On the 27th October last year, 2018, Labour Left Voice put up a post about the disgusting anti-Semitic abuse hurled at their consultant and convenor, Sally Eason. Eason had been on the receiving end of abuse twitter messages from Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents in the Labour Party, whom she had outed as members of a troll network. This continued for several years without anything being done about it, even though she complained to Sam Matthews and Labour’s Compliance Unit. So she left, setting up Left Labour Voice as a support network for socialists who were in the same position as herself.
Her departure from the Labour party has not stopped the abuse, and the post reports that there is now a third twitter account parodying her. This one does so as ‘Sally the Jew’. It’s because Eason is of Sephardic Jewish descent on her mother’s side. The Sephardim are the branch of the Jewish people, who settled in the Iberian peninsula. Their vernacular language, Ladino, was a form of Old Spanish. They are named after a Biblical Hebrew term that was believed to refer to Spain.
This troll account attempts to dox her and reveal her location as well as intimidate her. Labour Left Voice also notes that it’s stolen their logo. It’s followed by a number of the anti-Semitism witch-hunters, including the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. It lists those following the troll account as
*Emma Feltham (Picken) Lewisham East CLP Labour currently under investigation JLM
*Euan Philipps (AKA @Bellatrixlittle) Tonbridge & Malling CLP Labour currently under investigation JLM
*Labour Against Antisemitism – Official
*Tracy Ann Oberman – Actress Ex Labour
*Simon Myerson QC Ex Labour
*Saul Freeman @nudderingnudnik – Ex Labour – LAAS
*Mark Hopkins – @lifeonacanal Conservative
*Professor David Hirsh – Ex Labour
*Matthew Ravenhilll – Chair Taunton West branch Labour Party.
*Steve Silverman – Head of Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA)
*Dan Fox – Ex Director of Labour friends of Israel
*Jonathan Hoffman – Consultant and activist LAAS – member of Herut UK
*Labour Intl CLP Moderates – AKA TheGreenKnight200 / RosalieJulius / JewsagainstJC – Jessica Jacobs-Schiff Ex Intl Labour / JLM LAAS
*Gnasherjew – David Collier, Richard Millett, Simon Cobbs, Joseph Elfassy, John Arnott, CAA.
How anti-Semitic are the posts? Very. This is an example.
The post quotes Buddy Hell, of the Guy Debord’s Cat blog, as saying looking at them is like ‘bathing in sewage’. It makes this observation on the membership of this troll network and their objectives: to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist Jewish supporters.
What is clearly obvious here is that rather than the left being antisemitic. We have a mix of Labour Right, Tories and the Far-Right who are working together to ATTACK leftist Corbyn supporting Jews. Their common interest: Ultra Nationalism and the fear of Jeremy Corbyn recognising Palestine. Jonathan Hoffman is a Conservative and member of Herut UK, a Far-Right organisation and can be seen marching with the EDL on protests but is also bizarrely the consultant for the outfit Labour Against Antisemitism, whose non Jewish operators Euan Philipps, Emma Feltham and Denny Taylor also follow the above parody.
It also reproduces a number of anti-Semitic tweets attacking her from various sock accounts connected with the Gnasherjew troll farm. Like the one below.
Some of those sending Eason abusive twitter messages were Euan Philipps and Mandy Blumenthal of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The post goes on to describe the problems Eason has had combating these troll accounts. It says
Sadly Twitter has been no help at all despite continuously reporting the problem for 2 years at least. The previously Twitter suspended Gnasherjew brags of being reinstated by the CAA and CST and that they have a ‘human handler’ at Twitter. The problem is as shown above, that the CAA are part of the abuse. There is a conflict of interest. The CAA is worryingly also a police agency – although we suspect that the current Met police investigation into the CAA incitement of death threats to Corbyn will alter that relationship.
Another problem here is that Twitter is US based and the extremely Pro Israel Anti Defamation League (ADL) took over as Account Managers in around February of this year as monitors for antisemitism across all of America’s Social Media. Many times the UK police have said that US Twitter refuse to pass over details of the troll accounts. There is a political impasse.
The post states that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are – or were – under investigation for inciting death threats against Jeremy Corbyn. LLV reiterate that their mission is to help Left Labour/ Pro-Corbyn members, who were under attack for their beliefs by the above accounts and their superiors at CLP level. They ask victims of such attacks to get in touch with them and share their stories, whether its of vexatious claims or targeted attacks by the above, and give the email address which can be used to do so. They also conclude
We will keep you informed of the progress in the current police investigation as and when we are updated with any major news. As for now, we encourage all socialists to block the above accounts, be careful of the tone and language used in your posts and deprive these agenda driven accounts of a target.
At the time of writing JLM, CAA, BoD and the Labour Party have not responded to our tweets.
Eason’s not the only one to receive anti-Semitic abuse, simply because she’s a person of Jewish heritage, who supports Corbyn. It’s been dished out to Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, and I’ve no doubt any number of others. Just as gentiles like Mike have also been abused and smeared as an anti-Semite for the same reason.
What is particularly interesting is that among the abusers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Labour Against Anti-Semitism, Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel are our old friends Tracy Ann Oberman, Jonathan Hoffman Karen Bradley – the one from The Apprentice? – and David Collier, John Arnott and chums from Gnasherjew.
