Private Eye: Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Accuses Telegraph of Anti-Semitism

Here’s another story from an old issue of Private Eye, but rather more contemporary than those I last posted. It’s from the issue for the 4-17 May 2018. As well as smearing Mike and other members of the Labour party for supporting Corbyn and not sufficiently supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism also decided to attack the Telegraph. Just as the Israel lobby attacks anyone, who criticizes Israel and its covert interference in their domestic politics as an anti-Semite by claiming that they are using anti-Semitic tropes, so the Zionist bully-boys and girls claimed that the Torygraph was also doing so. In this case, the Torygraph was using them in a story about George Soros, and in a piece of false information about the Rothschilds nearly owning all the banks in the world except in three countries.

Private Eye’s article was entitled ‘Give Them Enough Trope’ and it ran

To Publish one anti-Semitic trope may be considered a mistake. To publish two in six months reveals, in the most charitable interpretation, an epic level of carelessness – but such is the slapdash clickbait operation that is today’s Telegraph.

In February the paper caused worldwide outrage with a front-page story about George Soros and his supposed “secret plot to thwart Brexit”, which not only drew on a classic anti-Semitic trope but compounded the offence with an accompanying online sidebar stating that the financier “stands accused by many governments around the world of meddling in their affairs”. In fact the accusation is mostly made by far-right figures in eastern Europe, which any half-decent editor would have spotted. But the Telegraph no longer employs half-decent editors, so the sidebar, written by a graduate trainee, went straight on to the site.

Now, a correction quietly posted on the Telegraph website last week reveals that last September it published what even it admitted was “an inaccurate and offensive … anti-Semitic trope” as part of a cheap ‘n’ cheerful listicle entitled “What’s missing? The countries with no airports, railways, trees and World Heritage Sites”.

The fun fact in question was that “Only three countries on the planet don’t have a central bank owned or controlled by the Rothschild family” – a nonsensical claim culled from way out on the wilder fringes of conspiracy theory. When press regulator IPSO investigated , following a complaint from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Telegraph said it was “a regrettable error arising from momentary carelessness”. It was “unable to say from which website or websites the claim had been taken”, but it did try to assure the watchdog its editorial training meant that “if it had been from an obviously and egregiously anti-Semitic website, the journalist would have been alerted to the risk of adopting information published on it.”

Ipso ruled against the paper, pointing out that “the claim was, on its face, highly implausible” and “to take no further steps to verify the claim represented a failure to take care not to publish inaccurate information”.

By a pleasing coincidence, the morning after the Ipso-mandated apology was published on the Telegraph website, the paper devoted an editorial tot eh subject of… anti-Semitism!

“As we report today, the Left does not take the allegations of anti-Semitism seriously at all,” it sturmed (surely “stormed”? Ed).

“Mr Corbyn has made the required noises against anti-Semitism without doing anything about it. Before Mr Corbyn points to the mote in the Tory eye, he should consider the beam in his own.” (p. 8).

This shows just how hypocritical the Tories are in their accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and the Labour party. But David Rosenberg on his blog put up a few weeks ago a long list of anti-Semitic comments uttered by Tory politicians since the 1930s, when many of them were head-over-heels about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It was his response to Marie van der Zyle of the Board of Deputies of British Jews claiming that the Tories had always been friends of the Jews, which is thoroughly disproved by history.

It’s also a rare instance of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism attacking it in the right-wing, mainstream press. People looking at articles its posted on its website have found that most of them by far are directed at the Labour party, with very few criticizing the Tories or the Far Right, despite the fact that the vast majority of anti-Semitic abuse and assaults come from the Fascist fringe.

As for Private Eye, the satirical magazine has followed absolutely the establishment line that Corbyn is a Trotskyite and an anti-Semite, and so are his supporters. Which makes you query just how independent and critical the magazine really is.

Tags: anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Brexit, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Conservatives, David Rosenberg, Ethnic Cleansing, George Soros, Internet, IPSO, Israel Lobby, Marie van der Zyle, Mike Sivier, Palestinians, Private Eye, Railways, Rothschilds, The Telegraph, Trotskyites