I gather from today’s headlines that the Tories are going ahead with their wretched plan to privatise Channel 4. Well, they’ve wanted to do it for a long time, ever since Maggie Thatcher set it up in the 1980s. It was meant to be an alternative to BBC 2, and so was naturally going to have low ratings. But it also had some excellent programming and did much to offer the British public genuine alternatives to the mainstream medial
It’s director-general in that decade, Jeremy Isaacs, believed that people had latent tastes they didn’t know they had, and it was the channel’s task to offer material that they otherwise wouldn’t know they liked. He talked in his autobiography about giving the public a range of minority interests like miners’ oral history. Reviewing it, Private Eye got very huffy, accusing Isaacs of thinking that he knew better than the rest of us. But Isaacs was quite right. For example, Quentin Letts, former Daily Mail and now Times parliamentary sketch writer, who is very definitely a man of the right, praised Isaacs’ Channel 4 in one of his books because it opened up opera to a mass audience. Absolutely correct – my family’s working class, but Dad used to put Channel 4’s opera on occasionally. I remember coming back from seeing the western Silverado at the flicks to find Dad had on the box a big opera event being broadcast across Europe. And there were obviously a sizable number of ordinary, working people like Dad across the country, years before Pavarotti caused a storm at the World Cup.
But the channel also offered a range of other content, often of a multicultural flavour. There was an adaptation of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, a season of films by the great Indian director, Satyajit Ray, as well as more popular Indian cinema with ‘All India Goldies’. It also gave a platform to the new, emerging alternative comedy scene with The Comic Strip, starring Rik Mayall, French and Saunders, Alexei Sayle and so on, and the group of Black comics, the Family. They had a series set in a Black barbershop. I only saw bits and pieces of it, but it was genuinely funny. In one episode, one of the characters finds out that he is the governor of a Caribbean island nation right at the same time they’re having revolution. He phones up his government on the island just in time to hear gunfire and one them report that ‘Such-and-such island has fallen’. Wearing his ceremonial uniform, the man then stands in a wastepaper bin and tears off his epaulettes. More seriously, the channel also presented a history of the world intended to challenge the Eurocentric bias of traditional history programmes. There was also news and documentary series about Africa, with Black presenters and a history of the continent presented by the White afrocentrist, Basil Davidson. I’ve been criticised here for describing Davidson as an afrocentrist in a previous post. But that is how Davidson, a respected historian, described himself in one of his books. Davidson is an afrocentrist in the sense that he believes that ancient Egypt is the ultimate source of western science and culture. He states that he has this view, because it’s what the ancient Romans and Greeks believed. While this is a very controversial view, he’s very far from the bizarre fantasies and pseudo-history of many on the Afrocentric fringe, like the notion that the ancient Egyptians somehow had quantum mechanics and advanced physics long before the 20th century.
To balance this, the channel also had more popular entertainment like Tell the Truth, a panel show that was ‘Would I Lie to You’ in all but name, the pop music programme, The Tube and the computer generated vid-jockey Max Headroom as well as the soap, Brookside. It also upset right-wing sentiments with sexually explicit movies and programmes, to the point where the Heil branded Michael Grade, the channel’s next director-general, ‘Britain’s pornographer in chief’. This was just when the channel had announced it was launching a season of gay and lesbian programmes and films. The best response to this came from the Archdeacon of York. The Mail’s journos had been contacting various people to ask what they thought about this latest assault on traditional British morality. The good clergyman replied, ‘Do you think anybody’s going to watch it if there’s Clint Eastwood on the other’. A common sense reaction against the Mail’s hysterical fearmongering.
The Tories seem to have hated all of this at the time, even if its programming was applauded by the critics. As I remember, they were particularly impressed by the Mahabharata, the Tube and the Family. Channel 4 was also set up to specialise in high quality news coverage. And it’s this which I think really annoyed the Tories. Channel 4 News had a reputation for being particularly good, and the channel also broadcast the current affairs documentary series Dispatches and The Bandung Files. The last I believe uncovered some of the dirty dealing by western politicos and multinationals in the Developing World. The channel became much more mainstream in the 90s under Bazalguette, who got rid of much of the alternative material. It still managed to annoy the Tories though with ‘yoof’ shows like The Word and TheGirlie Show, both of which had reputation for being spectacularly bad in terms of content and taste.
But I think it’s the persistent, in depth coverage and incisive questioning of government policies by the news programmes that has particularly brought down Tory spite. Channel 4 News has done too good a job of holding the government to account. When anchorman John Snow announced he was retiring a few months ago, the Lotus Eaters put up a video celebrating it and calling him a ‘snowflake’. Hardly. Snow was just determined not to take BS from officialdom. During the bombardment of Gaza he called Israeli ambassador Mark Regev a liar to his face when Regev tried telling the British people that if they sent their aid packages to Israel, the Israelis would pass it on to Gaza’s besieged people. It was a complete lie, and Snow did his job as a decent journalist and didn’t put up with it.
The Tories loathe anyone questioning them. They hated Paxo on Newsnight when he regularly tore Tory politicos like Michaels Heseltine and Howard into raw, bloody chunks. Hence all the rubbish about the Beeb’s left-wing bias and the campaign to end the license fee. And they clearly also hate Channel 4 with a passion for the same reason. And so they’re determined to privatise it.
The hope is clearly that without state support, both the Beeb and Channel 4 will dwindle into insignificance. Genuine public service broadcasting, with the duty to be impartial, will die out to be replaced by a Murdoch-owned right-wing propaganda outlet, like Fox or GB News.