These scumbags have, in my opinion, no call whatsoever to accuse anyone else of being anti-Semitic. Not when they appear to be posting vile anti-Semitic abuse themselves. And anyone wondering if there’s any truth to any of their claims should take a look at the abuse they produce and spread and then ask themselves the following:
Who is going to be more trustworthy – decent, genuinely anti-racist people, both Jews and gentiles, who are targeted for abuse, like Eason, simply because they support Jeremy Corbyn? Or a bunch of vile, abusive right-wing trolls, who fling around anti-Semitic smears while hypocritically claiming to combating it?
This fortnight’s Private Eye for 22nd March – 4th April 2019 carried yet another attack on the Labour party by their columnist, ‘Ratbiter’, on page 10. Entitled ‘Gardiner’s Question Time’, attacking Labour Party bureaucrat Thomas Gardiner for not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It is, of course, coincidental that the article also mentions that Gardiner is a close aide of Jeremy Corbyn. The article runs
LABOUR apparatchik Thomas Gardiner came to Eye readers’ attention last June as the helpful chap whom Jeremy Corbyn’s aides advised suspended members to contact if they wanted readmission to the party, after general secretary Jennie Formby brought him in to run Labour’s compliance unit (Eye 1472).
Earlier this month, the Observer and Times revealed emails which showed Gardiner opposing recommendations from the party’s investigations team to suspend members accused of Jew-baiting, despite Corbyn’s promise of “zero tolerance for anti-Semites”.
Kayla Bibby, for instance, shared an image of an alien creature marked with the Star of David wrapping its tentacles round the Statue of Liberty. “The most accurate photo I’ve seen all year!” she wrote, having specifically requested a copy of the picture from Incog Man, and American Neo-Nazi site. Incog Man’s talk of the “parasitic, whitish looking, chameleon Jew” didn’t appear to bother Bibby … or indeed Labour, since Gardiner ruled the image was “anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish”.
Gardiner also supported Camden Labour activist Mohammed Joynal Uddin, who had claimed Jews believe Jesus was “boiling in semen in hell and that the Virgin Mary is a whore.” Labour said Gardiner did not know about Uddin’s views when he backed him, and in any case had recused himself from the case. Gardiner meanswhile disappeared on holiday.
With Labour coming under scrutiny by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, party figures suspect that Corbyn’s aides are no lining up Gardiner to be the fall guy. Political hacks think so too, and their editors are prepared to get out the cheque book if he will tell all about Corbyn, Formby and Labour communications director Seumas Milne.
Will he grass up his comrades? The formbook suggests not: Gardiner, a Camden councillor, promoted a motion at the Hampstead and Kilburn Labour party in 2016 dismissing the anti-Semitism scandal as an assault on the Left and condemning “the factional use which a few within the party have tried to make of anti-Semitism”. Yet can Formby be sure he will stay silent? Or will she have to reach into Labour’s depleted reserves and present him with a deal that outbids anything the hacks can offer?
From the evidence is presented here, it seems the case against Gardiner is pretty damning: he’s covering up the massive anti-Semitism in the Labour party in order to protect Corbyn, Formby and co, who also have dirty, guilty secrets that the press are keen to publish. But there are real problems with the story and its sources, which mean that nothing in this should be taken at face value.
‘Ratbiter’: Warmonger and Libeller
Firstly, there’s the credibility of ‘Ratbiter’ himself. On Tuesday I put up extracts about him from a longer post against the anti-Semitism smears against Labour by the veteran campaigner for truth and justice, Tony Greenstein. ‘Ratbiter’ is Nick Cohen, a hack for the Graun and Absurder, who used to be a decent human being until 9/11. Then he morphed into an Islam hating neocon warmonger, who backed Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Cohen is also someone else, who has a problem with the actualite, and publishes lies and distortions about the victims of the anti-Semitism smear campaign. One of them is Greenstein himself, who, after pointing out the many lies Cohen had said about him, said that the only reasons why he wasn’t suing him was because he was already suing the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and wanted also to have a go at the equally mendacious Jewish Chronicle and a certain unnamed councillor.
Kayla Bibby and the CAA Smears against Mike and Jackie Walker
And then there’s the matter of the two people accused of anti-Semitism, Kayla Bibbi and Mohammed Uddin. Can we really believe the allegations? Both sound like the kind of accusation the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and ‘Gnasherjew’ make. ‘Gnasherjew’ is the pseudonym used by the repugnant David Collier, a vile individual who would have fitted in very well with the East German Stasi, Mussolini’s OVRA, Reinhard Heydrich in Nazi Germany, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, all of whom bugged their enemies. In the case of the last three, this included their personal enemies in the Nazi and Fascist parties and the American political machine. The Campaign Against Truth and Collier specialise in looking through people’s past electronic communications, pulling them out of context and then sending them as a dossier to the compliance unit. This is what they did to Jackie Walker and I’m assuming they also did it to Mike. Walker was smeared as an anti-Semite on the basis of a private conversation in which she said that her people the chief financiers of the slave trade. It was sloppily worded. She admits that she should have said that her people were among the chief financiers of the slave trade. She was also smeared because she said that the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism wasn’t one she could work with. As I and many others have said, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, Walker’s definitely not an anti-Semite. The party’s compliance unit admitted that the case against her was ‘weak’. But on the basis of this weak case, her life has been ruined and she now gets threats and abuse from nutters telling her that she should be lynched, or cut up and put into bin bags.
