Last week, Mike from Vox Political was on a net gathering on YouTube discussing Is Labour Anti-Semitic? Reaching Over the Noise, a documentary made with the express purpose of refuting the monstrous lies and smears made by John Ware’s wretched Panorama documentary, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ If you watched this nasty piece of very yellow journalism, you’d be convinced that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party certainly was, and the individuals identified as anti-Semites were the most utterly contemptible Nazis. Reaching Over The Noise, however, shows the opposite: Ware’s film was one long tissue of egregious lies from start to finish, which smeared and vilified thoroughly decent people.
Panorama Lies Refuted by Corbyn’s Jewish Supporters
The internet gathering Mike attended was to publicise the film. It was hosted by Lizzie, of Unity News Network, and apart from Mike the other guests were Jason Cridland of Dorset Eye and former Labour party member and activist Sian Bloor. They were there because they had helped raise the £2,000 needed to make the movie. The meeting began with clips from the film, including a little talk introducing it by Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP who was forced out and smeared as an anti-Semite because he dared question the witch hunt. This was followed by various Orthodox Jews in broad-brimmed hats, long coats, beards and side ringlets. One of these men appeared to me to be a rabbi, as he was elderly with a white beard, which suggested the sage wisdom of a man of God. All of them said that the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn was anti-Semitic was pure nonsense. This was followed by a Jewish woman, who described the effect the smears had had on her. She was made to feel she wasn’t really Jewish. But she was, just ‘the wrong type of Jew’. This is how these smear merchants work. Judaism has never been a monolithic religion or community. There’s the old Jewish adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. The Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book after the Bible, contains the debates about theology and the correct interpretation of the written and oral Law of the great rabbis. Frequently these discussions simply conclude with ‘and so they disagreed’. Zionism, as the peeps in this meeting pointed out, was originally only a minority opinion amongst Jews. Most of them wished to remain in the countries of their birth, to be accepted as fellow citizens with equal rights as their gentile compatriots. But the Israel lobby wishes to recast Judaism into a single community rigidly behind Israel. Anyone who challenges this is immediately denounced as an anti-Semite. If they’re Jewish, they’re accused of self-hatred and being a ‘traitor’.
All of the people at the gathering had been smeared as anti-Semites, either because they supported the Palestinians, Jeremy Corbyn, or simply for standing up for historical truth and refuting the lies about some of those smeared. And they each described how the Blairites in the party, Zionist activists like GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism had smeared them with the active collaboration of the press and media. Like alleged Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund.
Labour Activist Sian BloorSmeared by Sam Matthews and Gabriel Pogrund
The discussion started with Sian Bloor. Bloor was smeared after someone mistakenly sent information about her supporting Jewish Voice for Labour and its main woman, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, to Sam Matthews. Despite appeals not to, scumbag Sammy then passed it on to Pogrund. Who promptly did to her what he did to Mike: publish an utterly mendacious article claiming that she was in trouble with Labour because she was an anti-Semite. In fact Bloor had been under investigation, but for an entirely different reason, and been exonerated. But after Poggy’s smears the party went into proceedings against her as a Jew-hater. When she tried to clear herself, she got a letter from Schillings, the Labour party’s highly expensive libel lawyers, telling her that what she’d written was libellous. The stress of all this has shattered Bloor’s nerves and left her unable to work. What she found particularly disgusting was that Scumbag Sammy appeared on Panorama claiming that the anti-Semitic attacks on him had made him feel suicidal. A case of the bully posing as victim.
Mike, Ken Livingstone and the Nazis’ Real Support for Zionism
Mike then came on to recount his experience. He’d been targeted and smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier by Poggy because he’d written a long piece defending Ken Livingstone’s remark that Hitler initially supported the Nazis. Mike admits that Leninspart has said some genuinely questionable comments later. He doesn’t defend them, only the mad newt-fancier’s statement about Hitler and Zionism. Which is absolutely correct. The Nazis and the main German Zionist organisation signed a pact, the Ha’avara Agreement, in which Nazi Germany pledged to smuggle German Jews into Palestine, then under the British Mandate. This is all historical fact. It’s mentioned on the Jewish Virtual Library and in the works on the Holocaust by Zionist Jewish historian David Cesarani. But like Trump, these fanatics live in a world of ‘alternative facts’. Mike was particularly interested in Bloor’s identification of Sam ‘Scumbags’ Matthews, as I think he should be referred to, as he had never been able to get the identity of the snitch in the Labour party who passed on his details to the press. But from this is looks like it could well be him. Mike was able to get the press regulator to rule against the articles smearing him which appeared in the Times, Scum, Jewish Chronicle and so on. Bloor had also been successful in getting some of the papers to retract the articles. But not the Times, because they had expensive lawyers which ordinary peeps can’t afford to challenge. Speaking in a completely different context, the veteran British ufologist Jenny Randles once said that under British justice you were ‘guilty until proven rich’. Absolutely.
Jason Cridland Smeared and Doxed by GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism
Cridland then came next, to tell how he’d been doxed by the odious GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. He’d been contacted by a reader, who’d been falsely accused of anti-Semitism. The two Zionist organisations had gone further. They’d produced a map showing where supposed anti-Semites lived, complete with their names and addresses. The woman was on this map. And so, she revealed, was Cridland. This had left them extremely worried for their safety. One woman, who had been so smeared, who was in fact Jewish, had had her car torched as a result.
Posting people’s personal details on the net so that others can attack or harass them is despicable. It’s completely out of order. It’s been one of the tactics used by real anti-Semitic, Nazi organisations. Way back in the ’90s the NF or BNP in Brighton decided to publish in their vile rag the names and addresses of local ‘reds’. They were stopped when local trade unionists published theirs in turn. I suppose doxing might be justified in cases like it with real Nazis, like the banned National Action, who really do believe all that vile nonsense about secret Jewish conspiracies against the White race and who are dangerous and violent. But not for ordinary, decent people.
In addition to this, litigious Countdown numbers person Rachel Riley raised her metaphorical head. Cridland had a couple of cops appear at his house to talk to him, as Riley had complained that he was anti-Semitic. In fact after talking to him they decided he wasn’t, and the conversation moved to how she could be prosecuted for wasting police time.
Political Context
The meeting then moved onto a general discussion about official attempts to silence campaigns for Palestinian rights. The Tories wish to ban the BDS campaign as anti-Semitic, as has been done in America. But the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign isn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli. It does not seek to prevent people purchasing from Jewish or Israeli businesses, only those that are in the Occupied Territories. And many of its supporters and activists are Jews. They also talked about Keef Stalin’s campaign of purging socialists from the Labour party. Many of those purged as anti-Semites had been so demoralised by the direction the party was taking under his misgovernment that, rather than being upset over their expulsion, they were glad to leave. They also made the point that what stopped Labour getting elected wasn’t the anti-Semitism witch hunt, but Brexit. As for the people themselves and their political views, Lizzie and Jason Cridland made the point that they weren’t party political. They didn’t support the Labour party, but supported Jeremy Corbyn because of his policies. Sian Bloor was targeted because she was particularly close politically to the Labour leader. She had been part of the original group, JC4PM, which became Momentum. The smears were about silencing and purging Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, who wished to return it to genuine socialism after Blair as much as attacking support for the Palestinians.