I’ve no doubt that this is all being presented as saving the taxpayer money for broadcasting material nobody watches – which was one of the arguments the Tories made against the channel back in the 80s when they part privatised it the first time. There’s almost certainly going to be talk about how it’s ‘woke’ bias is unrepresentative of British views, just like they ranted about it being ‘pc’ in 80s and 90s. But the real reason is that they despise its journalistic independence.
The privatisation of Channel 4 is yet another despicable assault on genuine, quality journalism in favour of right-wing propaganda pumped out by Murdoch. They want to destroy any journalistic independence so that right across the news media, only the right will be heard.
This is another video from Middle East Eye that’s been posted on YouTube. It shows mobs of Israeli rioters attacking shops and businesses owned by Palestinians. You can see these thugs waving the Israeli flag. It’s an absolutely chilling sight, especially as it brings to my mind Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht, when the Nazis attacked and smashed Jewish owned businesses. This is very much the kind of video the Board of Deputies of British Jews does not want you to see. Peter Oborne, a deeply principle journalist, who previously worked for the Torygraph, made a video over ten years ago for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby. He interviewed Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Groan, and Avi Shlaim, an Oxford expert on the Middle East. Rusbridger described how, when his newspaper ran stories about Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians and their allies, the president of the Board would turn up with his pet lawyer in tow to complain that the story would increase anti-Semitism. The Board also denounced the Beeb as anti-Semitic because its highly respected correspondents on the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin, also reported Israeli atrocities, including the massacre of Palestinian refugees by their allies, the Christian Phalange. Shlaim stated that the Beeb’s reporting was actually overwhelmingly factually correct, although there were a couple of minor faults, according to an independent review body.
It is Israeli Fascist violence like this that Jeremy Corbyn opposes, not Jews. As have any number of pro-Palestinian Jewish activists – Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and veteran thesp Miriam Margolyes. Nearly ten years ago Margolyes condemned the attacks on Gaza as ‘a proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. It is because of their activism on behalf of the Palestinians that these people have been foully smeared and reviled as anti-Semites.
It’s time this stopped. Terrorism by anyone is wrong, and I don’t agree with the Palestinian attacks either.
But its time the Israeli attacks on Palestinians ceased, Netanyahu condemned for his barbarous treatment of the country’s indigenous Arabs, and the Board condemned for seeking to cover up such racist barbarity.
On Saturday Zelo Street revealed that there’s a real crisis at the Grauniad. Its readership has plummeted and in response, Kath Viner has announced a swingeing round of job cuts and redundancies. Whole sections of the Saturday edition will vanish for good. The Street went on to ponder whether left-wingers should go on defending and buying it. One the one hand, the standard of its journalism is a cut above the rest of the press. On the downside, it ain’t the paper it was ten years ago.
In Zelo Street’s opinion, the paper has conceded too much to the press pack and the groupthink that infests the rest of the media. It would not expose political corruption, like the Hamilton scandal that caused such outrage and merriment in the 90s. Nor would it expose the phone-hacking scandal. It would not go out on a limb to defend whistleblowers from the intelligence agencies, like Edward Snowden. As regards the Labour Party, it backed Ed Miliband against Corbyn, and then Kier Starmer. And it always reported on Corbyn from the hostile perspective of his enemies. And so now it is on its last legs, its supporters like Zelo Street are wondering whether to go on with it. As you can tell from the replies his piece has received, others are very sure they won’t. They despise it for his fascination with America, which has turned its politics to that of American Democratic centrism, way to the right of traditional British politics. They despise the fact that Viner and her lead columnists are all alumni of Oxford University, so that their views reflect those of the metropolitan bubble. And they really hate it for its Blairism, pushed by people like Marina Hyde and Polly Toynbee. This was another cause of its fascination with America, among other things. Blair was a firm Atlanticist, and wished to turn the Labour Party into the domestic equivalent of the Democrats.And they also hate the way it pushed the anti-Semitism smears under Jonathan Freedland.
I share their feelings. I can’t say I’m a Guardian reader – I’ve only ever read it occasionally. In some ways it’s too left for me, and too right-wing in others. As regards the Labour party, it and the Absurder have a long history of promoting the Liberals in the 1975 general election. I believe that in the 2017 election it actually ran an editorial telling people to vote Lib Dem.
And it tried everything it could to smear Corbyn. One of the most risible was a letter it published from some deranged female, arguing that he and Bernie Sanders were obviously homophobes and misogynists because they preferred loose, baggy clothing over fitted outfits. This was back to the bad old days of the male-dominated trade union movements of the 1970s. This was published despite the fact that Bernie has turned up at the invitation of many women’s groups and feminist rallies because of the support he’s given the American women’s movement. I’m sure the same is true for Corbyn. As the former Labour leader has listed break-making as one of his hobbies, he can’t be said to be a stickler for upholding traditional gender roles.
And then there was the anti-Semitism smears. They were pushed as hard as they could by Freedland and others. Many of the hacks, like Jessica Elgot, who co-penned the recent article repeating the libel that Mike was an anti-Semite, were out-and-out members of the extreme Zionists now comprising the British Jewish establishment. As I’ve blogged again and again, they define anti-Semitism almost wholly in terms of anti-Zionism. No Jewish voices critical of Israel, whether liberal Zionist or anti-Zionist, religious or secular, may be allowed to be heard. Historical truth is covered up and propaganda and lies pushed in its place. Corbyn was never an anti-Semite, and neither were his followers. Especially not his followers. But they pushed it until this gentle man, who has actually done so much in his career to support the Jewish community, appeared to be little less than Hitler incarnate.