The smear merchants tried the same tactics recently against Mike over an image he put up on Vox Political. This showed the state of Israel in America, and was included in a piece he wrote against the smear attack on Naz Shah. The Witchhunters claimed he’d taken it from a Neo-Nazi website. Not so: Mike took it from Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish critic of Israel, who is the son of Holocaust survivors. And needless to say, Finkelstein has also had the anti-Semitic abuse heaped upon him, accused of being self-hating and all the rest of it. There’s a clear parallel here to Kayla Bibby’s case. So was Bibby the victim of the same tactics? Did she really get the image from Incog Man, or was it a similar image? And if she did, was she aware Incog Man was a Nazi? And even if she did, does it make her an anti-Semite if she qualifies it and says she talking about Israel, not Jews? If she really did take the image from a Nazi site, then she’s stupid and deserves criticism for it. But if she is genuinely making a comment about Israel, and not about Jews, then she’s no more than that.
Mohammed Uddin and What Is Not Being Said
Uddin’s case also should be treated with scepticism. Did he really say what he is alleged to have said about Jews and Christ? And if he did, what is the context? It’s possible he was quoting someone else, or reacting to something someone else has said along the same lines. We aren’t told. Furthermore, looking carefully, this doesn’t seem to be the original accusation against Uddin. Gardiner is quoted as saying that he didn’t know about Uddin’s views when he defended him. Now I doubt that the witchhunters simply made a complaint about Uddin just saying that he was an anti-Semite and wanted him suspended, and then left it like that. They must have provided some substance to their accusation. And Gardiner clearly found this evidence unconvincing. Then they dredged up, or invented, this remark about the Jews and Christ. As for recusing himself, this is what you’re supposed to do in a court of law if you know the accused. So it looks like Gardiner may well have acted entirely properly in the circumstances as they unfolded.
The Campaign to Unseat Corbyn
And underlying this sordid tale are Cohen’s true intentions. Gardiner is an enemy of the witchhunt, which really is against the Left and particularly against Israel’s critics. As a Blairite neocon, Cohen wants Corbyn out. This is the ultimate goal of the witchhunters. It’s why they accused Chris Williamson of anti-Semitism last week, because he had the horrible audacity to state that Labour was being too apologetic about it. And it’s no coincidence that Williamson is a close Corbyn ally. This is all about smearing and getting rid of Corbyn’s chief supporters before attacking and unseating the man himself.
As for the newspapers Cohen cites in his article, the Absurder and the Thunderer, neither have shown themselves even remotely to be impartial and trustworthy when it comes to the anti-Semitism smears, having published them with the same zeal as the rest of the press. Just as Private Eye has done, and no doubt for the same reasons.
This attack on Gardiner therefore looks like just another Blairite/Tory hit piece on a close Corbyn aide, consisting of nothing but lies and, at best, half-truths, from liars like David Collier, the CAA and Cohen himself. It’s disgraceful that such vicious smear merchants should be given such space by the media, and it’s a damning indictment of the Eye that it has also followed them in doing so.
Okay, so I was wrong. Yesterday I wrote a piece commenting on a story in Private Eye that Trevor Chinn, a Zionist businessman, looked like he was going to take his funding away from Tom Watson and his attempt to stage a backbench revolt against Corbyn, and give it instead to the Lib Dems. This section of the story is, as far as I know, true. However, I connected it to the debate the Jewish Labour Movement, real name Paole Zion, was going to stage about whether they should disaffiliate from Labour. I speculated that Chinn, as a Zionist, was taking his money out of Labour because his attempts to boost the Israel lobby weren’t working, and that this may also apply to the JLM.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. The Jewish Labour Movement, which only represents Zionist Jews in the Labour Party, despite the rulings and rantings of Labour’s Compliance Unit and the NEC, voted by majority of its members in Manchester and London to stay on. If they can be believed, of course. It has also been said that no vote was held at all.
Whether this was true or not, what is true is that it was all a stunt. Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada posted a series of Tweets which showed that he wasn’t at all surprised,. Indeed, he even predicted it. He had expected a group of right-wing Labour MPs to split away, followed by the JLM, as the Movements Fuhrer, Jeremy Newmark, had done the exact same thing to disrupt the University and College Union several years ago. It’s done to pretend that Jews are leaving en masse in protest at the anti-Semitism they experience whenever an official body starts criticising their favourite apartheid state. In fact, the tactics had worked and put a chill on any discussion of Israel for a time. But it also put the JLM in court, and the beak was not impressed. He attacked them for using litigation to try and shut down free speech. The judge was particularly critical of the leader of this fiasco, one Jeremy Newmark. Winstanley stated
Newmark was singled out by the judge for giving particularly “preposterous,” “arrogant” and “disturbing” evidence which showed contempt for freedom of speech. He was basically called a liar by the judge — giving “untrue” evidence.
Nomark is the former head of the Jewish Leadership Council, where he showed his complete absence of morals there. They quietly let go of him when he was caught embezzling. No-Morals has been described as ‘bent as a nine-bob note’ and ‘a one-man crimewave’ by one Jewish blogger. After leaving the JLC, he then took over the moribund Paole Zion in the Labour Party, pumped money into it, and reinvented it as the Jewish Labour Movement, and himself as a Labour activist.
But how mighty is this gang of zealots? Er, not very. It has a membership of only 2,000. And you don’t even have to be a member of the Labour Party to join. Which is how David Collier, one of the people behind the Gnasherjew online persona, got in. And which also turns around Collier’s rage at the Beeb inviting Jewish Voice for Labour on to Newsnight. Predictably he accused the Corporation of anti-Semitism and claimed that they were only a fringe movement. Which is what could also be said about the JLM, with their paltry membership and abuse they mete out to Israel-critical Jews like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and others.