The Psychology that Smears Innocent Anti-Racists
During the talk Bloor commented that the witch-hunters and smear merchants really didn’t care about the harm they were doing to ordinary people. This raises the whole issue of their mentality, as people have been harmed and even taken their lives. I think it’s worse than that. Not only do they not care, but they actively see their opponents as enemies to be destroyed. I’ve got the impression that they really believe, whether they are religious or atheist, that the modern state of Israel is the culmination of Jewish history and that anyone who opposes it really is a Nazi. They really do seem to view themselves as the modern successors to Judas Maccabaeus, the great Jewish hero who fought against the pagan forces of the Greek general Antiochus IV Epiphanes. That general really was an enemy of the Jewish people. He banned the Torah, forbade circumcision and the observance of the Law, and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem. He was a genuine anti-Semitic tyrant. Unlike the people they now smear and vilify, who simply want justice and equality for the Palestinians.
Just to show you how utterly insane this attitude is, you think of some of the people, who have been smeared as threats to Israel by these nutters. Four-fifths of them are Jewish, and they include convinced anti-racist activists, like Marc Wadsworth, and victims of genuine racism and anti-Semitism. Jackie Walker is a respectable Jewish granny and academic, whose demeanour, at least from what I’ve seen online, is more that of the lecture hall and seminar room than any kind of violent confrontation. Much the same can be said about Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi. None of the people accused and smeared, including those in the meeting, remotely resemble any real, fanatically genocidal anti-Semites. But this is, I fear, how GnasherJew, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Starmer’s coterie sees them.
Toby Young, Hack, Eugenicist and Anti-Semitism Tsar
Real Nazis are horrific, but they’re also so grotesque they can be easily lampooned. P.G. Wodehouse sent up Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists as Spode, the leader of the Black Shorts, who stood to defend the British knee against the Asiatic immigrant horde. The ranting and raving of Hitler has provided endless comic material for anti-Nazi satirists and comedians ever since the War. In a saner, more just society the smears and lies told by the Ware, the Israel lobby and the Blairites would similarly be laughed out of court. But unfortunately it isn’t. And so we have the grotesque judicial travesty of decent people being tarred as racist by those who really are. Like the right-wing Labour politico, who published anti-Roma material as part of his election campaign. I think he may have been made one of the Tories’ anti-Semitism tsars. The other, and this is not a joke, is Toby Young.
Yes, that Toby Young. The Toby Young who wrote a creepy piece in the ’90s for GQ in which he described how he’d been a ‘lesbian for a day’. Tobes had decided he wanted a bit of hot lesbian action, and so dressed in drag to see if he could get off with any of the ladies in New York’s lesbian bars. As bad as it was at the time, it’s arguably worse now. Part of the controversy over the transgender issue is the propositioning of lesbian women for sex by biological men who identify as women . Lesbians aren’t attracted to the male body, but queer theory erases biological sex in favour of gender, social sex. And so when these women turn the men down because of their biological sex, they’re accused of transphobia. But there’s worse than Young’s dated, dodgy article from the ’90s. Private Eye caught him attending a eugenics conference. Yup, selective breeding to improve the race. The doctrine the Nazis believed in. And while Tobes isn’t a racist, many of the people he was mixing with were.
But we’re expected to believe that Jeremy Corbyn, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and the above folks are the Nazis.
As I said earlier this evening, I was at an online meeting of my local constituency Labour party tonight. I was very impressed by Karin Smyth, our local MP, and her report on Sajid Javid’s health and social care bill, and what she and the Labour party are doing to prevent private healthcare firms sitting on the new commissioning boards the Tories wish to set up and the compulsory outside tendering. Smyth is a supporter of grotty, sectarian, squalid Starmer, but I believe she is sincere in her defence of the NHS and am impressed by how hard she works for her constituents.
But I don’t believe Starmer is, and if the choice comes between embracing the Tories’ privatisation and not getting his overprivileged, aristo, millionaire posterior in 10 Downing Street or winning the approval of the Tory press, the Stormfront Stalin will sacrifice the NHS to the private healthcare parasites and throw any Labour MP who attempts to defend it under the bus.
But I was less than impressed by what the local party’s delegate to conference had to say. They’d voted for nearly all of the motions put at conference. This included the Green New Deal. But it also included them voting for David Evans as General Secretary, the decision to raise the proportion of MPs required for a leadership candidate, and in fact nearly all of Starmer’s notions to knobble party democracy. They also voted for the implementation of the E.H.R.C. report into Labour anti-Semitism.
And then in the questions the local delegate or liaison from Unison, whose scab leadership endorsed all these scummy notions, announced that she also endorsed the implementation of the E.H.R.C. report. She had been indifferent of the anti-Semitism issue until she had attended a very powerful training session, which alerted her to the abuse our Jewish brothers and sisters got from the Left.
This was too much. I was sick of the sectarian anti-Semitism promoted at these workshops, and the way she had swallowed it hook like and sinker.
These training sessions are biased. Starmer has handed them to the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement, the sister of the Israeli Labour party. The JLM was formerly Paole Zion and was dying on its anti-Arab tuckus before it suddenly got a massive influx of money from person or persons unknown. It does not represent Labour’s Jews. You don’t have to be Jewish or even a party member to join it, as you do for Jewish Voice for Labour. It conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and is one of the major organisations behind the witch hunt against putative anti-Semites. And an amazing, incredible number of these seem to be secular or Torah-observant Jews. I say ‘incredible’ because I don’t believe a damn word of it. Not after reading the blogs, testimony and comments on mine and Mike’s blogs from the great Jewish peeps who’ve been a victim of this utterly damnable witch hunt. And also the same from genuinely anti-racist gentiles, like Mike himself, who have always been staunch opponent of real anti-Semitism and Nazism. Some of these people, Jews and gentiles, have suffered real anti-Semitic hate crimes, including violence and assault, either because they were Jews or marched against them as friends and allies. Mike was smeared and purged simply for saying that Ken Livingstone was historically correct about Adolf Hitler’s wretched support for Zionism in the Ha’avara Agreement. This made him an anti-Semite despite the fact that when Mike was at College, he gladly took part in a performance organised by one of his Jewish friends commemorating the Holocaust. He was one of the readers reading out the names of just some of those murdered. I have on my bookshelf a book, in German, he sent me, about the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst and its role in the persecution of political prisoners and the Holocaust. It lists some of the names of those butchered, maps showing the locations of the various concentration camps and pogroms and the stats for the numbers of innocents murdered at these various locales. And in answer to the Holocaust Deniers, yes, 6 million did die.