Rusbridger wasn’t perfect. He seemed almost an enamoured of Blair as the rest of the media. But he stood up to the Israel lobby. He appears in Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby describing how, when he accurately reported atrocities committed by Israel and her Christian allies in Lebanon, he would be paid a visit by the head of the Board of Deputies and his pet lawyer, screaming that it was anti-Semitic. As they did to everyone, even highly respected foreign correspondents like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin at the Beeb. Now that situation has been reversed, with Groaniad hacks publishing dangerous, vile nonsense about how politicos from Poland’s Law and Justice party, which has a streak of anti-Semitism a mile wide, aren’t really Jew-haters because they’re good friend of Israel. Israel is a good friend of every murderous bastard, even if they are real Nazis, so long as they buy their guns and armaments.
Most of the Groaniad’s readers were left-wing Labour. They heartily supported Corbyn, and the Graun repaid them by attacking their hero and, by extension, they themselves, at every opportunity. And the hacks themselves were also hypocrites. One of the commenters on Zelo Street’s article states that none of the named, celebrity hacks on the rag was willing to take a pay cut to protect the jobs of the minions further down the journalistic ladder. And despite its own attacks on the system of unpaid internships, it used more unpaid workers than the other rags.
Viner has only herself to blame for this mess. If she wanted to win back readers, she’d go back on all this, clear out the Blairites and start producing reports and comment from a genuine, traditional Labour perspective. She start protecting whistleblowers and start writing genuinely critical articles against Israel and defend those falsely accused of anti-Semitism. But she won’t do that, because she’s a Blairite through and through.
She is killing the Guardian. And as it stands now, I and thousands of others don’t care if it dies.
Last week, presenter Emily Maitlis mysteriously disappeared from an edition of Newsnight, leaving it to be hosted by her colleague Kate Razzall. This was after she had made a few sharp, but entirely fair and justified comments, about Dominic Cummings’ breach of the lockdown regulations in the previous evening’s edition of the programme. This had resulted in the Beeb receiving a nasty message from 10 Downing Street. The Beeb, Razzall and Maitlis herself all denied that her disappearance from the show on the subsequent evening was due to official disapproval. But to everyone else capable of putting two and two together and making four, the link seemed obvious.
Unfortunately, the Tories and their supporters have been out there denying any such connection. One of the Tory-supporting channels on YouTube, We Got A Problem, has instead claimed that Maitlis flagrantly breached the Beeb’s impartiality rule, and was therefore rightly the subject of 40,000 complaints. I haven’t watched the wretched video on the reasonable grounds that if I do, it’ll just make me angry. But even without seeing it, it still seems to me that there are two obvious flaws with their argument. Firstly, Tory anger does not mean that Maitlis broke the Beeb’s guidelines. All it does is show that the Tories are angry. Secondly, how many of these messages are genuine? This is a good, fair question. The Tories have a history of using bots and some of the email and twitter messages that have appeared in the last few years applauding the Tories and particularly Boris Johnson have rung massively fake. There are two many similarities between them and an awful lot of have come from previously unknown internet addresses. There’s also the case of the various medical professionals who tweeted out their messages of endorsement to Boris for his handling of the Cornoavirus. Many of them were demonstrably fake. One of them used a photograph of a Greek paediatrics nurse in London, but affixed it to a fake identity of a gay doctor. The scandal was briefly discussed by the Beeb, who decided that there was too little information to make the connection with the Tories and suggested that it was someone trying to smear them. As the Beeb has a long and infamous history of pushing pro-Tory propaganda, and especially the noxious smears against Jeremy Corbyn over the past four years, I think the opposite is true. The Tweets were fakes from the Tories, and the Beeb was trying to defend them by suggesting that the messages were anti-Tory fakes.
Maitlis’ disappearance was shortly followed by that of Laura Kuenssberg. Goebbels’ true-blue Tory spiritual daughter also vanished from her position in front of the camera to take an unscheduled holiday. This was after she had tried asking further questions about Cummings’ short touring holiday to Durham and Barnard Castle at Bozo’s press briefing, when the Prime Minister stopped the ladies and gents of the fourth estate asking his Chief Medical and Chief Scientific Officers about the affair on the grounds that such queries were political, rather than scientific and medical. Kuenssberg gave no reason for her sudden absence, just the message “Not around for a few days – keep up with [BBC News] and [BBC Politics]“. It’s therefore entirely possible that, despite her loyal support of the Tories and flagrant breaches of the Beeb’s impartiality rules in their favour, she too had been the subject of official disapprobation and had been hit with the ban hammer.
Her announcement that she was taking a short leave of absence was greeted with messages of support by some. Others remembered just how biased she had been, and so sent messages such as “We might get some actual reported news for a change” or ask her if she had, like Maitlis, also been sanctioned. Others reminded her of the occasion a few years ago when she left the Beeb to work for ITV, and Peter Oborne’s tart comment about her being the Beeb’s equivalent of Robert Peston. Oborne is a journalist of immense integrity, who stopped writing for the Torygraph because of the way that paper’s management was demanding that articles should be written to suit their advertisers. He also presented a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 attacking the Israel lobby and urged people to vote Labour at last year’s election.
Zelo Street in their article about Kuenssberg disappearance concluded
‘So what gives with Ms Kuenssberg? Taking a few days off while the country is in lockdown and in the middle of a significantly sized national crisis? Curiouser and curiouser.
There is one further problem: the BBC will manage fine without her. I’ll just leave that one there.’