Collier and the Jewish Labour Movement is what Norman Stanley Fletcher, the sage of Slade Prison, used to call ‘charmless nerks’. The organisation tweeted about its decision with its members’ usual surly lack of grace. Zionists like Collier and the JLM threaten their opponents online as well as in person, and this post was no exception. They told Labour politicos and councillors that if they stood with JLM, the JLM would stand with them. But if they were against them, they wouldn’t. Which is basically coded language meaning that if they didn’t support the JLM and their war against Corbyn, they’d attack them.
If they were expecting the legions of ordinary people in the party, to be cowed and chastened by the news, they were to be severely disappointed. Marxy spoke for many when he said
Dear JLM
We don’t respond to threats.
Do as you wish.
Labour Party Membership.
This was all just a stunt. While it might take in the public, 29 per cent of whom supposedly now believe the lies about Labour Party anti-Semitism retailed by the media, it didn’t impress Labour’s real supporters. Rather than being aghast at the JLM disaffiliating, like the 200 Labour Party right-wingers such as Ruth Smeeth and Margaret Hodge, most of the real Labour supporters were ready to clap and cheer.
This group of Zionist entryists and surly, domineering racial supremacists have been indulged for too long. It’s about time they were thrown out for racism and bullying.
According to today’s I for 5th March 2019, Z-list celeb and social media bully Rachel Riley is to sue Laura Murray, a Corbyn aide, for libel. Because Murray said that Riley believed Corbyn should have been attacked yesterday because he was a Nazi.
The article by Padraic Flanagan runs
Rachel Riley is reported to have instructed a high-profile lawyer to pursue libel claims against a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s staff over a Twitter outburst.
The Countdown presenter has instructed Mark Lewis, who came to prominence representing victims of phone-hacking, to pursue a claim against Laura Murray, “stakeholder manager to the Leader of the Opposition”, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
In a tweet made in response to the alleged assault of Mr Corbyn during a mosque visit at the weekend, Ms Murray claimed that Riley had said Mr Corbyn “deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi”.
Riley called the claim an “appalling distortion of the truth”.
It came as several Jewish Labour MPs reacted angrily to the appointment of Ms Murray, the daughter of Corbyn aide Andrew Murray, to the party unit dealing with the anti-Semitism complaints. (p.5).
This is standard operating procedure, whose immediate response when anyone calls out her bullying and bigotry on social media is to reach for Lewis and threaten them with a writ. She tried to do this to Shaun Lawson and everyone, who repeated his blog post about how Riley and her mate Tracy-Ann Oberman bullied a sixteen year old girl with anxiety and then the girl’s father, smearing her as an anti-Semite. One of those, who was threatened with legal action by Lewis was Mike, who, along with many others, got a message from Lawson advising him to ignore it. Lewis had threatened Mike and the others over Twitter, which is strictly forbidden under the rules of the Solicitors Regulatory Association, and Lewis had already been censured and fined for doing this previously. And thanks to Lewis trying it again, more complaints of his conduct were duly lodged.
And there’s no question that Riley did call Corbyn a Nazi. Another of her besties, the bit-actress Frances Barber, had tweeted that she wanted to buy Corbyn’s attacker a full English breakfast. Riley herself tweeted an earlier comment from Owen Jones that if you didn’t want to be egged as a Nazi, don’t be a Nazi. Jones in this case was referring to Nick Griffin being egged. Others on Twitter strongly criticised Riley for applying this to Corbyn, which she strongly denied. But the evidence is there. Zelo Street covered the incident yesterday, remarking that Riley’s reputation is now in the gutter. Quite. See http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03/rachel-riley-reputation-in-gutter.html
You can also expect Riley to perform another characteristic maneouvre soon. The moment people stand up to Lewis and it starts to look like all this will backfire, she and her besties will step away from him.
As for the Jewish Chronicle, well, as Mike’s case shows, it’s nothing but a lying rag with all moral integrity of the denizens of tabloid journalism, as you’d expect from its squalid editor, Stephen Pollard, who used to work for the vitriolically racist Express. And the Jewish Labour MPs, who don’t want Murray in the Compliance Unit are just going to be more Blairites and members of the Israel lobby, who can’t stand any criticism of their favourite colonialist apartheid state. They really shouldn’t complain about Murray’s appointment anyone, because they have had a concession in that Lord Falconer, one of Blair’s lawyer cronies, has been put in charge of the Compliance Unit’s oversight for the anti-Semitism cases. This is clearly a case of bias towards them, but I don’t see them complaining about it. So more democrapic from the Labour Israel lobby.
In my considered opinion, Riley’s reputation really is in the gutter, and Lewis stands no chance of retrieving it, as he should soon, we hope, get a visit from Mr Struckoff.
This is another video I’ve just put against the continuing anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The smears are driven by the Blairites determination to hang on to power, and their close connection to the Israeli state and the Israel lobby, which uses allegations of anti-Semitism to silence its critics. Here’s the blurb for it:
The anti-Semitism allegations against Corbyn and the Labour party are part of a campaign by the Israel state to defend itself against attacks for it maltreatment of Palestinians by accusing its critics of anti-Semitism. The Israel Lobby also buys influence through the sponsorship of politicians in Britain and America. Tony Blair was one of those. The treatment of those tried by Labour’s Compliance Unit is blatantly unjust. And the accusation that a statement is anti-Semitic, even when it is true, because it conforms to anti-Semitic tropes, is the skewed and twisted logic that has seen SF films like Aliens described as metaphors for racism.
