Toby Young on the Free Speech Union and Legislation Needed to Protect Free Speech

I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.

And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.

But his Free Speech Union does have a point.

Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.

Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.

Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.

He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.

But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.

Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.

This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.

This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.

Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.

Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.

Mike and Friends Tear Apart the Blairites’ Anti-Semitism Smears

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 Bloor Smeared 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.

Telegraph Journo Embarrassed by Sargon and Robinson’s Free Speech Organisation

As we know, embarrassing the Tories is good and righteous work. So Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the man who broke UKIP, deserves especial congratulations for making the Tories uncomfortable over the whole question of free speech. He didn’t do it intentionally. It’s just that they found the similarities between Toby Young’s Free Speech Union and a rival right-wing organisation founded by Sargon and the islamophobic thug Tommy Robinson far too close for comfort.

Last month the Spectator’s vile Toby Young announced that he was founding the Free Speech Union along with a load of other rightists. This was going to defend those expressing controversial opinions from being silenced and kicked out of their jobs. The Heil on Sunday quoted Tobes as saying

“People who become the target of ‘Twitter storms’ after making controversial remarks will be defended by a new body called the Free Speech Union. The organisation will ‘stand up for the rights of its members to tell the truth in all circumstances’. The union has been set up by the journalist Toby Young in response to police investigations into a string of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ triggered by outspoken comments”.

“If someone at work writes to your boss to complain about something you’ve said, we’ll write to them, too, and explain the importance of intellectual tolerance and viewpoint diversity. If self-righteous social-media bullies pick on you, we’ll return the fire. If someone launches an online petition calling for you to be sacked, we’ll launch a counter-petition. The enemies of free speech hunt in packs; its defenders must band together too.”

The organisation has a Latin motto, which runs something like ‘Audi altri partem’, which I think means ‘Hear the other side.’

However, it’s not a union, but an incorporated, whose five directors are all spokesmen for the right. They include Young himself, Prof Nigel Biggar, who defends colonialism, Douglas Murray, who has islamophobic opinions, and Radomir Tylecote, who was suspended from the Treasury for writing a book against the EU. And their record of defending their opponents’ right to express their opinions is actually very poor. Zelo Street in their article about the wretched union quoted Paul Bernal, who tweeted

“As Toby Young should know, your commitment to free speech isn’t shown by how well you defend those whose speech you agree with, but how you defend those whose speech you don’t. When his ‘free speech union’ talks about the excesses of the Prevent programme, then see”.

The Street himself commented that it was just free speech for the right, and a way for Tobes and co. to complain about how unfair the world is.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/02/toby-youngs-free-speech-sham.html

Unfortunately for Tobes’ outfit, Sargon and Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of the EDL, have launched their own right-wing free speech organisation, the Hearts of Oak Alliance. And the similarities between the two concerned Tory feminist academic Zoe Strimpel to write a piece for the Torygraph on the first of this month, March 2020, complaining about this fact. Strimpel’s a Cambridge graduate with an M. Phil in gender studies. She’s the author of a series of book on men’s psychology, feminism, dating and romance. She began her article with the statement that her circle of friends has taken on a left-wing hue. It includes many Labour supporters, against whom she has to defend capitalism and Zionism. Well, at least she said ‘Zionism’, rather than accuse them once again of anti-Semitism. She’s upset by them chuckling off her fears about the erosion of free speech and thought, which, she claims, is under attack by a visible machinery of censorship in offices, the cops, universities, arts and online. She cites approvingly a report by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which advised universities to guard against being the voice of critics of those, who despise the supporter of the traditional values of patriotism, family, faith and local traditions. They have to be willing to represent and not sneer at those, who feel justifiable pride in British history, culture and traditions.

However, she was worried whether it was possible to defend free speech, without sullying the cause with too many real thugs, who wanted to get as close as possible to inciting actual violence under the guise of expressing their democratic rights. Was it possible to challenge the climate of intimidation, snide snitching, and mendacious and manipulative accusations of hate-mongering, racism and making people feel ‘unsafe’, without being a magnet for the alt-right? She agreed to become a member of the advisory board, but has her reservations. She’s uncomfortable about Sargon’s and Robinson’s organisations, because of Sargon’s own anti-feminist, misogynistic views. Sargon was, she declared, far right, a thug, who called feminism ‘a first world female supremacy movement’, and ‘all kinds of blokeish’. He’s also the man responsible for sending that Tweet to Labour MP Jess Philips, telling her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her’.