But this comes to nothing. The JLM and related organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Labour Friends of Israel, the GnasherJew troll farm and all the scummy rest specialise in going through peoples’ social media posts looking for whatever they can use to twist so that it sound anti-Semitic. That’s how they got self-respecting, anti-racist Jews like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, as well as Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Graham Bash and many, many more. Men and women whose only crime has to criticise Israeli for its barbarous persecution of the Palestinians. Disgust which they also share with anti-racist Zionists – there are a few – and Israelis.
I am utterly disgusted by this and do intend to challenge this in my local party. Whatever Starrmer wants, his vicious, sectarian anti-Semitism is still an issue some of us intend to keep on fighting.
No pasaran to Blairite socialFascism and anti-Semitism!
I should have realised it wouldn’t last. Last fortnight’s Private Eye carried an article about the leaked Labour party document revealing the antics and intrigues of Blairite party bureaucrats to prevent the party winning the 2017 general election. Although the article accepted uncritically the leaked document’s false assumption that Labour was a hotbed of vicious anti-Jewish hatred, it nevertheless seemed to take seriously the document’s allegations that a series of highly placed Labour apparatchiks had been doing everything they could to sabotage its election chances in order to get rid of Corbyn. Now that attitude has been completely reversed.
In this fortnight’s Private Eye, for 8th – 21st May 2020, there’s another article about the document. Titled ‘Party Poopers’, this has returned to the magazine’s old line of pushing the anti-Semitism smears along with the rest of the lamestream media. The article views the leaked document as a series of terrible libels against people, who were genuinely exposing massive anti-Semitism. These people were also being victimised for their participation in the Panorama programme, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’, were suffering vicious personal abuse, including being targeted by an online Nazi group. Fortunately they’re being defended by defamation and privacy specialist (sic) Mark Lewis.
The article runs
Like a retreating army planting booby traps, Labour’s routed Corbynistas have left Keir Starmer some unexploded bombs: most notably the 860-page report on the supposed complicity of anti-Corbyn officials in hindering investigations into anti-Semitism.
They have left the party open to investigations by the information commissioner and Inspector Knacker – and multiple actions for libel and breach of privacy. Not content with electing one lawyer as leader, Labour may soon be enriching more of them.
The report, commissioned by general secretary Jennie Formby, created a stab-in-the-back narrative by alleging that Labour lost the 2017 general election because, in the words of John McDonnell, staff undermined the leader in a “shocking act of treachery”. It implied that anti-Corbyn officials sat on complaints of racism to make him look bad. Criticising “whistleblowers” who appeared in a Panorama film about Labour and anti-Semitism, it said the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) should “question the validity of the personal testimonies”.
Party lawyers advised Formby she couldn’t submit the report to the EHRC, let alone publish it. After an unknown Corbyn supporter leaked it over the Easter weekend, however, online activists were quick to share unredacted copies – including much confidential personal information.
A shower of writs is now about to descend on the party. At least 30 former Labour officials have contacted defamation and privacy specialist Mark Lewis – so many that Lewis has signed up other lawyers who are twiddling their thumbs in lockdown to deal with the backlog. Labour will ahve to deal with the fallout without Formby, who announced on Monday she was stepping down as general secretary.
The leaked report was based on 10,000 emails and private WhatsApp messages in which Labour employees bitched about their bosses, as employees tend to do. The information commissioner, who has the power to set multi-million-pound fines, is said to be taking the data breach seriously – all the more so because Labour has still not met its legal obligation to contact all the victims of the data breach to warn them that information they had the right to expect would remain private was in the public domain.
Equally angry are members of the public who are identified in the report as reporting incidents of anti-Jewish hatred – and whose names are now in the possession of neo-Nazi groups. The far-right website Unz Review used Formby’s dossier to name Labour members who complained and to denounce them as agents of “Jewish control” behind “the conspiracy to undermine and destroy Corbyn”. The group Labour Against Anti-Semitism has asked the police to investigate. Its lawyers have also hired private detectives to find who leaked the report.
One lawyer involved expects about 40 privacy and libel actions, estimating that even if Labour settles them at once, the cost to the party will be £2.5m. But Corbyn supporters on Labour’s national executive committee could try to block retractions and apologies. If so, the costs will explode.
Let’s deal with a few irritating little details Private Eye doesn’t mention. It claims that the plotters’ emails were leaked. They weren’t. The plotters did the intriguing using Labour’s computers, and duly handed them over when they were asked as part of the inquiry. They surrendered that information themselves. If they had wanted to keep it all private, they should have used their own machines.
They also went much, much further than bitching about their bosses. Their anti-Corbyn scams included mocking up fake videos to mislead Corbyn that the anti-Semitism allegations were being effectively handled, when they were allowing those same allegations to pile up. They ran two sets of campaigns in London with the intention of ensuring election victories solely for members of the Blairite right. They also suspended constituency Labour parties that were on the verge of deselecting the sitting MP, like Angela Eagle’s in Liverpool. Leading conspirators also acted as members and moderators on Tory online groups, and openly wished for Conservative and Lib Dem victories. This is against party rules, and the same conspirators had also thrown out other members of the party for doing the same, such as one individual who made the mistake of liking an internet comment by a Green politico.
The Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ was a farrago from start to finish. It’s producers were already biased against Corbyn, and it allowed members of the anti-Corbyn groups to make their allegations of anti-Semitism without revealing their membership of the same groups. Mike, Zelo Street and any number of other left-wing news sites and blogs have torn it to shreds.
Now look at the way it deliberately connects the leaked report with Nazism. The allegations of intrigue and plotting are described as a ‘stab-in-the-back- narrative. This is the same language historians use to describe the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that propelled Hitler to power: that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Jews so that the country lost World War I. Then it brings in the real Nazis, Unz Review.
If innocent people are being target for anti-Semitic abuse and attack by real Nazis, then it is absolutely disgusting.
But the Eye is also hypocritical in not mentioning the abuse and intimidation heaped upon their victims by the anti-Semitism smear merchants. People like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Mike, who is still accused of being an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier, even though he won his IPSO complaint against the newspapers who so libelled him. Mike, and other victims of the anti-Semitism smears, also had their private information leaked to the press. Mike has also complained to the Information Commissioner about it, but so far the Commissioner has done nothing. This awkward fact also isn’t mentioned by the Eye, because Hislop’s mighty organ has also done everything it can to push the anti-Semitism smears. And some of the witch-hunters’ victims have suffered far worse than abuse and death threats. One commenter on Mike’s blog posted that he had also been smeared as an anti-Semite by David Collier, part of the GnasherJew troll farm. Not only did Collier smear him, but he also doxed him as well, putting his personal details up on his wretched website and then camping outside his door. Collier has so far not taken the information down.
No mention of any of this from Private Eye!
On then, to Mark Lewis. The Eye’s description of him as specialising in defamation and privacy issues is one way of viewing him. In fact, he’s Rachel Riley’s pet lawyer, and the one she uses whenever someone criticises her for smearing and bullying decent people as anti-Semites and Nazis simply because they support Corbyn.