I describe how the Israeli state is afraid of Jeremy Corbyn because he defends the Palestinians and opposes their maltreatment and oppression by the Israelis. The Labour leader is not an anti-Semite, and has consistently opposed all racism and stood up for Jews. I urge people to look at his parliamentary record. The Israeli state has a government department to supervise the smearing of its political opponents, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, run by Gilad Erdan, a cabinet minister. It runs hasbara, the Hebrew word for civilian propaganda, similar to military propaganda and psy-ops.
The Israeli state also obtains political support through funding politicians. One of those was Tony Blair, who was given money by pro-Israel businessmen after he met Lord Levy at the Israeli embassy. This allowed him to be independent of the trade unions. Other politicians have also been given donations through businessmen connected with the Israeli embassy. One of the politicos talking about the Israel lobby in Peter Oborne’s Despatches documentary describes how he was given money by two businessmen he had never met after he attended a gathering at the embassy. In America one of the main fundraising groups for Israel is AIPAC, whose members are mainly Jewish. The largest Zionist group in the US is the Christian Right organisation, Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. These two groups raise funds to sponsor pro-Israel politicos.
I also tackle Tom Watson’s demands that complaints of anti-Semitism should be sent to him, rather than Jenny Formby, because the complaints process is too opaque and not quick enough. Which means he’s upset because the people responsible for these accusations are seeing the people they’ve accused being thrown out of the party quickly enough. But the people who have been smeared as anti-Semites have also complained about the Compliance Unit and its unjust procedures. The process takes a long time, and as the videos I’ve put up from Labour Against the Witchhunt with Jackie Walker, Moshe Machover and Marc Wadsworth show, those accused are frequently suspended for a long time without hearing anything about when they will have a hearing. They are frequently refused the information about them and the charges held by the Labour party, to which they are entitled. Some manage to obtain it, but others don’t. They may also not be told what the charge or evidence used against them is. Which makes it seem to be a case of the Compliance Unit simply trying to find anything they can make stick.
Then there is the peculiar nature of the allegations. These are often based on the notion of literary tropes. An action or statement may be declared to be anti-Semitic, even if it is factually correct, if it corresponds to an anti-Semitic trope. Thus, Mike, my brother, was accused of anti-Semitism because he described Shai Masot’s plot to have Alan Duncan removed from the cabinet as a conspiracy. This was supposed to be a comparison with the really anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews plotting behind the scenes, the murderous fictions that saw six million innocents die in the Holocaust. But Mike was correct. Shai Masot’s plot was a conspiracy in the entirely correct sense that it was a secret political plot. And it was not anti-Semitic, because he made no global claim about Jews. Masot’s plot was not Jewish in the sense that it was by the Jewish people as a whole; it was simply a plot by the Israeli embassy. And this conspiracy, unlike the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and others, was real.
In fact, the use of literary tropes to accuse innocent people of anti-Semitism is very much like some of the dafter pieces of literary criticism, which claimed to find racism in SF. For example, in the 1980s the film Aliens, in which Ripley lands on an alien planet with a squad of space marines to tackle the creatures there, was seen by one critic as a metaphor for White America’s fears of Black welfare queens, unemployed Black women who were producing children on welfare. Because one of the Aliens is a queen, which lays eggs. No, Aliens isn’t about White America fearing Black women. It’s about Ripley and space marines fighting space aliens. It’s that simple, although beyond the aliens of the title is the villainous company, that has allowed the planet to be colonised without telling the settlers the aliens are there. It is also like another piece of criticism I came across, which said that SF aliens were anti-Semitic, because in the 19th and early 20th centuries the word ‘alien’ was often used to describe Jews. No, in all the SF I’ve read, the word ‘alien’ means ‘space alien’. It does not mean ‘Jew’.
The anti-Semitism smears and Labour’s Compliance Unit are unjust, and smear decent, anti-racist people, who have stood up against racism including anti-Semitism. It needs to stop, now, as does the use of literary tropes that are used to claim that descriptions of real events are anti-Semitic.
One of the most entertaining books I’ve read on the stranger or more remarkable items of the English lexicon is simply entitled Words, by the American author Paul Dickson (London: Arrow Books 1982). It’s subtitled ‘A Connoisseur’s Collection Of Old And New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful And Outlandish’ -. And one of the most useful political terms it records, in the chapter on ‘Neologisms’, is ‘Democrapic’. The book gives its definition as ‘Garson Kanin’s word for the expression of democratic beliefs by those who cannot tolerate democracy in action.’ (p.168).
It’s particularly appropriate at this time, as we heard a lot of democrapic last week from the Independent Group. They are the breakaway politicos from Labour and the Tories, who are so passionate about democracy and parliament, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, don’t have any real policies, except opposition to Brexit – or at least, not any they want the public to know – and have registered as a private corporation so they don’t have to do what real parties do and reveal who their sponsors and donors are. Nor do they have any infrastructure to allow a mass membership that would decide party policy.
Of course, they have serious rivals in their use of democrapic by the Blairites in the Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The Blairites maintain that they’re the true heart of Labour and stand for genuine inclusion, equality and diversity, while all the time trying to purge the real moderate and left-wing members of the party. At the same time, Tony Greenstein has noted that there’s also a very nasty racist undertone in the anti-Semitism smears, in that they’re targeted primarily at anti-Zionist Jews and anti-racist Black activists. The Lib-Dems are very democrapic since they effectively dumped John Mills’ On Liberty as their founding text determining the pursuit of real democracy to support David Cameron’s secret courts, where in the interests of national security, you may not know who your accuser is, nor the evidence or charge against you, and the whole trial will be held in secret. Pretty much like Labour’s Compliance Unit examining charges of anti-Semitism. And when you come to the Tories, there’s a whole mountain of democrapic coming from a party that despises the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, Blacks, Asians and Muslims, but make a lot of noise about how they stand up for British ideals of tolerance and democracy when anyone challenges them on all this.
