Congratulations on the excellent piece ‘Racist countries attempt to sabotage anti-racist conference’, which appeared in the June/July issue of Proletarian.
In that article, you quote some of the odious, supremacist remarks of the late and thoroughly unlamented Rabbi Meir Kahane, so I thought other readers might possibly be interested in hearing about my own experiences with this fascist thug.
In 1983, when I was active with the Southern California district of the Communist Party USA, we helped organise a local speaking tour for another Meir – Meir Vilner, then General Secretary of the Israeli Communist Party. Clearly, the two Meirs were not the closest of friends.
One of the venues for Comrade Vilner’s tour was the Los Angeles party centre, and I was one of the people forced to physically defend the building when Kahane personally led a paramilitary assault on it. He and his so-called Jewish Defense League pelted our premises with stones, shouting “Death to the traitor!” and smashing six windows. Through one of the broken windows came two petrol bombs — which, fortunately, we were able to extinguish before any serious damage had been done or any of our comrades had been hurt.
We did succeed in driving off our attackers through the judicious use of fists and baseball bats, but this incident shows the real nature of zionism, as subsequently proved – on a massively greater scale and to a growing worldwide audience – by the actions of the Israeli ruling class and the fascistic, genocidal regime which it maintains in office with the indispensable financial and political support of US imperialism.
Kahane was a thoroughgoing Nazi and, when he died in 1990, there were plenty of others (both in Israel and in the US) more than happy to step into his shoes.
SC, London