In addition to its own, innate right-wing bias, the Beeb’s also under additional pressure from the Tories. They want to privatise it for the benefit of their donors in the rival, private broadcasters, like Sky and one Rupert Murdoch. The Corporation is facing devastating cuts and the Director-General is up for replacement in a few years’ time. This brings with it fears that the Tories will impose one of their henchmen, who’ll carry out their plans of closing it all down and selling it off. Boris is already threatening to decriminalize nonpayment of the license fee, which would starve the Corporation of millions of pounds if it goes ahead. It therefore seems all too likely to me that, no matter how impartial or even pro-Tory presenters may be, the Corporation is so terrified of Tory displeasure that any offending journo now faces a few days’ suspension. Even if, like Kuenssberg, they have resolutely toed the government line all the way down the road.
As for the Tories themselves, they’ve shown themselves to be the party of fake news and lying propaganda. Their style of handling the media now seems closer to that of Putin than other, properly democratic nations. If a hack displeases the Arkhiplut, he sends a couple of state toughs round to beat them. Other hazards include being thrown down stairwells.
Johnson hasn’t gone that far yet, but give him time. And the lying Tory media would excuse and applaud such brutality when it comes.
Okay, it’s the beginning of March, Boris Johnson’s government has settled into its new round of incompetence and personal vindictiveness, and the Tories have been caught in another islamophobia scandal. According to the Mirror, 20 Tory members were expelled for their horrendous views on Islam. BBC Politics Live in its wisdom decided to discuss the issue of race. Unfortunately, one of the guests they chose to talk about it was Daily Heil hack Melanie Phillips. The author of Londonistan, which claims that London is now seething with Islamist terrorists and that Muslims are intent on destroying western society, her views on race are closer to Tommy Robinson than Dr. Martin Luther King. And like the rest of the Israel lobby, she confuses anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. According to Zelo Street, she began by expressing her views on the leading contender for the Labour leadership. Keir Starmer, she opined, was a ‘very decent guy’, and she was sure he was going to put in eye-catchingly good measures to get rid of people, who have not been got rid of. As for Rebecca Long-Bailey’s response to questioning the day before, she declared that Long-Bailey was trying to avoid the fact that she had gone along with something she should never have gone along with, along with many other members of the Labour Party. Which was, she then explained, that Starmer wasn’t going to get on top of this problem. And that problem went beyond the Labour Party and permeated progressive politics. And it was all about hostility to Israel. She said
“It’s wrapped up in attitudes to Israel. It’s wrapped up with beliefs that what’s being talked about isn’t really anti-Semitism, it’s not really prejudice, it’s simply an attempt to stop criticism of Israel. In other words, even among people of goodwill, there is a very widespread failure to understand quite what this thing is that has come out of the woodwork, and until and unless people are prepared to acknowledge precisely what it is, and acknowledge the enormity of it, and the depth of it, no-one’s going to get on top of it”.
As Zelo Street points out, not only is Phillips highly presumptuous in arrogating to herself the authority to define what anti-Semitism is, she expands it so that it includes legitimate criticism of Israel. Even the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which includes amongst its examples criticisms of Israel, also allows legitimate criticism.
And Zelo Street also pointed out that Philip’s opinions were at variance with the facts. After all the evidence of anti-Semitism was passed to the cops, the rozzers only charged one person. Five were arrested, but four of them – three men and a woman – were released and told they would face no further action. That’s out of a party with nearly half a million members.
The Street concludes
‘If what Melanie Phillips was talking about “goes very deep”, how come only one person was charged with an offence? After all that evidence was handed over to the Police? After all the hype, if there was such a serious problem, wouldn’t one expect the numbers to be rather more significant than that? It’s almost as if someone was exaggerating.
Not that one could ever accuse Melanie Phillips of such behaviour. Perish the thought!’
In fact nearly all the allegations of galloping anti-Semitism in the Labour Party are fact-free. The people accused and expelled, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Cyril Chilson and many others, were smeared because they were supporters of Corbyn and/or critics of Israel. They are all genuine anti-racists, but the whole point of the anti-Semitism witch hunt is to close down criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, regardless as to truth or legitimacy. Eleven years ago Peter Oborne, a former Telegraph journalist of immense integrity, who just before the election announced his support for Corbyn, present a Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 on the Israel lobby. He talked to former Groaniad editor Alan Rusbridger, who told him that whenever the newspaper published a piece on Israeli atrocities, the head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews would turn up with his pet lawyer, moaning that coverage of such events would result in a rise in anti-Semitism. He also discussed how the Board had accused the Beeb of anti-Semitism because it dared to cover the massacre of Palestinians by the Lebanese Christian Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during that country’s civil war. The Phalange were allied to Israel, and therefore the coverage was anti-Semitic. And so were the very respected Beeb foreign correspondents, Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin, who reported it. When the Beeb tried to defend them, the defenders, in true witch hunt fashion, were also accused of anti-Semitism. And that included David Attenborough, the very well respected wildlife presenter and former head of BBC 2 many decades ago. The documentary interviewed the Oxford academic Avi Shlaim, an expert on Middle East affairs, who revealed that the Board’s complaints had been examine by the broadcasting regulators, and rejected except on a minor point. The Beeb’s reportage had been correct.
But this is immaterial to the Board and the rest of the Israel lobby. What matters is defending Israel, whatever it does. Even when that includes shooting nurses and unarmed protesters dead and torturing children. And the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is an important weapon in its defence. Because it states that some criticism of Israel may be anti-Semitic. This is expanded to mean all, or as many as the Israel lobby can get away with. It’s why Kenneth Stern, the Zionist American academic, who was one of those who formulated the definition, has criticised it for having a chilling effect on free speech about Israel.