Democrapic is a very useful term to describe this type of political hypocrisy. Just as the old slang term ‘gentleman ranker’, for a ruined gentleman reduced to serving as a private in the army, aptly describes Iain Duncan Smith. Who was rumoured to have failed the office course at Sandhurst and Returned To Unit.
IDS is now out of office, but sadly, not out of parliament. But I predict that ‘democrapic’ will remain intensely relevant, especially as applied to the Independent Group, who are particularly democrapic.
There’s a very good article in The Canary reporting how Tom Watson got an earful from a caller, Lee of Swindon, when he was LBC on 1st March, 2019. Watson has been trying to undermine Jenny Formby’s attempts to deal with the anti-Semitism accusations by requesting people send their accusations to him at a private, non-Labour phone number, instead of to Formby and the Compliance Unit. This is because the accusers, or rather, smearers and libellers, are upset that there isn’t any opacity about the complaints process, and too many people are being found innocent. He is also trying to set up a backbench group of MPs to undermine Corbyn. Although he denies it, it’s very clear that he’s organising a coup against the Labour leader.
Watson’s appearance on LBC therefore provoked an angry response from Lee, who was, like the rest of the genuine supporters of the Labour party, angry at his disloyalty and intriguing. Lee told him he was trying to destroy Labour from within, when they were trying to build a revolution that would transform Britain for the better. He pointed out that Labour had a membership of over a half a million people, and very few of them are anti-Semites. He challenged him on his failure to target the Tories, concentrating instead of trying to destroy the Labour. He ended by saying that as the deputy leader, Watson should be bringing people together. Instead he and his ‘little tribe’ were appearing on TV stations, trying to destroy the party.
The Canary adds that Lee’s correct. There are 500,000 people in the party, and that 0.1 per cent of them have been accused of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, an academic study found that the media had vastly exaggerated the extent of anti-Semitism in the party. The worst culprits for this highly biased reporting was the Beeb and the Groaniad. The report concluded that the media reporting of the issue was so bad that it amounted to a disinformation campaign.
It also has a recording of that piece of Watson’s appearance on LBC and a link to a petition calling for Watson to resign as deputy leader of the Labour party. I’ve signed it, and I encourage other, genuine supporters of the Labour party to do so.
This is the video for Jon Pullman’s movie, Witchhunt, about the persecution of former Momentum vice-chair, Jackie Walker, on the completely risible and mendacious charge of anti-Semitism. As I’ve said many times before, Walker is a Jewish lady of colour. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist and her father a Russian Jew. They met on a civil rights demo. She is also a Jew by faith, her partner is also Jewish, and she sends her daughter to a Jewish school. All her life she has campaigned against racism, including anti-Semitism. But she does not agree with the I.H.R.A.’s definition of anti-Semitism or the Jewish Labour Movement’s handling of Holocaust Memorial Day. And so a trumped up charge of anti-Semitism was brought against her on the basis of a sloppily worded statement about Jewish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, a trade that was initiated and very largely in the hands of Christians. As she has pointed out.
The video begins with the overwhelming election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. It then moves to Evan Davies and Rabbi Julia Neuberger claiming that there is an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour party. A man, speaking outside the Department of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London stating that the establishment will do anything they can to rubbish Corbyn and anyone close to him. It then goes on to show the various news presenters stating that Walker had been suspended. Then Walker appears to state that what was happening to the Palestinians was unspeakable, and you couldn’t ignore it. Followed by footage the Israelis sending planes to bomb and strafe Gaza, and an injured Arab child being taken out of an ambulance. Walker states that, for her, Gaza was the last straw. Corbyn is shown speaking at a pro-Gaza demonstration. Erdan, an Israeli apparatchik, speaks of economic and political warfare.
The great Israeli mathematician and supporter of Palestinian rights, Moshe Machover, who was also thrown out of the Labour party for anti-Semitism, before being readmitted because of public outcry, appears to describe the appoint of Erdan as the ‘head of this ministry’, which appears to be the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy. There’s a headline from the Electronic Intifada talking about the Anti-Semitism smear campaign. Walker quotes her mother, who said, ‘You can make anyone look a devil if you want to.’ There is then a map showing the links between the various anti-Zionist organisation from what appears to be pro-Israeli propaganda. Machover appears again to state that the goal of the Zionists is to make anyone who is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist appear anti-Semitic. This is followed by footage of a baying mob of Zionists all claiming to be demonstrating against anti-Semitism.
Jewish Voice for Labour’s Naomi Winborne-Idrissi appears, stating that this is all taking place during a shift to the right, in this country as well as others, and that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat. A young man says that what we find is an overwhelming emphasis on sources mobilising against Corbyn with a particular agenda. There is a shot of page from the Media Reform Coalition on the anti-Semitism smear against Corbyn, which they state is a disinformation campaign. A Black man says that people want moral slurs. They don’t want balanced stories. They want black and white stories. Walker says that what they are seeing with anti-Semitism, they have seen with McCarthyism. She is followed by Machover again saying that Walker was selected as a test case. Walker herself says that someone in the Compliance Unit said that the case against her was ‘pretty weak’. But this pretty weak case has smashed her reputation. A white-haired man says the pressure and attacks on Walker, with her lifetime of fighting racism, is to send a message ‘we can get you’.
