior ministry said on Sunday.
The policemen were travelling in a minivan when the assailants in a pickup truck blocked their path and sprayed the vehicle with automatic rifle fire, the ministry said.
Jihadists, including Islamic State group militants, have killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers in attacks, mostly in the Sinai Peninsula and also in and around Cairo.
Egyptian criminal gangs have also killed policemen in shoot outs, but the attack bore the hallmarks of jihadists who have waged an insurgency since the military overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
The interior ministry said the dead included a lieutenant and seven lower ranking policemen who were patrolling the area just south of the capital when they were ambushed late at night.
Militants had struck before in Helwan, killing a policeman standing guard outside a museum in June 2015.
The jihadists, who are based in the sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, have repeatedly tried to make inroads in the capital, where police have had more success in quelling them than in Sinai.
They have claimed several attacks in Cairo, including an attempted assassination of the interior minister in late 2013 and the bombing of the Italian consulate in July 2015.
More recently militants have conducted hit and run attacks on policemen in Cairo and small scale bombings.
They often claim their attacks are in retaliation for a bloody police crackdown on Islamist supporters of Morsi, which has killed hundreds of protesters and imprisoned thousands. They have also targeted foreigners.
In October, Isis claimed responsibility for bombing a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from a south Sinai resort, killing all 224 people on board.
The group said it smuggled explosives concealed in a drink can on to the plane in airport at Sharm El-Sheikh, a popular Red Sea resort in south Sinai.
Egypt says no survivors from Russian plane crash
The attack prompted Russia to suspend all flights to Egypt, and has lost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenues.
The bombing came two months after they abducted a Croatian oil worker near Cairo and beheaded him.
Police later tracked down the top Isis operative in Cairo, who was linked to the Croat’s murder, and killed him in a shoot out.
But efforts to quell the insurgency in Sinai have floundered despite a massive army campaign.
In March, Isis gunmen killed 15 policemen in an attack on a checkpoint near the El-Arish, the provincial capital of North Sinai.

No answers are given in either of two “contributions” in Lalkar/Proletarian.  
It simply plays into the hands of this preposterous fraud by quoting a short 1931 statement by Stalin declaring anti-semitism to be reactionary and any active anti-semitism a capital crime. 
Fine. But that was in a period of rising Nazism and the scapegoating by the Hitlerites against the largely poor and working class Jewish masses, as a means to whip up hatreds and divisions for the oncoming capitalist world war.
And it begs a much bigger question; why not quote the much more significant 1947 Stalin decision to recognise the existence of the “Israeli” state and vote for it in the United Nations???????? (And even to provide material support to the Zionists)???
This must be one of the more disastrous mistakes made by its “do-no-wrong” hero Joseph Stalin, still strongly in command of the Soviet Union, surely, a telling symptom of the disastrous philosophical retreats and failings that the revisionist museum-Stalinists permanently cover-up and refuse to discuss??
The Palestinian struggle leaves the entire fake-“left” stretched the rack of its condemnations of “jihad” and “terrorism” more than any other issue.
Condemn Hamas?????
As the EPSR said correctly 13 years ago (No1213):

anti-”Israeli” terrorism is bound to grow.
However regrettable some might think it, a Marxist historical view can only be that this spontaneous terrorist fightback has to happen first before a more organised revolutionary political movement is likely to get going towards building a positive revolutionary Palestine to put a certain end finally, once and for all, to this Zionist-imperialist nonsense.
In which case, the only progressive historical comment it is possible to make about something that is going to happen anyway, in the direction of even better future developments, is “let it happen”.
The Marxist programme for a communist revolution would rarely be wishing to encourage the development of spontaneous terrorist anarchy; but it would never condemn it either, even though it might often have cause to regret its consequences, along with other “innocents”.
But fighting capitalist society’s battles for it, against a mess of its own making, would be a ridiculously self-defeating thing for any serious anti-imperialists to do.
If nothing can stop a wave of spontaneous terrorist hatred from being brought about by the injustice, brutality, and degeneracy of the capitalist system, prior to the class war crisis becoming irreconcilably deep and matured enough to lead on to the development of a real revolutionary answer to collapsing bourgeois-system decadence; then the sooner this terrorist spasm is got through, then the more rapidly that the really serious revolutionary progress to put an end to the whole capitalist ruling-class system (and not just an end to individual capitalist state officials or random bourgeois electors) can get under way.
There is a huge amount to clarify but it will not happen by lining up with capitalist demonisations, condemnation of world upheavals and refusing all debate.
Leninist science and revolutionary clarity needs building.
Steven Tudy