The Tories and the Israel lobby are terrified of legitimate criticism of Israel. So terrified in fact, that they ignore the fact that anti-Semitism is far more prevalent in right-wing parties, and that almost all of it in this country comes from the far right. And so Melanie Phillips and her ideological ilk have precious little to say about members of the Met police having connections to real Nazi organisations, or Tommy Robinson greeting his supporters with ‘Shalom’ and appealing for more money to overthrow the White race – a clear reference to the real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
No, they’re far more worried about a united, resurgent Labour Party. A party that would allow legitimate criticism of Israel. And that says much about their racism and hypocrisy.
I’ve said before that Private Eye does much good, but it’s also followed the rest of the press in media in pushing the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party. And it’s Christmas edition is no exception. Mike reported last Tuesday that former Labour MP Chris Williamson has launched a legal fund to help defend people falsely smeared as anti-Semites like himself. See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/17/williamson-launches-fund-to-help-labour-members-who-were-wrongly-expelled/
Williamson was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, and so a natural target for the smear merchants. He was falsely accused and then expelled from the party because he said that Labour had given too much ground and been too apologetic over the controversy. He wasn’t being anti-Semitic, and was right. Corbyn had given in too easily, and had sacrificed some of his closest followers to the smear merchants in order to appease them. These were innocent people, and the smear merchants in the Zionist Jewish establishment and Tory media are never appeased. By giving in to them, Corbyn had ceded ground to their smears and shown that they were effective. Williamson responded by suing the party for libel.
The media reported that he lost. This is an outright lie. As Williamson says in his video, which Mike has included in his article above, Williamson won and is using the money to set up a fund for people like him, who have been falsely smeared by the Party. This is also reported in Private Eye’s Christmas edition in their mock awards for the general election. It’s in the snippet ‘Best use of ‘period of reflection’. After describing how Emily Thornberry was talking to her lawyers after another Labour MP, Caroline Flint, supposedly claimed she had called voters ‘stupid’, the article moves on to Williamson, saying
She was, however, upstaged by another former Labour MP, Chris Williamson, who waited until five days after the election to announce that he was setting up a “Left Legal Fighting Fund” to help anyone else who had been “maliciously smeared” as an anti-Semite to sue the party – adding for good measure that such claims had only come about because “a hostile foreign government has mobilised its assets in the UK, which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power multiplier’, in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government… using faith organisations.” And to think people have somehow got the impression he’s a raving anti-Semite!
Williamson’s exactly right, however. The campaigns waged by the Israel lobby across the world to suppress criticism of Israel and its genuinely Fascist treatment of the Palestinians are led and coordinated by the Israeli government’s Office of Strategic Affairs. Jackie Walker in one of her videos defending herself states that she and Corbyn were together declared by the Israeli government to be the ‘No. 2 threat to Israel.’ Shai Masot, a former diplomat at the Israeli embassy, was caught conspiring with senior civil servants to oust Alan Duncan from the Tory cabinet and replace him with Johnson, because Duncan was a critic of Israel. Masot was sent packing back to Israel after the footage of him doing so was broadcast by Al-Jazeera in their documentary, ‘The Lobby’, and the denials started coming in from the Israelis – that he was acting alone, his actions were unauthorised and unapproved. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. Peter Oborne in his Dispatches documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4 nearly ten years ago talked to Jewish academics, who described how Israeli officials had ordered them to merge their private organisations with the Israeli state’s so they could control them. But the media is doing its level best to have any discussion of the Israeli state’s machinations dismissed as paranoid, anti-Semitic ‘conspiracy theories’. Private Eye is obediently following this line.
And it’s also highly hypocritical of the Eye to attack Williamson for launching his Fighting Fund. The Eye has done nothing to refute the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn since they first started. Indeed, it has gleefully repeated them. It has not defended any of the victims, and when people have written in to refute the accusations of mass anti-Semitism, it has instead published replies claiming they are wrong, citing Momentum’s Jon Lansmann.
The Eye is one of the anti-Semitism smear merchants, despite its excellent work elsewhere. And its attack on Williamson is not just another smear. It’s damage limitation against someone, who is determined to attack the smear merchants and plotters in the party.
He’s dangerous, which is why the Eye has chosen to rubbish his claims.
Robin Ramsay, the editor of the online parapolitics/conspiracies magazine, Lobster, has added a few new articles in his ‘View from the Bridge’ section for issue 78. One of these is about the media’s colossal, odious failure to present the real truth about the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party. Which is, basically, that the conspiracy theorists are exactly right and the whole thing is a disinformation campaign run from the Israeli embassy in London.
He begins by reporting the recent attacks on Labour for being anti-Semitic by Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, Philip Collins in the Times, and then the claim by James Cleverly, the Tory chairman, that British Jews are about to flee the UK in case Corbyn gets in. Because some Jewish friends of his told him so.
He then states that these are symptomatic of the failure of the media as a whole to tackle the real truth about these smears, and suggests why this might be so. He writes
These comments (and there were many similar in the first week of the election campaign) illustrate again the complete failure of the mainstream media to handle the Labour–is–anti-semitic operation run by the Israeli embassy in London and its assets. Why has the MSM failed so completely at this? Maybe one day some of those involved at editorial level will explain their thinking; but until then we can only speculate. Among the factors are:
* The story is too complex for the rolling 24 hour news culture and there are few journalists left in the MSM with the time to research complex stories.
* Anyone pursuing the story is going to be accused of anti-semitism or conspiracy theorising or both.
* To acknowledge the existence of the Israeli operations revealed by Al Jazeera’s covert filming, means acknowledging that the version of political reality offered by the MSM is partial at best, and false at worst. This also implies that British political journalists either don’t know what is going on or are too career-minded to stray beyond the carefully delineated boundaries of ‘serious’ or ‘respectable’ journalism.