And finally, there’s the whole issue of ‘Jewish control’ in the Labour party. In fact, a large number of the victims of the anti-Semitism smears are themselves Jewish, because the ultra-Zionists of the Israel lobby cannot tolerate the idea that any Jew does not support Israel and regards its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians as abhorrent. Yet there are any number who do, from the Haredi who believe Jews must continue to live in galut – exile – until Israel is truly restored by the Messiah, to politically liberal Jews, who believe that Israel’s maltreatment of the Arabs violates the liberal principles they view as being intrinsic to Judaism. As the saying goes, ‘to be a Jew is always to identify with the oppressed, never the oppressor’. It violates the commandment in Deuteronomy that the Jews are not to maltreat the ‘stranger in the land, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. These entirely decent, self-respecting people are smeared, insulted and sometimes physically attacked, like the non-Jews the witch-hunters have also targeted. Some of them have even been the victims of real anti-Semitic assault themselves, or, if non-Jewish, they’ve been attacked because they’ve dared to defend Jews or have Jewish friends, partners and relatives.
But no-one from the press, including Private Eye, has ever asked them about their experience.
And the talk about ‘Jewish control’ is designed to stop any objection to the Board of Deputies of British Jews’ demand for the right to interfere in the Labour party. By demanding that the Labour leadership contenders, including Starmer, sign up to their wretched 10 Pledges against anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews now exercises a very high level of control over the party. They want the right to decide who should be allowed membership, including seeing confidential personal information. They have also demanded that members should not be allowed to share platforms with those expelled for anti-Semitism.
These demands are unreasonable, dictatorial and one-sided. No such demands have been made of the Tory party, Lib Dems or anyone else.
By talking about Nazis and their denunciation of the Blairites’ intrigues and plotting as ‘Jewish control’, the article is clearly intended to make any objection to the Board’s demands seem anti-Semitic. But the Board has overstepped the boundaries of reasonable criticism into comprehensive involvement with these demands. And there are party political motives at work here. Not only does the Board uncritically support Israel and its atrocities, but it is also partisan in its political support here. The Board’s president, Marie van der Zyl, has sent messages of support and congratulations to Tweezer when she took office as Prime Minister. It’s possible that individual members of the Board may not be Tories, but to me it looks extremely likely that Zyl and the Board will use the anti-Semitism smears to demand the expulsion of anyone, who either criticises Israel or seems serious about returning the party to its socialist roots.
I’ve said many times that Eye publishes some excellent stuff, but I am exasperated by its complicity in the anti-Semitism smears. I despise the way it, and the rest of the media, has steadfastly refused to cover the people, who have been unfairly defamed and threatened by the witch-hunters simply because they criticise Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. And this article is another example of the same. I notice that the article is also unsigned. It is not credited to ‘Ratbiter’, perhaps because ‘Ratbiter’s’ real identity as Nick Cohen of the Guardian and Absurder is too well-known.
But like Cohen’s articles, this is yet another disgraceful smear and another vile attempt to keep the witch-hunt going and the witch-hunters safe from retribution for their foul activities.
There are some very, very frightened people at the top of the Labour Party. Starmer’s and Rayner’s leadership has been embarrassed by the leak of an 865 page report that the party commissioned into its handling of the anti-Semitism crisis. This was meant to be handed over as evidence to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for their investigation into the crisis. But it was suppressed on the advice of Labour’s lawyers. Because it showed very clearly that the handling of the crisis had been marred and manipulated by the massive political intriguing of the Blairite apparat. This included senior party officials like Ian McNichol, the party chairman, Emilie Oldknow, presently the COO for Unison, who is Starmer’s choice to succeed Jenny Formby as General Secretary, the former acting head of the governance and legal unit, Sam Mathews, and Tom Watson.
These scumbags misinformed Corbyn about the scale of the problem while at the same time doing their best to prevent any action being taken about it, because they wanted to present Corbyn’s leadership as incompetent. It shows that the Blairites were hoping to establish Watson as an interim leader after the 2017 General Election, which they hoped would force Corbyn out. They were severely disappointed when he wasn’t. The director of the Governance and Legal Affairs Unit, John Stolliday, wanted to set up an electoral college system to prevent anyone from the Labour left becoming head of the party. In London the Party HQ operated a parallel election campaign which aimed to ensure that only right-wing Labour MPs were elected. And the report lists conversation after conversation showing the Blairite party bureaucrats sneering and vilifying left-wing MPs or party activists, looking forward to purging ‘1000s of Trots’ – who were defined as anyone left of Gordon Brown. They hoped to see Labour down 20 points in the polls, cheered at the prospect of him losing elections or being ripped apart by Andrew Neil.
Basically, they did everything they could to force Corbyn out, even debating whether they should vote for Tweezer against him.
Starmer’s team has now gone into defensive mode, promising an investigation into how the report was commissioned and leaked. As Mike points out in his post, this is very much Starmer and Rayner trying to cover their arses.
As for the anti-Semitism accusations, the Blairites were determined to exaggerate and magnify it to undermine Corbyn. The report notes that around half of them came from a single individual, who spent his or her time going over emails going back years. Mike comments that ‘(i)nterestingly, Labour’s report appears to describe this individual as one “who is highly abusive towards Party staff and Party members and submits large numbers of poorly formatted and poorly evidenced complaints”.
And now someone like this has got Mike suspended from Facebook.
Mike wanted to put up his piece about the report and its suppression on the site. But no! This was definitely verboten! Because someone had complained about a piece he’d written in 2016. This was about the suspension of Clement Attlee’s nephew, and showed a meme of David Cameron as Hitler with a quote from the Fuhrer about the best way to remove people’s rights. You do it slowly, so they don’t notice. This apparently, violated Facebook’s delicate community guidelines, which don’t tolerate organised hate, terrorism, people trafficking, or organised violence and crime. Mike’s piece obviously doesn’t constitute any of the above, and so he’s written to Facebook protesting against his suspension. Which looks suspiciously like the work of someone very much like the deranged individual mentioned in the report. His piece is an attack on the way Cameron is taking away people’s rights and not remotely an endorsement of that or Adolf Hitler. As for the sneak who got him suspended, Mike says
If the complaints are similar to this, both Labour and Facebook should not only refuse to countenance any further correspondence from this individual, but should name and shame that person – to ensure they cannot spread their poison any further.
Who is it, Labour? Who is it, Facebook? Tell us now.
