But even in Britain itself, there was considerable opposition to the war. In the House of Commons, Liberal MP Philip Stanhope (later Baron Weardale) introduced a resolution expressing disapproval of Britain's military campaign against the Boer republics. In tracing the war's origins, he said:
Accordingly, the [pro-British] South African League was formed, and Mr. Rhodes and his associates -- generally of the German Jew extraction -- found money in thousands for its propaganda. By this league in [British] South Africa and here [in Britain] they have poisoned the wells of public knowledge. Money has been lavished in the London world and in the press, and the result has been that little by little public opinion has been wrought up and inflamed, and now, instead of finding the English people dealing with this matter in a truly English spirit, we are dealing with it in a spirit which generations to come will condemn ...
Opposition in Britain to the war came especially from the political left. The Social Democratic Federation (SDF), led by Henry M. Hyndman, was especially outspoken. Justice, the SDF weekly, had already warned its readers in 1896 that "Beit, Barnato and their fellow-Jews" were aiming for "an Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa stretching from Egypt to Cape Colony," designed to swell their "overgrown fortunes." Since 1890, the SDF had repeatedly cautioned against the pernicious influence of "capitalist Jews on the London press." When war broke out in 1899, Justice declared that the "Semitic lords of the press" had successfully propagandized Britain into a "criminal war of aggression."
Opposition to the war was similarly strong in the British labor movement. In September 1900, the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution condemning the Anglo-Boer war as one designed "to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews, most of whom had no patriotism and no country."
No member of the House of Commons spoke out more vigorously against the war than John Burns, Labour MP for Battersea. The former SDF member had gained national prominence as a staunch defender of the British workingman during his leadership of the dockworkers' strike of 1889. "Wherever we examine, there is the financial Jew," Burns declared in the House on February 6, 1900, "operating, directing, inspiring the agencies that have led to this war."
"The trail of the financial serpent is over this war from beginning to end." The British army, Burns said, had traditionally been the "Sir Galahad of History." But in Africa it had become the "janissary of the Jews."
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