He concludes by comparing the al-Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, with the Zapruder film in the way this has the potential to alter research into the real conspiracy behind the Corbyn smears. This would be similar to the way the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination has provided evidence supporting the idea that there was another shooter beside Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Al Jazeera films on ‘the lobby’ may eventually be a game-changer in the way that the 1975 showing of the Zapruder film on US TV was: after the Z film the official version that all the shots came from behind Kennedy became an absurdity. After ‘the lobby’ films no-one can seriously deny the existence of the Israel lobby.
For many people outside the milieu, the Kennedy assassination really is the archetypal modern conspiracy theory with various obsessives convinced that Oswald didn’t do it, and that it was all down to the CIA and American intelligence establishment instead. While I believe that there probably was another shooter and that the question of whether there was a wider conspiracy to kill Kennedy is a good one, Ramsey’s comparison may not be so convincing to others.
But he’s right about the conspiracy to remove Corbyn and the Israelis. The Israeli government does have an office that deals with attacking and smearing critics of the Israeli state for their brutal policies towards the Palestinians. Al-Jazeera did catch Shai Masot at the Israeli embassy trying to get a Tory minister removed from the government and replaced with Boris Johnson, because the minister, Alan Duncan, was too pro-Palestinian. And one of the Labour supporters smeared as an anti-Semite is Cyril Chilson, the son of a Holocaust survivor and Soviet airman, an Israeli, who worked in the IDF’s propaganda department. He was smeared because he recognised the libels as hasbara – the Israeli term for civilian propaganda, and called it as such.
As for the reasons the media isn’t calling it out, I think it’s probably a mixture of all three. Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches showed eleven years ago how the Israel lobby in this country would stop at nothing to destroy and smear critics of Israel. Independent Jewish monitoring groups were put under pressure to merge their magazines with Israeli state periodicals. Newspapers like the Guardian and its editor were accused by the Board of Deputies of anti-Semitism for accurately reporting atrocities committed by Israel and its allies, the Christian Phalange, in Lebanon. As was the Beeb and highly respected journalists like Orla Guerin when they did the same. They even tried to smear David Attenborough when he defended the Beeb’s Middle East correspondents.
The media are pushing lies by repeating these smears against Jeremy Corbyn, lies which have their origin in attempts by the Israeli state and its supporters to prevent the rise of a Labour government which genuinely wants a just peace between Israel and its indigenous Arab peoples.
Mike covered this story a few days ago, but it’s another one that bears repeating: the Tories want to privatise the NHS and sell it off to American corporations.
This was revealed on Monday night’s Dispatches programme on Channel 4, broadcast at 8 pm. The description of the programme in that day’s I ran
Earlier this year, Donald Trump sparked a row when he said that the NHS would be “on the table” in any future trade talks between the UK and America – swiftly performing a U-turn over his comments. Now Antony Barnett shows that US drug giants are busy lobbying trade negotiators in Washington and London to make the health service pay more for their medicines and to ban cheaper alternatives.
This should come as no surprise. The Tories voted against Labour’s bill setting up the NHS, even after claiming that they welcomed it. A few years later under Harold Macmillan, the Tory Right tried to privatise it on the grounds that we could not afford it. And Thatcher wanted to privatise it, but was prevented by a cabinet revolt. Since then there has been an encroaching privatisation of the NHS by both the Tories and New Labour. It’s described in Ray Tallis’ book, NHS – SOS, and I’ve self-published a book on Lulu and a small desktop pamphlet discussing this. There have also been a series of short videos presented by Stephen Fry on YouTube against the Tory attempts to sell out our NHS to the Americans. In one of them, the former presenter of QI tells you that under the American private healthcare system, simply being taken to hospital in an ambulance can cost you £200. The Tories have been lying for years that the NHS is safe with them, but the truth is that they have consistently run it down, closing hospitals and A&E departments, all while claiming that they are doing no such thing. Or are actually going to reverse this policy. Remember when Dave Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith were running around protesting against Blair’s hospital closures when they were in opposition? Soon as Cameron got his foot in the front door of No. 10, that policy was reversed and they went on closing hospitals and outsourcing services to private healthcare companies.
You cannot trust the Tories with the NHS – not now, not ever. If you want to continue having a National Health Service that provides everyone in Britain with healthcare, free at the point of service, you have to vote for Corbyn and Labour.
If you vote for the Tories, you are voting for a private system, which will profit the big healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, but will be unaffordable to a large part of the British people. Can you afford private health insurance?
Presented by the Conservative journo Peter Oborne, this is a very hard-hitting and extensive investigation into the malign influence and tactics of the Israel lobby. It covers not just the soft corruption of political lobbying – the various donations in money and paid trips to Israel given to Tory and Labour politicos, but also the co-ordinated smear campaign against anyone who dares to speak out in favour of the Israeli state’s victims. It’s a smear campaign that has seen very respected members of the Jewish community, including senior rabbis, and BBC journos like the late Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen and even Jonathan Dimbleby accused of anti-Semitism. The result has been that the Beeb was pressured not to put out an appeal for the victims of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and there was complaints about its coverage of those murdered by Israel’s allies in the Christian Fascists of the Lebanese Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. And there has been constant pressure by these same bullying thugs on the Groaniad under its former editor, Alan Rusbridger. Who really does look like Harry Potter. Much of this pressure and screaming abuse seems to have come from America. The organisations are carefully structured, so that they keep the total number of donations secret, and their donors hide behind anonymity. When investigated they repeat the same, smooth words about just trying to keep the argument open by presenting Israel’s case, or mutter platitudes about supporting a two-state solution. All the while doing their level best to make sure that their voice is the only the British public hear, and rabidly pursuing business deals on stolen Palestinian land.
