I’ve posted many pieces of my blog from Private Eye criticizing the Tories and Tony Blair. Yesterday I put up a couple of pieces, one of which was about the magazine’s cover in 1998 which showed Blair watching a bank of monitors and demanding a leftie be thrown out of the Labour party. However, today’s Private Eye for 21 September – 4 October 2018 carries a story on page 13 which seems to suggest that the satirical magazine is firmly behind the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
It’s a response to a letter they had in their last issue from a reader, Dorothy Macedo, who was outraged at the false accusations of anti-Semitism. The Eye writes
Eye 1478 featured a letter from Dorothy Macedo cancelling her subscription and saying: “Accusing someone of being anti-Semitic isn’t funny. (This is particularly true when there is no evidence, just accusations.) By repeating the sort of crude smears favoured by the Daily Mail, Private Eye has crossed a line.
Many thanks to the Eye reader who pointed out that Ms Macedo crops up on Facebook as one of the team members involved in running the Worthing and Adur chapter of Labour’s hard-left Momentum movement. The official stance of Momentum HQ is that there’s actually lots of anti-Semitism in the Labour party – the group claimed in April that it’s “more widespread in the Labour party than many of us had understood”, and that “accusations of anti-Semitism should not and cannot be dismissed simply as right-wing smears.” Just fancy that!
There are a number of features about the Eye’s reply that need criticizing. Firstly, there’s the sneering attitude to Macedo herself as a member of Momentum, which they characterize as hard left. Momentum isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s very traditional labour as I’ve stated over and again, ad nauseam. It favours a mixed economy, renationalization of the NHS, strong welfare state and unions, and decent wages, job conditions and security for working people. It’s members are not ‘Trots’ nor ‘Stalinists’ or whatever else the right wants to smear them as. But Private Eye has consistently repeated the right-wing claim that Corbyn is far left, despite this being refuted by MPs like George Galloway. I stopped reading the Eye for a little while because I was sick and tired of these persistent smears. As well as casual comments, the Eye ran a series of cartoons, ‘Focus on Fact’, which attacked the Labour leader for events in the 1980s.
As for the claims about anti-Semitism being far more widespread in the Labour party than previously believed, this appears to be the attitude of Momentum’s leader, Jon Lansman, and his fellows. I don’t believe it’s held by Momentum’s base, and certainly isn’t held by Jewish Voice for Labour. Their members said at the counterrally they held against the demo against Corbyn by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies that genuine anti-Semitism in the Labour party was probably much smaller, and made it clear that while it probably existed, it was something they personally had not encountered. These sentiments have been echoed by some of the Jewish commenters and supporters of Mike’s blog. But they made those comments YouTube, while Tony Greenstein’s criticism of Lansman and his apparent belief in the anti-Semitism claims are at his website. And so presumably have not been seen or consulted by the Eye and its contributors, who appear not to be entirely conversant with social media.
Besides, as Tony Greenstein, Mike, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg and so very many other people have pointed out, the genuinely left-wing Jews, who support Corbyn, like Jewish Voice for Labour, the Jewish Socialist Group and Jewdas, are ‘the wrong kind of Jews’. They are not part of the Jewish establishment, which appears to be solidly Zionist and Tory, and which actively despises them. And the Israel lobby bitterly attacks and smears them, calling them ‘kapos’, self-hating, anti-Semitic and even denying that they are Jewish at all. That’s clearly seen in the video I put up the other day of Jackie Walker calmly and politely refuting Jonathan Hoffman’s claims. When Hoffman finds that she has an answer for his questions, he tells her that she isn’t a Jew. Which gets a very appropriate response from Walker, who is properly roundly applauded by the audience.
The right’s distinction between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of Jews is anti-Semitic, as Mike and the others have also pointed out. The Nazis made that distinction, as did Hitler’s hero, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl von Luegerer. And the Israel lobby does it too, and expresses its hatred of the ‘wrong’ kind of Jews in language that, if it came from a gentile, would be unequivocally condemned as anti-Semitic.
But the Eye appears to have followed the rest of the press in ignoring Corbyn’s Jewish supporters. They, apparently, don’t exist. As far as the lamestream media goes, they’re ‘unpersons’, the name Orwell gave to the people written out of official history in 1984. Just like Stalin and his faction rewrote Russian and Soviet history to erase the individuals they despised and had killed.
It seems very clear from this that the Eye has not investigated whether the claims of anti-Semitism leveled by the Blairites and the Israel lobby are true, and it seems very clear that the magazine has absolutely no intention of doing so. It seems very content to regurgitate the standard, establishment narrative.
But thousands of people have been smeared as anti-Semites, including Mike. This is a real issue, and needs to be exposed. It is absolutely scandalous that decent, anti-racist people, who are very definitely not anti-Semites, should be libeled as such. And its especially odious when applied to Jews and others, who have suffered racially motivated abuse and violence, and who have lost family members in the Nazi concentration camps.
You’d have thought that the Eye, which claims to be determined to show up falsehoods and wrongdoing in politics, business and the unions, would have been keen to investigate this scandal. But it seems the reverse is true. They either can’t be bothered to investigate whether they are, or are quite happy to see innocent people libeled if it brings down Corbyn.
I have been tempted to write a letter of polite criticism to the Eye inquiring why they haven’t investigated or criticized this massive injustice. But I haven’t. I don’t think I’d get a proper reply, and am afraid that I’d simply be setting myself up for attack and smear myself, as Mike has been.
I like Private Eye, but find this piece and its complete silence over the anti-Semitism smears absolutely disgusting. My sympathies here are resolutely with Dorothy Macedo, whose comments were absolutely correct. But it seems clear that no-one will ever change the Eye’s editorial policy on this issue. In this, the magazine seems to share all the prejudices and is part of the mass groupthink as the rest of the lamestream media.
Tags: '1984', 'Momentum', Abuse, Adolf Hitler, Adur, anti-racism, anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Assault, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Concentration Camps, Conservatives, Daily Mail, David Rosenberg, Dorothy Macedo, Facebook, George Galloway, George Orwell, Holocaust, Israel Lobby, Jackie Walker, Jeremy Corbyn, Jewdas, Jewish Leadership Council, Jewish Socialist Group, Jewish Voice for Labour, Jon Lansman, Jonathan Hoffman, Karl von Lugerer, Mainstream Media, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Mixed Economy, Nationalisation, NHS, Private Eye, racism, stalin, Stalinists, tony blair, Tony Greenstein, Trotskyites, Vienna, Vox Political, Welfare State, Worthing, Youtube, Zionism
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