She concluded her article by stating that the aims of Tobes’ outfit were perfectly legitimate and free speech is under threat. But it was ‘just a shame that in defending those who ought to speak freely, one has to defend those, who – in an ideal world – wouldn’t have anything to say.’

Sargon was naturally upset at this assault on his character. He therefore posted a piece up on his YouTube channel, Akkad Daily, on the 2nd of March defending himself from her attack. He didn’t deny he was anti-feminist, and defended his own comments on this. But he roundly denied being a thug and far right. He was, he repeated, a Lockean classical liberal, and believed in precisely the same values as those Policy Exchange’s report claimed were under attack.

Sargon is indeed far right. He’s a libertarian, who would like everything privatised and the end of the welfare state. He’s against the European Union and immigration, and is bitterly critical of feminism and affirmative action for women and ethnic minorities. And yes, he is an islamophobe like Robinson. But in very many ways he and Robinson are absolutely no different from Young and his crew. Young is also far right. He’s a right-wing Tory, who attended eugenics conferences whose members and speakers were real Nazis and anti-Semites. And Young also is all kinds of blokeish as well. He’s posted a number of tweets expressing his obsession with women’s breasts. Way back in the ’90s, he also wrote a piece for the men’s magazine, GQ, about how he once dressed up in drag in order to pose as a woman, because he wanted to snog lesbians in gay clubs.

And it’s not just the people in the Free Speech Union, who have no real interest in free speech. Neither does Conservatism or Zionism. Thatcher tried to pass legislation making it illegal for universities to employ Marxists. A week or so ago, Turning Point UK announced that it was launching a British version of its parent organisation’s Professor Watch, a blacklist of university lecturers, who dared to express or teach left-wing views. And anti-Zionist and Israel-critical bloggers, like Tony Greenstein and Martin Odoni have described how Israel’s super-patriotic supporters, like Jonathan Hoffman, don’t want to permit free debate about Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Rather, they turn up at pro-Palestinian meetings with the intention of heckling, shouting down and otherwise disrupting the proceedings. They also seek to use the law to suppress criticism and factual reporting of Israeli atrocities as anti-Semitism.

Now there are opponents of free speech on the left. But Stimpel, as a good Tory, doesn’t want to recognise that it exists on the right. She’s embarrassed that supporting right-wing speech also means supporting extreme right-wing figures like Sargon and Robinson. But she doesn’t recognise, because she can’t afford to, that Sargon and Robinson aren’t actually much different from Toby Young, Douglas Murray, Radomir Tylecote, Nigel Biggar and the rest. In fact, there’s little difference between the two groups in fundamental attitudes.

It’s just that Sargon’s a little more extreme and doesn’t have a column in a major right-wing newspaper or magazine.

John Bercow Denies Jeremy Corbyn Is Anti-Semitic

More evidence to add to the plentiful pile of it showing that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a Jew-hater was given by John Bercow the other day. Bercow, who has just stepped down as Speaker of the House of Commons, was interviewed by Alistair Campbell for GQ magazine. Campbell told him that he realised Bercow was a Jew, and asked him about the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Bercow responded cautiously and diplomatically, pointing out that racism was a problem across society. He said that anti-Semitism was an issue in the Labour party, and that it needed to be dealt with and that he respected those, who were concerned about it. But in all his time in parliament he had never encountered it from a member of the Labour party, and in the 22 years he had known and worked with Corbyn he had never experienced it from him either. This was not even when Bercow was a right-winger. Campbell joked with Bercow about Corbyn, as a long-time opponent of New Labour, probably voting with the Tories more often than he voted with the Labour party. Bercow chuckles, and admits that he always got on well with Corbyn, and found him personally very supportive.

Okay, it’s not a refutation of the lie that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour party. It most definitely isn’t anywhere near as serious as the Tories and the right-wing media are making out. Anti-Semitism has actually dropped in the party since Corbyn became leader, and he himself has led numerous initiatives to root it out. But Bercow has said that Corbyn isn’t anti-Semitic, which contradicts what Stephen ‘Goysplaining’ Pollard of the Jewish Chronicle and Rabbi Jonathan Romain in the Torygraph have been telling people this week.

