CAA reveals author and Labour Party activist Daniel Waterman said wearing a Jewish skullcap or star of David is like waving a Nazi flag

We can reveal that author, locksmith, Labour Party member and Momentum activist Daniel Waterman has, for a number of years, been making extensive use of Facebook, posting under the pseudonym “Dolong B Blavats”.

As long ago as August 2014, Mr Waterman claimed that “compulsive” behaviour related to the Holocaust was “causing Israelis to behave like Nazis”. It is a theme to which he regularly returned, asserting only last month, while referring to mandatory military service for young Israelis, that “Our young people are still mindlessly following orders just like the Nazis!”

The International Definition of Antisemitism clearly identifies “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as a manifestation of antisemitism.

In November 2015, Mr Waterman condemned the wearing of a kippah or a star of David in public, comparing it to the waving of the Nazi flag during the Nazi ascent in Germany, and demanded that Jews eschew the practice in order to distance themselves from what he described as “Israel’s terrorism against Palestinians”. He went on to insist that failure to follow his advice would mark Jews as  “provocateurs” and “belligerent fools”, and render them responsible for any hostility they encountered.

In January 2017, he accused a Jewish journalist and “the entire rest of the pro-Israel pro-Zionist community” of being “the real self-hating Jews”, and made the assertion that their protests against the antisemitism that is now prevalent within Labour are a conspiracy to fear-monger and silence criticism of Israel.

In September 2017, he accused “other Jews” of “s***ting all over the Holocaust”, adding that he was “ready to give it up and ‘just’ be a human being”.

In the same month, he posted what was presumably intended to be a joke: “Hey I have a good idea! Why don’t we have another World War? I missed all the good bits at the end of the last one!” On being told this was not funny, he replied “Really, I thought WWII was a gas!”, in an apparent reference to gas chambers used by the Nazis to industrialise the genocide of European Jewry.

Mr Waterman has also given fulsome praise to Gilad Atzmon, who was disavowed by Palestinian activists because of the virulence of his antisemitism, and whose book, The Wandering Who, was described as “…quite probably the most antisemitic book published in this country in recent years.” Despite this, Mr Waterman appeared to be overjoyed that Mr Atzmon had agreed to review the drafts of his new book and at the possibility of his contributing a chapter.

These examples are just a small selection of comments representing views that have no place in our public life.

Matters took a turn for the worse when we contacted Mr Waterman for his comments on this article. Mr Waterman had previously written to Campaign Against Antisemitism to let us know that he considers our website to be a “s***rag” and that “I fart in your general direction”, however we approached him for his comments nonetheless.

In e-mails that ran to four pages, Mr Waterman claimed that “Jews are not above criticism merely for having ancestors who were persecuted”. In a first, he also said that: “In the course of rubbing shoulders with a great many strangers on Facebook one comes into contact with people making all kinds of statements and assertions and one sometimes quotes them or amplifies on what they are saying by repeating it.” However he did not offer any reason why his comments appeared to be his own work and not something he was quoting. He also claimed that “not one” of the comments we had quoted was in context, but when we asked what context was missing he retorted: “Since you are deliberately seeking to incriminate me, I have no intention of aiding you. Have a nice day you f***ing Hasbara bastards!” He then followed up: “By the way, not really interested in [Campaign Against Antisemitism], the only point of my replies was to post them on [Facebook] to expose you. Please do not contact me or troll me in any way anymore or I will file a complaint to the [Labour Party’s National Executive Committee] and the Charities commission [sic]”, and then published a series of odd posts on Facebook, appearing to seek to attract the attention of figures such as Jackie Walker and Gilad Atzmon.

The Labour Party and Momentum should now expel Mr Waterman.