I’d say that the person responsible is almost certainly a member of the Zionist organisations in the Labour Party, possibly Labour Friends of Israel but also the Jewish Labour Movement. This was formerly Paole Zion, and states that it is Zionist, and the sister party to the Israeli Labour Party. The obsessive, monomaniacal trawling of previous social media posts is a strategy of ultra-Zionist campaign groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the David Collier ‘GnasherJew’ troll farm. You know, the people that smeared Jackie Walker as an anti-Semite, who thinks that the Jews were responsible for slavery, despite the fact that she is manifestly nothing of the sort. This is only speculation, but the demented conduct of this individual sounds a bit like that of Jonathan Hoffman, the former head of the Zionist Federation. He was also a member of the Jewish Labour Movement, despite very definitely not being a member of the Labour Party. He’s also known for his extremely disruptive behaviour at pro-Palestinian events, where he struts about waving the Israeli flag screaming at the speakers. And he and one of his friends were also up before the beak for their aggressive conduct towards someone else. On the other hand, all of the ultra-Zionists are aggressive and disruptive, so it could almost be any one of them.
Either way, someone in the Blairites and Israel lobby is definitely afraid of Mike and what he would say about this crisis. Good. To quote a certain horror movie slogan, I hope they’re ‘afraid… very afraid’.
Mike, Martin Odoni and Zelo Street have all published very extensive pieces about the report so far. They’re at:
More trolling from the darker parts of the internet. Mike reported on Saturday that a hashtag campaign had been started against left-wing journalist and author Owen Jones. The hashtag declared in crude language that Jones practiced the kind of solitary behaviour that tradition has it makes you grow hair on the palms of your hands and ruins your eyesight. It started after a group of Alt Right thugs shouted ‘Oi, you w*nker’ at him live on British TV. Jones himself said of the incident that if he could survive fascists chasing him on the street, then he could survive a hashtag campaign set up by people who need their hard drives checking.
Laura Murray told him that the person – and I use that term loosely – responsible for the troll campaign against him is the same individual, who posts pictures of her in a bikini in various positions in order to degrade and humiliate her. This person is one ‘Basil Brush/Bruscetta’, who is a massive fan of Rachel Riley. He endorsed a thread from Riley in which she attacked a certain 16 year old girl as an anti-Semite. Bruscetta’s website didn’t last, and was taken down. So his supporters linked it to one attacking their idol. Which apparently was done by members of the GnasherJew troll farm, David Collier and another odious jerk, Jack Silver. Collier was moaning that Twitter’s removal of the hashtag against Jones showed it to be a fake news site, as Jones is an anti-Semite and therefore akin to a Nazi!
Saaaaaay whaaaaat!
In what parallel world are this idiots living? Jones is no kind of Nazi. Indeed, he’s been criticised by Tony Greenstein – also definitely not a Nazi – for being too accommodating to the anti-Semitism smear campaign of which Riley, Collier and co. are a part against critics of Israel and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party.
As Mike explains, the clip used to troll Jones was of the abuse screamed at him from right-wing pro-Brexit campaigners when he was being interviewed outside parliament in January. Riley also tried to attack Jones with smears and shockingly inaccurate comments about his coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mike concludes his article about this
She protested at the time that she is not a supporter of the far right. Maybe that’s true; I don’t propose to comment on it, one way or the other.
But questions need to be asked about why supporters of the far right seem so keen to link themselves with her.
There’s more that could be said about this. Much more. Alongside the comments about Jones’ supposed solitary practices was another line calling him a ‘Stalinist’. This obviously comes from the far right. In some ways it’s ironic. Stalin was a brutal dictator with a venomous hatred of the Jews. After the Nazis broke the pact they’d made for the occupation of eastern Europe with the former Soviet Union, Stalin lamented what the Soviet and Nazis could have achieved together. And one of the major figures in post-War American Nazism, Francis Parker Yockey – a bizarre figure who was very much like the Nazi playwright in Mel Brookes’ The Producers – was a supporter of the Soviet Union because he saw it as a bulwark of civilisation against the decadence caused by democracy. The real Alt Right have more in common with Stalin than they’d like to admit.
The hashtag campaign against Jones was also supported by Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP. I think Sargon’s Jewish, and he has argued online with the Alt Right. But despite describing himself as a ‘classical Liberal’ – for which read ‘Libertarian’ – Sargon’s own politics are so close to that of the Alt Right that some have commented that he is a gateway to them. A soft introduction leading to the harder, more racist stuff further away from the mainstream.
Despite Collier and co.’s claim that they’re fighting anti-Semitism, they’re doing no such thing. Like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, they’re almost completely uninterested in real, right-wing anti-Semitism. They’re against anti-Zionism or simply criticism of Israel, which they deliberately conflate with anti-Semitism. And they attack it on the left for two reasons.
At the most superficial level, they do it because they’re bullies.
The people they attack, people like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Sally Eason and so on are decent people. They aren’t trolls, and so don’t response with the high level of abuse the real anti-Semites would. GnasherJew and Riley’s fan are not going to attack the trolls that post real anti-Semitic material, like those who consider the Holocaust a great joke, because their campaign of hate wouldn’t touch them. The trolls would just start making coarse comments on their sexuality, which would probably be homophobic and accuse them of being paedophiles. Further attacks on them by Riley’s fans and Collier and his fellow scumbags would just be treated with amusement, and provide them with further ammunition for trolling them. But the people on the Labour left GnasherJew and Riley attack instead aren’t like that. They can be bullied and cowed. And so they do.
And there’s no great mystery why racists like the Alt Right support Riley.
Tony Greenstein has observed that historically, Zionism’s allies have always been the Far Right. The Islamophobic right in Britain – Britain First and the English Defence League strongly support Israel because they hate Muslims. Tommy Robinson even boasted that if there was a war with the Palestinians, he’d fight for Israel. They also admire Israel because it’s the kind of ‘ethnostate’ they’d like to create in the West. Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt Right, appeared on Israeli TV, where he declared himself to be a White Zionist. Just as Israel is a racial state in which the only true citizens are Jews, so Spencer and co. wish to create a White ethnostate in America, where only Whites will enjoy full civil rights and Blacks, Asians and Hispanics will have been ‘peacefully’ cleansed.
And the Alt Right also have an enemy in common with Israel’s supporters, at least on the Right.
They hate and fear genuine left-wingers. Which is why they were both determined to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. He was both a critic of Israel and determined to bring back the welfare state, strong trade unions and a mixed economy. All of which are abhorrent to those on the Far Right, like Spencer and Sargon, and the Blairites in the Labour party. Which is why you had the Blairites in the Labour party, like Joan Ryan of Labour Friends of Israel, sneering at Corbyn’s supporters in Labour as ‘Stalinists’, ‘Trotskyites’ and Communists.
I am not accusing Riley of being a Fascist or a member of the Alt Right. But she needs to think very clearly about the way she is supported by them, and do what she can to discourage it.
Otherwise some would be justified in calling her a hypocrite. If not worse.
