I have also written an email to Private Eye informing them that I have been unfairly accused of anti-Semitism, and offering to give them more information on this sorry affair and the process by which innocent people are smeared and purged from the Labour party. This, I say, will correct their previous biased reporting in favour of the witch hunters. The email runs
“Dear Sir,
I am a long term reader of your magazine, which have greatly enjoyed. I have followed with interest your coverage of the mass accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour party and the purges of those accused. I regret to say that I have found this coverage to be almost wholly one-sided. You have given little opportunity for the victims of what can only be described as a witch-hunt to speak for themselves. Worse, you seem to have blindly followed the media groupthink and automatically assumed that the Labour party did have a severe anti-Semitism problem, that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite, and that those accused were indeed guilty.
This left me somewhat perplexed, as your magazine has a strong tradition of criticising Israel and standing up for those, who have been falsely accused. I am offering you the opportunity to correct this bias.
Yesterday I received a message from the Labour Party Complaints Team informing me that I was being investigated for anti-Semitism, based on an article I had published on my blog as far back as 5th December 2020. In this I agreed with another blogger, Tony Greenstein, a proud Jewish critic of Zionism, that Zionism was an internalised Jewish version of anti-Semitism and that Israel is indeed a racist, colonialist state. The argument is supported by solid historical scholarship, quoting reputable historians and the major figures in Zionist history themselves.
I am not an anti-Semite, a form of racism that I find particularly abhorrent and have published very many pieces on my blog attacking it and other forms of racism, as well as its political expressions, Fascism and Nazism.
I am offering you the chance to hear about this witch hunt and the perversion of justice used by the NEC and the anonymous accusers from one of its victims. If you wish to hear about all this from the horse’s mouth, as it were, you may contact me at the above email address or by telephone at [redacted]
Yours with very best wishes,
David Sivier, BA (Hons) History; MA History, PhD Archaeology.”
I doubt this will do any good. When Hislop has published letters from the victims of the witch hunt, it is immediately followed by an editor’s comment stating that Labour must have an anti-Semitism problem based on the comments of Jon Lansman. Lansman is one of the founders of Momentum, who is still claiming that Labour is riddled with Jew-hatred despite the evidence to the contrary. But still, I am determined to fight this and publicise it as much as possible in order to embarrass the party apparatchiks behind it.
And I’ll let you know if I get a response from Private Eye.