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles

Cuba efforts to eradicate mosquitoes
EXTREME vigilance and measures to combat mosquitoes are defining recent efforts by Cuban health authorities in the campaign to prevent the spread of viruses transmitted by the aedes aegypti mosquito (including Zika, dengue, chik-ungunya and yellow fever).
On March 2, the Cuban Ministry of Public Health reported that the first imported case of Zika virus had been detected in a 28 year old Venezuelan doctor, who remains quarantined with a further 37 high risk individuals. Given this situation, health authorities are increasing vigilance efforts and examining all individuals suffering from non-specific fever. Controls have also been strengthened at entry and exit points to the country.
28 imported cases of chikungunya were detected in 2015, while reports of dengue were registered in 55 municipalities, predominantly in the most densely populated zones across the island’s 15 provinces, demonstrating the high risk of infection to the population.
Although Cuba has been working intensely over the last month to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito, unsatisfactory fumigation efforts, adverse environmental and weather conditions and a lack of cooperation by the population, have contributed to continuing high levels of infestation.
In the call made by President Raul Castro, February 22, 2016, to prevent the spread of Zika, he highlighted that the Party and government leadership has adopted an action plan - carried out by minsap - to combat the vectors.
Tasks include extreme vigilance to reduce environmental risks; the strengthening of sanitary controls at entrance and exit points to the country; guaranteeing medical and hygienic-epidemiological attention; progressively training public health workers in control and prevention measures; as well as conducting a comprehensive public awareness campaign, instructing the population in timely control and further prevention measures.
Dr. Roberto Morales Ojeda, minister of Public Health, highlighted the importance of applying biolarvacides to water containers in all homes and communal areas; carrying out various cycles of aerial and home-to-home fumigation; keeping roof terraces, basements, elevator shafts, areas of rust deposits, glens, rivers and water areas clean; keeping potable water tanks covered; repairing leaks in health facilities; as well as providing the population with products to eradicate mosquitoes.
Such efforts are being supported by an additional 9,000 Revolutionary Armed Forces (far) personnel, and over 200 National Revolutionary Police (pnr) officials, all equipped with the technical means for anti-mosquito and sanitization.
“The participation of the armed forces,” noted the minister “will be decisive in this intensive stage given their discipline and organization. Their efforts also demonstrate to the population that effective efforts to eliminate mosquitoes and their breeding sites are being carried out.”
 Morales Ojeda stressed the importance of community participation to tackle environmental hazards, with an emphasis on personal vigilance noting that those who fail to cooperate with sanitation efforts will be heavily penalized.
 Tourists and visitors arriving to Cuba are being requested to submit a Health Statement at entry and exit points to the country, while stringent vigilance measures are also being applied in order to identify individuals with symptoms of the aforementioned diseases, and ensure their admittance to medical institutions for treatment. Cuban collaborators serving abroad are also being closely monitored and undergoing regular temperature checks, while those working in African countries are required to present up-to-date vaccination. certificates.
 Although there is no proven link between the Zika virus and microcephaly in newborns, Dr. Roberto Alvarez Fumero, head of MINSAP’s Maternal-Infant Program, has advised pregnant women to visit their family doctor as soon as possible in order to start the pregnancy checks and maternity-infant monitoring processes, which will “enable them to benefit from pre-natal controls,” he stated.
 In order to improve immune defense, the pediatric specialist recommends women of child-bearing age take folic acid, whether they are trying for a baby or not. He also explains that Cuban medical services are extending precautions to pregnant women presenting with fever or who live in areas with high levels of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
 One such measure includes performing the third trimester ultrasound at 28 weeks (in Cuba the first ultrasound is performed in the first 12 weeks and the second between 18 and 22 weeks) as well as a 15 day check-up performed by specialists.
 The doctor also advised intermittent consultations by generic specialists to be carried out on newborns identified as suspected cases, in order to rule out other possible causes, as well as viro-logical studies. The information obtained from these investigations is available to international organizations, noted the MINSAP official.
 Alvarez Fumero states that the Cuban healthcare system, and in particular its Maternal-Infant Program, are ready and able to detect infection in a timely manner and thus reduce the risk of microcephaly. 
The region is facing a complex epidemiological situation given the spread of the Zika virus, and as such Cuba is carrying out efforts to prevent infection and reduce infestation rates, an immense task for this first half of the year. •

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles

Obama visit to Cuba
The blockade is the most serious obstacle to our economic development and the welfare of the Cuban people  Statement to the press by Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Councils of State and Ministers of the Republic of Cuba, at the Palace of the Revolution on March 21, 2016, “Year 58 of the Revolution”.