The media’s been full of stories about how politicians are being sent abuse and death threats, with many of these stories focusing on the internet. It’s been going on for some time, and the Labour right tried to weaponise the issue against Corbyn. Following Hillary Clinton’s lie that Bernie Sanders’ supporters were all misogynist ‘Bernie Bros’, various right-wing female MPs tried the same smear against Corbyn’s supporters. They claimed that they were receiving sexist and misogynist abuse from them. Many of these stories fell apart on inspection, and by and large I don’t think the Blairite women were getting more abuse than anyone else. Half of the abuse directed at female MPs in the Labour party goes to Diane Abbott. Some of the tales of abuse couldn’t be supported, as it seems that the messages sent could not be found or shown. And other messages weren’t sent by members of the Labour party, and so Corbyn couldn’t be responsible.
The same smears of abuse were also used by the Israel lobby – Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And the same criticisms apply here. The existence of some of these abusive texts couldn’t be corroborated, some weren’t sent by members of the party and the actual numbers of real anti-Semites in the party is actually minuscule. But nevertheless the press was full of smear stories by Blairites like Ruth Smeeth and others that the Labour Party was not a safe space for Jews, not since Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
But what the press and media do not report is the extensive smearing and bullying by the Israel lobby and ultra-Zionist activists. This is immense and horrific. Anyone – anyone at all – who dares to make the mildest criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians is immediately accused of anti-Semitism. And this is particularly true of Jews. I’ve blogged about the way Jackie Walker receives horrific abuse after her smearing as an anti-Semite and expulsion from the Labour party. Jackie, despite being Jewish by faith and blood, is told she isn’t a Jew because she’s a woman of colour. They also call for her to be lynched – an especially serious threat, as her mother was a Black civil rights activist from the American Deep South – and her body to be set on fire and stuffed into bin bags. Tony Greenstein has received emails telling him that he and his family should have been murdered in the Holocaust. He has also been assaulted by an angry Israeli.
And it goes on. Peter Oborne in his programme on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches ten years or so ago showed how respective journalists at the Guardian and BBC were subjected to the same smears by the Board of Deputies of British Jews when they reported massacres and atrocities committed by the Israelis or their allies, the Christian Phalange, in Lebanon. These accusations were leveled at Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. When David Attenborough stepped in to deny them, he too was accused of being an anti-Semite. And this abuse has been hurled at people like Mike and other Corbyn supporters in the Labour party. Lobster also cites formerGuardianreporter Nick Davies in their review of a book dismantling the anti-Semitism smears,Bad News for Labour. Davies described inFlat Earth Newshow reporters and journalists were subjected to horrific abuse and allegations from Israel’s supporters. John Booth, the author of Lobster’s review, writes
‘Journalists who write stories which offend the politics of the Israel lobby are subjected to a campaign of formal complaints and pressure on their editors; most of all, they are inundated with letters and emails which can be extravagant in their hostility,’ he writes. ‘Robert Fisk of The Independent has been told that his mother was Adolf Eichmann’s daughter, that he belongs in hell with Osama bin Laden, that he is a “hate peddler”, “a leading anti-semite and protofascist Islamophile propagandist” and a paedophile.’
This abuse has reached the point that according to the Lobster article, Jewish journalists are afraid to publish articles critical of Israel. Evening Standard journo Mira Bar-Hillel, who was born in Jerusalem, says that they fear retribution if they do.
And left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have also received this horrific abuse in the Labour party. Sally Eason, the founder of Labour Left Voice, was forced to leave the Labour party because of her criticisms of Israel. Eason’s Sephardic Jewish on her mother’s side. And so she was targeted for concerted abuse and trolling by a network of right-wing scumbags, including David Collier and the Gnasherjew troll farm, which was cheerfully reblogged by ‘jobbing actor’ Tracy Ann Oberman. Mike also suffers vicious abuse from people, who continue to believe the smears that he’s an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier despite his success in getting these utterly false allegations retracted from the papers that printed them. And last week I was insulted by someone angry at my support for Corbyn against the anti-Semitism smears. They sent the comment ‘Fuck you. From a Jew’. It was only one such insult, and it’s mild compared to that sent to people like Mike, Tony and Jackie. But it does show the abusive nature of Israel’s most ardent supporters.
But if you believe the media, the abuse is all one way. It’s all those evil anti-Semites in the Labour sending hatred and death threats to women and Jews. The reality is that Corbynites have also been on the receiving end of horrific abuse, much of the abuse the Blairites claim was sent to them seems to be nonexistent. And some of the most vicious, and viciously anti-Semitic abuse is that sent by the Israel lobby and supporters of Britain’s Jewish establishment. And thanks to the abuse sent by people like David Collier and his friends in Gnasherjew, Israel-critical Jews do not feel safe.
That is real, viciously dangerous anti-Semitic abuse. And it is not reported in the Media. Disgusting!
This really shows how twisted and vile Netanyahu and his coalition are. Yesterday the Jewish anti-Fascist, anti-Zionist activist Tony Greenstein, put up a piece about how he’d been contacted by an Israeli academic, Avraham Oz. Mr Oz is professor of Theatre at Haifa University and a long-standing supporter of the Israeli left. The professor was appealing for funding for the Alfa Theatre in Haifa. It is in danger of losing its state funding following allegations made by an informer, Shai Glick, to the government. Netanyahu’s vile administration is not only determined to expropriate and eventually expel the indigenous Arabs, but also to silence and harass dissenting voices in Israel. I gather from previous posts that it has launched attacks intended to stifle criticism and reporting of atrocities and other crimes against humanity from groups like Breaking the Silence, a veterans’ organisation, and the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem. Regev has been part of this campaign in her capacity as Israeli Culture Minister. Last year she attempted to pass a ‘Cultural Loyalty’ bill, which would have denied funding to any work that did not respect the symbols of the state of Israel, viewed Independence Day as a day of mourning, or incited violence and terrorism. Tony points out that this would mean that any play about the Palestinian Nakba – their term for massacres and ethnic cleansing against them that was an integral part of the foundation of Israel as an independent state, would lose its state funding. And such a play may even face banning altogether.
It’s the kind of cultural repression found in Communism and Fascism. And what is truly sickening is that Regev actually said that she was proud to be a ‘Fascist’, and that Fascism was an integral part of Israeli culture! She also made a speech in 2002 declaring Sudanese immigrants to be a ‘cancer’ in Israel’s body. Not surprisingly, her critics produced mock images of her in Nazi uniform, which is anti-Semitic under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and Regev herself got upset.
Tony puts her remarks into context with the Zionists’ policy of allying themselves with real gentile anti-Semites in order to encourage the foundation of a Jewish state and Jewish immigration to it. He shows this went as far back as Chaim Herzog, who wrote that the Jews had been too hard on groups like the British Brothers’ League, which had campaigned against Jewish immigration to Britain in the early 20th century.
He also quotes Jewish authorities on the rabbinical condemnation of tell-tales like Glick. I’ve used similar quotes in some of my pieces attacking groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Gnasherjew troll army, who go through people’s social media posts looking for material they can use to accuse them falsely of being anti-Semites.