I’m afraid I may have misheard some of the names in the programme, and so misspelled them, but they should be roughly accurate.
The documentary begins with the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the Conservative Friends of Israel. Despite the horrendous carnage and destruction wrought, David Cameron in a speech made no mention of this, but instead praised the Israelis and his pledged his lasting support to them if he became Prime Minister. It was this that prompted Oborne to launch his own investigation into the Israel lobby. He makes the point that they have influence on both sides of Parliament, as shown by an exchange between a Conservative MP, who was a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, who asked a question about Israel’s continuing safety. This was answered by a Labour MP, who was a member of the Labour Friends of Israel. Oborne then interviews Michael Ancram, former Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2003-5, about the Israel Lobby’s influence. as well as Sir Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Iran from 2003-6. Dalton states clearly that the Israel Lobby does exist, and is important in defining the debate about Israel and the Palestinians. The Conservative Friends of Israel is highly influential, and boasts that it includes 80 per cent of all Tory MPs. Its chair, Richard Huntingdon, received £20,000 last year (2008) in donations, and gave £34,000 to the Conservatives. And the director of the No. 10 club, that exclusive Tory fundraising outfit in which, for a mere £50,000, you can meet David Cameron or have lunch with William Hague, is also included. The Tory Friends of Israel also arrange paid trips to Israel for MPs. So far there have been more of these than equivalent trips to America and Europe combined. Oborne states that in fairness, he has to say that he went on one of these, and there was no pressure to report favourably about Israel. But two MPs, who went on one of these trips, then received afterwards £25,000 in donations. This prompts Oborne to ask Ancram if this explains the soft line taken by the Tories about Israeli influence, and why the Tories don’t like to talk about it.
The documentary then moves on to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, during which 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed, and $3.6 billion’s worth of damage inflicted. Michael Howard gave William Hague £25,000 in donations. Hague then made the mistake of making a speech criticising the Israeli response to Lebanese attacks as disproportionate. As a result, Lord Kalms, a CFI donor and head of the Dixons electronics chain, was outraged, and threatened to withhold further funding. Which he did, and Hague never received a penny more. The Israel lobby attacks even the mildest criticism of Israel. The director of the CFI, Stuart Pollak, had a meeting with David Cameron after the speech. Then, at his lunch with the CFI, Cameron didn’t mention the Lebanese invasion at all.
The programme then moves on to the organisation’s income, as revealed by the Parliamentary Accounts Register. For comparison, the pro-Arab lobby revealed that they had been given £43,000 in donations. How many had the CFI been given? No-one knows. They didn’t register any. They’re structured as a group of individuals, and are not incorporated, so they don’t have declare any under the rules. In 2008 the CFI gave the Tories £2 million, but this is not the whole story. One Tory MP said that after a chance meeting with Stuart Pollak, he received two donations from businessmen he had never met, and who did not live in his constituency. The CFI gave £30,000 to Cameron’s team. And in 2005 Cameron met Plocha Zabludowicz, who gave the future Tory PM £15,000 and a further £35,000 to Tory Central Office. The total figure for the donations given by the CFI is £10 million, more than the other lobbies.
Then there’s the incident of the UN vote over a motion censuring both Hamas and Israel for the carnage in Gaza. The CFI rang Hague up to condemn the resolution and demand that he criticise it. Which he duly did.
But the Israel Lobby only became really powerful in Britain under Maggie’s favourite Labour pet, Tony Blair. Jon Mandelsohn, a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist, stated that ‘Zionism is pervasive in New Labour’ and ‘It is axiomatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings’. There are more Labour MPs in Labour Friends of Israel than their opponents across the benches in the Tory Friends of Israel. The documentary describes how Blair met the rock entrepreneur, Lord Levy, at the Israeli embassy, who then raised £15 million for the Labour party before the row over ‘cash for questions’. When Blair became PM in 1997, he gave Levy a life peerage. Levy, however, was unpaid and never a formal servant of the British state, so that the deals he made as Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East between Israel and the Arab nations could be kept secret. The programme interviews Prof. Avi Shlaim of Oxford University’s Middle East department, who states that he considers Levy has damaged Britain’s reputation in the Middle East.
The documentary then moves back to CFI lobbyists at the Tory party conference. Their purpose there is to make sure Cameron’s policies are in line with Israel’s This means that Michael Kaminski, the Polish leader, who heads a small, far right nationalist party, is lionised by the Tories, despite his record of making anti-Semitic remarks and his refusal to apologise for the suffering of Jewish Poles during the Second World War. Stuart Pollak was most keen not to have Cameron’s speech to the CFI at the Tory conference covered. He is shown waving the camera crew away. The CFI totally support Kaminski. They also plead that they’re totally transparent through the distinction between their donations as a group, and those of individual businesspeople.
The documentary then moves on to January, 2009 and the invasion of Gaza, and allegations of Human Rights abuses by Israeli forces were still circulating months later. But Oborne points out that you wouldn’t know it from the contents of the News of the World and the Mirror. Both these rags ran stories instead about the threat to Israel from the surrounding Arab nations. The hacks behind these pieces had been given free trips to Israel by BICOM, one of the wealthiest lobby groups in Britain. Oborne then goes on to interview David Newman in his office in Jerusalem. Newman worked alongside BICOM in disseminating Israeli propaganda in British universities. Newman states that there is indeed a debate within Israel about the status of the settlements in Palestinian territory. Groups like BICOM close down this debate abroad, and instead demand absolute for Israel.