Good afternoon.  Mr. President Barack Obama:
  We are pleased to welcome the first visit by a U.S. president to our country in 88 years.
  We hope that during your brief stay on the island you will be able to appreciate the hospitality of the Cuban people, who have never harbored feelings of animosity toward the American people, to whom we are united by historical, cultural and emotional ties.
  Your visit is an important step in the process toward the improvement of bilateral relations, which we hope will help advance further progress in our ties, to the benefit of both nations and the region.
  We have just held a constructive and useful meeting, which continues on from the previous two we held in Panama and New York.
  We note that, in the 15 months since we announced the decision to reestablish diplomatic relations, we have achieved concrete results.
  We resumed direct postal mail and signed an agreement to reestablish regular flights.
  We have expanded cooperation in areas of mutual interest. We signed two memorandums of understanding on environmental protection and marine areas, and another to improve the safety of maritime navigation. Today another will be signed on cooperation in agriculture.
  Currently, another group of bilateral instruments for cooperation in areas such as combating drug trafficking, security of trade and travelers, and health are being negotiated. On the latter, we have agreed to intensify cooperation in the prevention and treatment of communicable diseases such as the Zika virus and chronic non-communicable diseases, including cancer. This cooperation is beneficial not only to Cuba and the United States, but also to our hemisphere.
  Since the decisions taken by President Obama to modify the application of some aspects of the blockade, Cuban companies and their U.S. counterparts have been working to identify potential trade operations within the still restrictive framework of the regulations in force.
  Some have been concretized, particularly in the area of telecommunications, an area in which our country has a program based on its development priorities and the necessary technological sovereignty to ensure the appropriate use of these to serve national interests.
  Negotiations are also advancing on the purchase of medicines, medical equipment and equipment for power generation and environmental protection, among others.
  Much more could be done if the U.S. blockade was lifted..
  We recognize the position of President Obama and his government against the blockade and the repeated calls he has made on Congress to eliminate it.
  The latest measures adopted by his government are positive, but not sufficient. I discussed with the President other steps which we believe can be taken to eliminate restrictions still in force and make an important contribution to the dismantling of the blockade.
  This is essential, because the blockade remains in force and has dissuasive components and intimidating effects of extraterritorial reach, on which I set forth some examples to the President to demonstrate the negative consequences for Cuba and other states.
  The blockade is the most serious obstacle to our economic development and the welfare of the Cuban people. Therefore, its elimination will be essential to normalize bilateral relations. It will also be beneficial to Cuban migrants, who want the best for their families and their country.
  To advance toward normalization, it will also be necessary that the territory illegally occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base be returned.
 Both issues, constituting the main obstacles, were addressed, once again, in the editorial published on March 9 in the official voice of the Communist Party of Cuba (Granma) and, just four days ago at the press conference by our Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, widely reported by the press.
 Similarly, other policies should be abolished to allow for normal relations between Cuba and the United States. It should not be expected that for this the Cuban people must renounce the destiny they have freely and sovereignly chosen and for which they have made immense sacrifices.
 We also discussed international issues, particularly those that could affect regional peace and stability.
 Specifically, I had planned to address, and there was no time to conclude this, but I use this occasion, to express our concern about the encouragement of de-stabilization in Venezuela, which is counterproductive to the atmosphere on the continent.
 Similarly, we discussed the progress of the peace process in Colombia and the efforts to end this conflict.
 There are profound differences between our countries which will not disappear, as we have different views on many issues, such as political models, democracy, the exercise of human rights, social justice, international relations, peace and global stability.
 We defend human rights. We consider civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights to be indivisible, interdependent and universal. We can not comprehend
that a government does not defend and guarantee the right to health, education, social security, food and development, to equal pay for equal work and the rights of children. We oppose political manipulation and double standards on human rights.
 Cuba, has much to say and to show on this subject and therefore I reiterated to the President our willingness to continue the dialogue we have begun.
 On December 17, 2014, when we announced the decision to reestablish diplomatic relations, I said: “We must learn the art of living, in a civilized manner, with our differences”
 On July 15, 2015, before our parliament I noted: “Changing everything which must be changed is the sovereign and exclusive domain of Cubans. The Revolutionary Government is willing to advance in the normalization of relations, convinced that the two countries can cooperate and coexist in a civilized manner, to our mutual benefit, beyond the differences we have and certainly will have, thus contributing to peace, security, stability, development and equity in our continent and the world”
 Today I reaffirm that we must practice the art of civilized coexistence, which means accepting and respecting differences and not making them the center of our relationship, but rather promoting ties that benefit both countries and peoples, and concentrating on what brings us closer rather than what separates us.
 We agree that a long and complex road lies ahead. But the important thing is that we have begun to take steps to build a new type of relationship, the likes of which has never existed between Cuba and the United States.
 Destroying a bridge is easy and requires little time. To solidly rebuild one is a much longer and difficult task.
 After four failed attempts, as a symbol of willpower and perseverance, on September 2, 2013, U.S. swimmer Diana Nyad managed to swim across the Florida Straits, without a shark cage.
 For this feat, overcoming the distance that geographically separates our countries, on August 30, 2014, to the tune of the national anthems of Cuba and the United States, she was presented with the Order of Sporting Merit, awarded by the Cuban Council of State.
 This accomplishment contains a strong message, it should serve us as an example for bilateral relations, as it confirms that if she could, then we too can.
 I reiterate our thanks to President Obama for his visit and the willingness of the government of Cuba to continue moving forward in the coming months for the benefit of our peoples and countries.,
 Thank you.•
Granma March 25