But it’s Regev’s comments applauding Fascism that utterly astonish me. I can only imagine the disgust and horror it must have caused self-respecting Jews everywhere, and indeed anyone, who had ever lost people in the struggle against Fascism. A Jewish philosopher described the ultra-nationalist ideology of the Israeli state as ‘Judaeonazism’. Obviously it’s a highly controversial term, but when ministers like Regev describe themselves as ‘Fascists’ and claim that Fascism is part of Israeli national identity, then it’s entirely justified. Buddy Hell in post about Zionism a few years ago at Guy Debord’s Cat described how one of the early Jewish settler groups in the 1920s were the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to create a Fascist state similar to Mussolini’s in Italy. Regev’s comments about Fascism, consciously or not, hark back to them.
And now I see Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has decided to spout lies against Corbyn once again, accusing him of having not done enough against anti-Semitism.
The Labour leader certainly has and more than enough, as some of those allegations, such as those against Mike, Tony, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Ken Livingstone and so on were unfounded and malicious. They were a cynical attempt to smear and purge decent anti-racists from the party as part of a wider campaign to oust Corbyn. Since Mirvis opened his mouth, and his mendacious splutterings were published in the Times, a number of left-wing bloggers have put on the Net the countless instances where Corbyn and his party have supported Jews against discrimination and racism.
And Mirvis and his predecessor, Jonathan Sacks, also have questions to answer themselves about racism and bigotry.
A year or so ago, Sacks led a contingent of British Jews to participate in the March of the Flags. That’s when the Israeli equivalent of Nazi boot-boys parade through the Muslim part of Jerusalem waving Israeli flags, banging on doors and vandalising property. Sacks had been asked not to go, but he still went. And I also remember the anger he caused when he declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’ – which is the language of religious persecution. Mirvis and the Board also turned up to the mass demonstrations against Corbyn a few years ago, when they tried smearing him as an anti-Semite because he had not fully adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. That’s the definition that’s been criticised by Kenneth Stern, who formulated it, as chilling reasonable, genuine criticism of Israel.
There’s absolutely no substance to Mirvis’ recent sputterings. It’s just more noise from a Tory, writing in the Tory press, and an arch-Zionist afraid of reasonable criticisms against Israel.
Like what is the country doing appointing a self-identified Fascist as its Culture Minister?
Now I realise that Regev may have made her comments well before Mirvis became Chief Rabbi, but you have to wonder what his reaction to Regev’s words were. He is, after all, a friend of Netanyahu’s as well as Boris Johnson, and while British Jews aren’t responsible for what the Israelis do, the Chief Rabbinate and Board of Deputies have shown themselves to be staunch Zionists. So it has to be asked of them how they saw Regev’s statement and what they did, as supporters of Israeli, to protest against it.
My guess is that Mirvis and the Board did nothing. They’re quite content to let Israel behave like a Fascist state, and Israeli ministers call themselves Fascists, so long as it isn’t reported and they aren’t criticised for it.
And David Rosenberg, another Jewish anti-Fascist and critic of Israel, published a post in which he recalled how, when he was growing up in ’70s and ’80s, the Board tried to stop Jews from joining the marches then against the NF and BNP by groups like the Anti-Nazi League. Or go to meetings and concerts by organisations like Rock Against Racism. The Board claimed it was to stop them being exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda, but others suspected that there was more than a little of real racism against other minorities there as well.
And that’s why they hate Corbyn: because he is a genuine opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, while they just want to stop criticism of Israel.
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?
Oh ho! Another wheel has come off the anti-Semitism witch-hunters’ malign clown car, and it couldn’t come too soon. Lee C has posted a little video on twitter of a conversation between David Collier, a member of the Gnasherjew ultra-Zionist troll farm, one of his friends and another man, who appears interested in joining his campaign to root out anti-Semitism. Collier’s mate, a man in the traditional Jewish kippa, tells the prospective recruit how they combat anti-Semitism across society and the political divide, in both Labour and the Conservatives.
Except they don’t. And the supposed recruit knows it. He asks Collier several times what he’s done to expose and combat anti-Semitism in the Tory party without getting an answer. Eventually, when the point has been glaringly made by Collier’s inability to answer the question, Collier tries to excuse his political bias by saying that he’s a member of Labour.
Lee C. comments
David Collier Exposed. The man behind Labour’s antisemitism smear campaign. Never calls it out when it’s from the right because it doesn’t fit his political agenda. It’s always been about removing pro Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn and nothing else.
The Sage of Crewe has written an excellent piece about it, and helpfully describes the conversation in the video, which goes as follows.
‘In the video, Collier, at right foreground, and his colleague at left are in conversation with an individual who they are seeking to persuade to join their campaign. But their potential recruit has a nasty surprise for Collier. First, he calls anti-Semitism “a disgraceful thing”.
Collier’s pal takes it from there. “So will you be an ally and join with me and David in the campaign against anti-Semitism, whether it’s in the Tory Party, whether it’s in UKIP, whether it’s in the Labour Party, will you help us to expose those that express anti-Jewish racism?” Then the potential recruit takes the mic, and it all goes wrong.
“I have a wonderful question for David here. David, can you go through your routine … can you go to your record on exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you, David”. After a pause, Collier responds “Do you think that’s a point?” NO COMMENT.
Back comes the question. “David, would you like to go through your record of exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you David”. Collier’s response this time? “I’m not a member of the Tory Party”. Not going very well, is it? Back comes the question again. Except with a little more pointedness. “Anti-Semitism exists everywhere. If you are here to fight anti-Semitism, you fight anti-Semitism everywhere. You seem to specialise in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Can you please tell me not why, but what your record is in exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you, David”. Come on Dave!
Next excuse? “Again, your questions are disingenuous. Now if you’ll let me answer …” But the questioner had by now heard enough. “Disingenuous? It is because I asked a very straightforward question. What have you done to expose anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you David”. Collier bleated “I am a member of the Labour Party”
The questioner’s conclusion? “He says he has done nothing”.
What also makes this exchange interesting is that Collier is friend and collaborator of Rachel Riley’s, as the Sage shows with a few highly illustrative tweets.
Zelo Street makes the point that Collier’s highly selective attitude towards anti-Semitism is simply not acceptable. You fight it wherever it exists, because if you ignore it in one place, it’ll just fester and grow. And Collier has shown he’s prepared to do this. And he also makes the point that you need to think when Riley appears bashing the Labour party again that she appears to share the same attitude. And her selective indifference to anti-Semitism is a frightening prospect to real anti-racists. He concludes
‘Ms Riley’s pal just gave the game away. It’s not exposing hatred. It’s just Labour bashing.’
I think the clip came from a much longer video of Collier, his mate and Depik Rajgor in debate, posted on YouTube by the Israel Advocacy Movement. They seem to think it exposes Mr. Rajgor as ‘an anti-racist, who can’t help being racist’. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment, but I suspect their definition of racism is that someone is anti-Semitic, if they’re not prepared to support Israel’s brutal persecution of the Palestinians. Even if they are a fervent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism otherwise.