Plocha Zabludowicz, the head of BICOM, is the 18th richest person in Britain. And he is very definitely not part of traditional British Anglo-Jewish society, but came up through the Jewish Leadership Council, who are described as the lords of the big Jewish donors. Oborne then interviews the head of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Rabbi Emeritus David Goldberg, and asks if he knows him. Goldberg states that his name doesn’t ring a bell. Zabludowicz is actually of Polish ancestry. He is a Finnish citizen with a house in north London. His father made a fortune peddling Israeli arms, as did Zabludowicz himself before moving into property and casinos. His company is registered in Lichtenstein. He is, in short, ‘a rank outsider’. He was also one of the guests at Madonna’s birthday party in Italy.
Zabludowicz generously bankrolls BICOM, to whom he gave £800,000, who wrote a clause into their accounts recognising his generosity. He had given them £1.3 million in the previous three years, and has business interests in the Middle East. These cast doubt on the possibility of reaching a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Oborne then goes on to discuss the case of one of the illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine, whose supermarket is owned by Zabludowicz. Newman states this indicates the direction in which BICOM is moving. Rabbi Goldberg states that it shows that Zabludowicz calculates that the settlement won’t be returning to the Palestinians, even under the most generous peace deal. As for Zabludowicz himself, he declined to meet the Dispatches team, but instead released a statement claiming that he was a major supporter of the creation of a separate Palestinian state, and that he understood that concessions would need to be made. Oborne was, however, successful in talking to Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. She claimed that BICOM was very open, that their donors do not influence policy. When asked about Zabludowicz, she claimed he was different from anyone else and she didn’t know about his business connections. All the organisation was doing was to make journos and people aware of the different strands of the debate on Israel.
Oborne moves on to the other groups involved in the Israel lobby – the Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation, and states that some members of these groups are very aggressive towards the TV and press. He then interviews Alan Rusbridger about his experiences of dealing with them. Rusbridger states that some TV editors warned him to stay away from them and the whole subject of Israel and the Palestinians. The Guardian was attacked for criticising Israel in a way that no other country does. There was a special meeting at the Israeli embassy between the ambassador, Zabludowicz, Grunewald of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the property magnate Gerald Reuben. They were unhappy about a Groaniad article comparing the Israeli’s occupation of Palestine with apartheid South Africa. So Grunewald and his mate, Roman Leidel, decided to pay Rusbridger a visit. Grunewald is a lawyer, claimed that the article was fomenting anti-Semitism, and would encourage people to attack Jews on the street, a risible accusation which Rusbridger denied. This was followed by complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about the article by the pro-Israel American group, CAMERA, or Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which specialising in attacking journos critical of Israel. The Press Complaints Commission duly investigated the article, and found that only one fact was wrong. When asked about this, Rabbi Goldberg states that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. There are two road systems, one for use by Israelis and one for the Palestinians. There are two legal systems in operation. The Israelis are governed by Israeli law, while the Palestinians are governed by military law. When asked what will happen to him when his comments are broadcast, the good rabbi simply laughs and says that he’ll be attacked once against as being an ant-Semitic, self-hating Jew.
Many other Jews are also critical of Israel. Oborne goes on to talk to Tony Lerman, formerly of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, and now a Groaniad journo. Lerman states that the Israel lobby don’t take into account the diversity of Jewish views on Israel. This is confirmed by Avi Shlaim, who says that there is a split in the Jewish community over Israel. The community’s leaders are largely pro-Israel with a narrow rightwing agenda that is not typical of Jewish Brits. And libelling Israel’s critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ is now common policy.
One example of this use of libel is a New York blogger, ‘Hawkeye’, who hunts through the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ column, claiming it is full of anti-Semitic bias. Rusbridger states that this is dangerous and disreputable. ‘Hawkeye’ attacked Lerman in particular as a nasty anti-Semite. Lerman states that this tactic has been adopted because it’s a useful defence of Israel. Rabbi Goldberg concedes that some people might be seriously anti-Semitic, others are just voicing genuine opinions, which should be respected. Michael Ancram, even, was accused of being anti-Semitic, which he said he takes with a pinch of salt.
But this leads into the whole question of whether the BBC has been corrupted by the influence of the Israel lobby. On record, BBC journos and spokespeople claim that the Corporation’s reporting of Israel is unbiased. Off-record, the stories different. News staff state that there is always pressure from top management for a pro-Israel slant. Oborne then interview Charlie Brebitt, an accountant at the LSE, who was formerly of Channel 4, who confirms that there is a very strong and active Israel lobby, and a sizable body of sympathy with Israel. The BBC has no choice but to respond. Honest Reporting, another pro-Israel media attack dog, and the other parts of the Israel lobby take advantage of this, alleging that there is an institutional bias at the Corporation against Israel.
In 2003 during the Iraq invasion the Beeb broadcast a hard-hitting documentary investigating Israel’s secret nuclear weapon’s programme, entitled ‘Israel’s Secret Weapon’ on the 16th March. The Israeli Press Office issued a statement comparing this to the worst of Nazi propaganda, and imposed restrictions on BBC staff in Israel. When Ariel Sharon, the Israeli leader, visited Downing Street, the only journos banned from covering the meeting were the Beeb. Honest Reporting UK complained that the programme was part of a campaign to vilify Israel. One member of the group, Nathan Sharansky, complained that the late Orla Guerin, here shown with two eyes, was anti-Semitic, and that she shared the goals of Palestinian terror groups.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 