The video ends with the film’s title fading out against a black background.
This is the trailer for a movie, that frightened Luciana Berger so much that she complained to the Labour party about its screening, and had it cancelled. And I don’t doubt that she was also one of the snitches claiming that Chris Williamson, the MP who booked the room for it, is a terrible anti-Semite who should be suspended.
And no wonder. It looks like cinematic dynamite that could well blow more than ‘the bloody doors off’ the whole revolting anti-Semitsm smear charade. It seems very clear from this that Corbyn, his associates and in this instance, Walker herself, are very much the targets of a very coordinated and orchestrated Israeli and establishment smear campaign. And it obviously is going to get both very worried. To use a turn of phrase from the SF movie Aliens, it’s going to make them stop their grinning and drop their linen’.
The film is due to be released March 17th, and will tour various British cities with its director, including Brighton and Derry in NI. I will be delighted if it comes to Bristol or anywhere nearby where I can catch it.
My very best wishes to Jackie, and to all involved in this movie. May you prevail, and the hatemongers, smear-artists and spineless moral cowards, who support them be swept away.
Here’s another glaring injustice in the Labour party. Yesterday Mike put up on his blog a piece about Tony Blair, who appeared in the Independent giving his support to the wretched Independent grouping. The war criminal, whose decision to invade Iraq with George ‘Dubya’ Bush and a coterie of allies, has killed a million people and displaced a further 7 million in the Middle East, said
“Last week several MPs defected to form a new political grouping.
“These are new times. We need, despite our moderation, to embrace the spirit of insurgency.
“We need new ideas and thinking on policy. Above all, we need to wake up, gird up, stand up and summon up the strength and intelligence to prevail.”
Now it’s probably no surprise that Blair supports the Independent Grouping. Like him, they’re neoliberals, who stand for privatisation, including that of the NHS, destroying more of the welfare state, and are desperate to avoid a public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq. Oh yes, and they’re pro-EU. There were rumours a little while ago that Blair himself was going to launch a centrist party, and then that his son, Euan, was going to be its leader. And it’s been suggested that if the Independent group persists, then Blair will return to politics, a prospect that gave left-wing vlogger Gordon Dimmack nightmares.
It’s also fascinating seeing Blair try to present the Independents as something new and ‘insurgent’, when they’re the absolute opposite. They’re just the same shop-worn, deadbeat Thatcherism with a new, but very corporate and anti-democratic package. But remember this comes from Blair, who tried to market his style of politics as ‘the radical centre’. Which is a contradiction in terms, except when applied to the Nazis in the 1980s, who infiltrated the German liberal party, the Freie Demokraten.
But apart from attempting to present the Independents’ zombie policies as something living and dynamic, Blair’s speech is remarkable for something else: it breaks Labour party regulations. These explicitly state that no Labour party member may support or promote a rival party. By these terms, Blair should be thrown out. One Tweeter, Socialist Bangers, has already sent a message to the Compliance Unit in the Party suggesting that they should get rid of Blair. Martin Odoni, a great friend of Mike’s blog, was so incensed that he has also put up a specimen letter for others to use demanding Blair’s expulsion. See: https://thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/suspend-tony-blair-from-the-labour-party-with-immediate-effect-template/
Unfortunately Mike considers it doubtful that they will, because at the moment the Compliance Unit seems determined to preserve the privileges of MPs and the party elite. Which contrasts strongly with its determination to persecute the innocent with fake accusations of anti-Semitism. As Blair seems to. The murderer of millions stated that anti-Semitism in the Labour party was a running sore, but gave no examples. Well, obviously, he couldn’t, because some of the cases are so flimsy that they should be greeted with gales of laughter rather than indulged and prosecuted.
Mike concludes his article
While innocent party members continue to be cast out under false claims of anti-Semitism that will trouble them for the rest of their lives, this elitist will be able to carry on preaching falsehoods to eager ears – because it’s what his fellow elites in the Labour leadership want. They are very much like the Conservatives in that respect. Wait a couple of weeks and then tell me if I’m wrong.
And it’s a scandal that he’s going to be exactly right.
Now that Tweezer is floundering about trying to keep herself and her wretched party from sinking on the black rocks of Brexit, they, the Blairites and the Israel lobby both within and outside the Labour party have taken to repeating the anti-Semitism. One of those who decided that he was going to try to whip up the witch hunt there again was Wes Streeting, who took it upon himself to dox and smear a 70-year old woman using a fabricated image on twitter.
Doxing is publishing someone’s name and personal details, like their address, on the internet without their consent. It’s against Twitter’s rules and is very dangerous. People have been personally threatened, attacked and their homes vandalized through others maliciously putting their personal details on the internet. In this case, Streeting decided he was going to dox Annie W-B because he’d decided that she’d dismissed anti-Semitism as a smear. He tweeted
Meet Ann . Ann dismisses anti-Semitism as a smear and says that hatred is being perpetrated by Emily [Benn] and Luciana [Berger] against innocent people who have never in their lives been anti-Semitic’.
He then goes to say ‘Let’s take a look in her back catalogue’.
But the tweet he was referring to did not dismiss anti-Semitism as a smear. It only dismissed the witch hunt against innocent people in the Labour for alleged anti-Semitism as a smear. Ann W-B actually posted this tweet, replying to Emily Benn raving about how brave Luciana Berger had been for standing up to anti-Semitism.
Oh please go away. Luciana Berger has done everything she possibly can to smear Mr Corbyn & over 500k members. #EnoughisEnough of the cost hatred being perpetuated by you and others towards innocent people who have never in their lives been antisemitic.