Of course, Collier’s selective attitude towards anti-Semitism should surprise no-one. It’s embedded throughout much of the pro-Israel movement. Tony Greenstein among very many others has shown that the laughably misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is far less concerned with anti-Semitism on the right, than it is about it in the Labour party and particularly Jeremy Corbyn.
Meanwhile, anti-Semitism in the Tories gets a free pass. Remember back in the summer when the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis were working themselves into a frenzy because Labour hadn’t signed up to the I.H.R.A.’s definition of anti-Semitism? The same definition, whose Zionist author, Kenneth Stern, had testified to the US Congress it was being used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel? Well, the Tories hadn’t signed it, either. But there were no mobs of angry Zionists waving Israeli flags and screaming that the Tories were anti-Semites and ready to start the Holocaust again outside Tory HQ.
And anti-Semitism has always been much more prevalent on the right. The vicious anti-Semitism and islamophobia of two twitter/ Facebook groups, which respectively supported Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg was exposed a little while ago. The members of these groups were calling for the mass expulsion and murder of Muslims, particularly Sadiq Khan in London. But some of them also believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which blames the Jews for the influx of Muslim and other non-White migrants. They’re doing this, according to the Nazis who believe this daft and murderous twaddle, as a deliberate plot to destroy the White race. The Tories have made noises about combating racism in their ranks, and some people have been suspended or expelled, it’s true. But as Matt Hancock’s ‘whitesplaining’ to Sayeeda Warsi about islamophobia shows, they’re not really interested in tackling it.
Meanwhile, David Collier and his ilk smear and libel genuine anti-racist people opposed to anti-Semitism in the Labour party, while ignoring the real anti-Semites on the right and far right.
The late, great Bill Hicks once said, ‘We live in a world where the good die young, while mediocrities thrive and prosper’. And on Tuesday, two days ago, one of the more noxious of those mediocrities, Tracy Ann Oberman, appeared in the ‘Sixty Seconds’ interview column in the Metro. That’s the free newspaper given away to passengers on buses. The former Dr Who cyberwoman was talking about her latest role as the heroine, Brenda, in the crime drama Mother of Him, the mother of a son, who has committed a terrible crime. Inevitably, the questions then moved on to the abuse she had received for her campaign against anti-Semitism. This ran
You’re no stranger to facing a barrage of abuse online since speaking out against Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism problem. Did that feed into the play?
My speaking out on anti-Semitism and misogyny, in particular in my old party, Labour, and the trolling I received didn’t really feed in because the character of Brenda is not an actor or celebrity and didn’t put herself out there. It made me think that social media has a positive side, which is to give people a chance to put out their story when they otherwise would have been unable to.
Why has anti-Semitism reared its head now?
All racism and misogyny is there somewhere beneath the surface but up until the past few years it was kept to people mumbling in pubs and private areas as it wasn’t deemed acceptable to say in public. I think there’s been a big change since 2017. The left should be better, as should the right- but that is not my affiliation so someone else needs to police them. You can deny you have a problem with it as much as you like but it’s here and it’s thriving.
Your experience with trolling on social media fed into your podcast, Trolled. Have people responded positively to it?
I’ve had such incredible feedback. I get handwritten letters and cards and tweets from people who enjoyed it. I think people have found it very empowering and cathartic to be able to talk about it. Everybody I had on my podcast was championing a different cause and every single one of us had exactly the same sort of trolls. So it is less to with the issue and more to do with the type of person who wants to abuse someone they disagree with.
This is the most self-promoting, hypocritical balderdash.
The anti-Semitism Oberman and the other witch-hunters are so keen to root out isn’t anti-Semitism per se, but rather criticism – including very justified criticism – of Israel. That’s why Oberman and the rest of the witch-hunters have been attacking Corbyn and his supporters. They do criticise Israel and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And Oberman, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and the rest of the wretched lot can be very justly accused of anti-Semitism themselves. Very many of their victims have been Jews, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, to name only two. As a result, these decent people have suffered the most appalling trolling and abuse. Walker has been told that she can’t be Jewish, ’cause she’s Black, obviously by White racists ignorant of the indigenous Black Jewish people of Africa and Afro-Jewish people in the Diaspora. They’ve demanded that she be lynched – not a joke to someone, whose mother’s people in America really suffered that atrocity – and her body dumped in bin bags, or set on fire. Tony Greenstein has been physically attacked, and told by right Zionists that they wish his family had died in the Holocaust. And any Jew, who criticises Israel, will be called that their a ‘traitor’. As they point out, you can’t be a traitor to a country you weren’t born in, or have never visited. But Netanyahu, contrary to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, which says that Jews cannot be accused of being more sympathetic or loyal to a foreign power, has declared all Jews, everywhere, to be citizens of Israel, and automatically expects their immediate, unconditional loyalty. Needless to say, he’s being sadly disappointed, as increasingly more Jews are giving him the two-fingered salute and ignoring Israel completely or showing solidarity with the Palestinians. To be a Jew, as one pro-Palestinian Jewish American has said, ‘is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressors’.
The witch-hunters targets also include decent, anti-racist gentiles, like Ken Livingstone and Mike. They went after Leninspart because he dared to cite respected history, that Hitler did initially support Zionism. Tony Greenstein and Prof. Newsinger over at Lobster, and many others, including Mike, have cited chapter and verse of respected histories showing that this is absolutely right. But as Greenstein has shown, Israel has repeatedly tried to suppress any mention of its collaboration with Nazi Germany, including the collusion of Zionist activists, like Kasztner in Hungary, with the Nazis in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz.
Many of the people smeared as anti-Semites by people like Oberman are anything but.
Quite often, they, Jews and gentiles, have been active against racism, like the Black anti-racism campaigner, Mark Wadsworth. Mike and I were brought up with an awareness of the horrors of the Shoah, and Mike at College was invited to be one of the speakers at a commemoration of those murdered in it by one of his Jewish friends. They have often themselves been the subject of racist or anti-Semitic abuse and attack.
And as for trolling, Oberman, her friend Rachel Riley, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have done more than their fair share of this against decent people like Mike, Jackie and Tony. Riley herself has connections, it seems, to David Collier’s Gnasherjew troll army.
And Oberman has no business lecturing anyone on free speech.
She and her bestie, Rachel Riley, are suing 16 people, including Mike, for libel because they reblogged material showing how they bullied a 16 year old girl with anxiety issues after calling her an anti-Semite. Why? She dared to support Jeremy Corbyn, and didn’t want to have anything to do with them when they wanted her take time out from school to meet them to be ‘re-educated’. Riley is suing Mike, despite not being able to answer his question about what was libelous in the material he reblogged.
At the moment, they’re trying to wear down Mike’s defence by raising technical legal issues in the hope, it seems, of using up Mike’s money so that he won’t be able to afford to defend himself. Mike is still appealing for contributions to his defence fund, and is very grateful for the generous support he’s received from people really concerned with justice and free speech. See:
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 