That these accusations are nothing but baseless lies and smears is amply shown by some of the very upstanding people, who have been accused. People like former Momentum Vice-President Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour and civil rights activist; Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racism activist, who campaigned with the Board of Deputies of British Jews against anti-Semitic assaults by the BNP in the 1980s; Cyril Chilson, a former member of the IDF and the son of a Holocaust survivor and a heroic Russian Jewish airman; Ken Livingstone, who has always been notorious for his opposition to racism and the recruitment of real, genuine Nazis by the British secret state; Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-racism activist and campaigner. Because he campaigns against Zionism for the good reason that it is just another form of apartheid and Fascism. Tony Odoni, another Jewish anti-racist, for the same reason. And, of course, Mike, for defending Livingstone and Walker.
Then Streeting moved on to smearing Annie W-B with a doctored image. She was shown tweeting her approval of an image posted on Twitter by another person, which contained a spurious quote from Voltaire ‘To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize’. This was next to a giant hand coming down crushing a group of people. On its sleeve is a Magen David, a Star of David. Mike points out that the quote doesn’t actually come from Voltaire. It comes from an American Nazi and Holocaust-Denier Kevin Alfred Storm. As for the image, it has a variety of forms in which the symbol on the sleeve differs. In its most common form, there is no symbol. It’s possible that Annie W-B may have genuinely believed the quote was from Voltaire. I’ve come across it several times, and until Mike’s article did not know who was really responsible for it. Mike suggests other Labour members and supporters may have been tricked into liking it because of its similarity to Tony Benn’s ‘Five Essential Questions of Democracy’, which as Mike says, are ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ And the dodgy quote does look like something Voltaire would say as an Enlightenment philosopher and defender of free speech against institutional religion and absolute monarchy.
He also decided that she had to be an anti-Semite because she had also posted a series of comments attacking the Rothschilds. Mike says of this
Interesting subject, the Rothschilds: A hugely wealthy and influential business/banking organisation that is apparently immune from investigation under any circumstances because those questioning its actions may always be accused of anti-Semitism. Does anybody – apart from a witch-hunter – think that is reasonable? We can see that Mr Streeting does, but then, he stands with the witch-hunters.
And the family has immense personal power. Last year one of the continental members of the family appeared in a very brief article in the I. It reported that this man was having the indigenous people in one region of Zaire cleared out of their homes in order to make it his personal hunting preserve. It’s because of its wealth and power that the Rothschilds feature in many of the Nazi conspiracy theories about Jews, Freemasons and the Illuminati plotting the downfall of the White race. But they also have a very sordid past. They lent money to the Third Reich, even when it was known that the Nazis were persecuting and exterminating the Jews. But because the Rothschilds themselves are the subjects of so many conspiracy theories, any person asking serious questions about their influence and power is automatically tarred as an anti-Semite themselves.
The peeps on Twitter immediately pointed out to Streeting that what he had done to Annie W-B was wrong. Not only had he published her name, but it, and the story, had been picked up by BBC news. This was far too far, and they began writing complaints to the Labour party about Streeting, with one person stating it was a sackable offence. Unbelievably, the complaints team said that Streeting’s actions did not contravene Labour policy. Which made them all the more determined to press their complaints and escalate it.
As for Streeting, he then went off and attacked Mike for being an anti-Semite using the old, and now absolutely discredited Sunday Times article. Which left Mike demanding that, if it was an attempt to smear him, he wanted an apology.
The controversy continued when Jenny Formby got involved. She was upset that Streeting was being ‘tried by twitter’ and so asked everyone to send their complaints into the Labour party’s Compliance Unit instead, so that they could all move on to attacking the Tories. She was then bitterly attacked in her turn by angry Labour party supporters, furious that the Blairites were able to smear and bully ordinary party members as they pleased without Formby or anyone else for that matter taking any kind of disciplinary action. As proof of this, Mike cited the example of one individual, who was thrown out for liking the music of the Foo Fighters, while Streeting himself went unpunished for what should have been a disciplinary offence. Some people stated that it was high time the Blairites were kicked out of the party. The sheer number of complaints about their behaviour on Twitter showed how deeply unpopular the various right-wing members of the Parliamentary Labour Party are. Finally, to show just how unfair the system is, Mike put up the case of Karen, a Labour party member, who told Formby that when she sent in a complaint against Tweeting, one of his little minions reported her in turn for ‘bullying’. Mike asked if Karen was also going to be penalized.
You can understand why Formby doesn’t want a fuss kicked up about Streeting, or any of the other Blairites and supporters of the Israeli apartheid state. They’re actually a tiny minority in the party, but they have the full support of a deeply biased right-wing media. Whenever they are even lightly embarrassed or taken to task, their immediate response is to whine about how they’re being bullied by evil Trotskyites, Stalinists, Communists and anti-Semites. As Joan Ryan did after she lost her local party’s vote of ‘No Confidence’. And these lies are automatically retailed as absolute truth by the Beeb and everyone else.
But time is not on their side. They are only a minority and the strength of the response to Streeting’s smears and doxing, and Formby’s attempts to hush it all up, show how much ordinary party members have lost patience with them. And it is becoming glaringly clear to an increasing number of people outside the party that people like Streeting do not represent the real heart of the Labour party, and that their smears and accusations of anti-Semitism are nothing but grotesque lies. As for their own threats and bullying, it’s high time the leadership stood up to them and called them out on it. That would have saved a lot of grief if it had been done at the very start, no matter how hard they may have whined and moaned in response.
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