Tory Fibs has put a short clip of this part of Bercow and Campbell’s discussion in a tweet, which Mike posted on his blog yesterday. Along with twitter comments from other people supporting the Labour leader. Many of these messages came from Jewish Labour supporters, who have also found themselves abused as anti-Semites by those taken in or responsible for these lies.

Also, Mike and another twitter commenter, ‘Paul’, point out that Corbyn rarely voted with the Tories. The Conservatives mostly voted for New Labour policies, which is hardly surprising as both groups were Thatcherites. Corbyn, as an old-fashioned Socialist, would have opposed them.

There was also a tweet from RedCountessa, who said that there were plenty of left-wing Jewish people, who support Corbyn, but it was also very noticeable that they were rarely interviewed by the lamestream media to get the other side of the argument.

And Jill Gore showed a twitter response from a Mark Fleischmann to show the odious response some individuals have towards Jews, who support Corbyn. So convinced was Fleischmann that no true Jew could ever support the Labour leader, that he was demanding the Jews who did to prove their Jewishness. I’m not Jewish, but this strikes me as a form of anti-Semitism itself. It’s as racist as Richard Spencer ranting about ‘octaroons’ to smear Blacks and people of mixed race, and in my opinion, anti-racist Whites, ’cause he can’t understand how real White people don’t hate Blacks.

And there were other tweeters attacking Ian Austin, who was in the news yesterday telling everyone to vote for Boris.

Pauline Lane retweeted a message from Children’s Poet Laureate, Michael Rosen, asking the Tory party to stop using the Holocaust and the threat of anti-Semitism to attract people to the party of Windrush, the Hostile Environment Policy, the anti-refugee and 20 years of austerity.

There was also a tweet from ‘Norman’ of Austin interrupting Michael Rosen’s testimony before the Education Committee for Holocaust Education. Norman states that he was aware of Austin, because of his support for Phil Woolas. Woolas was a ‘moderate’ Labour candidate, who got deselected because he ran a dirty campaign designed to get White voters angry and smearing the rival candidate, a Muslim, as a supporter of terrorism. But his interruption of Rosen showed how really horrible Austin is. Rosen testified that when the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands, all nine Jews were deported. Austin says something about how we cannot know what would have happened in Britain, because we fought back and stood alone against the Nazis. Rosen corrects him about this, stating that we had the support of two major powers, the US and Russia.

Rosen is quite correct. We didn’t stand alone. We not only had the support of America and Russia, but we were also supported by the entire resources of the British Empire. If we hadn’t, I gather that we too would probably have only lasted a week. As for what happened on the Channel Islands, Norman states that his grandfather evacuated from Jersey, and that Austin ‘is wrong’.

Absolutely right there, too. The Nazis did invade UK/ Britain, as the Channel Islands are part of it. And the people there were starved, they saw Russian P.O.W.’s worked to death as subhuman slaves, as they were seen by the Nazis, as well as the deportation of the islands’ Jewish citizens. And we can be sure that what happened there, would have happened elsewhere in Britain if the Nazis had invaded. Years ago Anne Applebaum wrote a piece in the Spectator saying that Brits would have collaborated with the Nazis, which I think was probably based on the evidence of the collaboration of the island authorities with the Nazis. This comes from the Speccie, which is the arch-Tory magazine.

And Josh tweeted a clip from Question Time, in which a Jewish lady stood up and attacked the Tories and the Conservative media for using anti-Semitism to smear and demonise Corbyn and the Labour party. The lady states that she and all her family are Jewish, and they’re not scared of leaving the house because of anti-Semitism. The Tories and the press take quotes of context to vilify Corbyn. But only 7 per cent of the time do they discuss his policies. 80 per cent of the time, she says, they’re just attacking his character, because his policies are right.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/08/never-mind-the-newspapers-bercow-buries-claims-of-anti-semitism-against-corbyn/

Clearly, not all Jews buy this rubbish about Corbyn being an anti-Semite by a long chalk. Ken Livingstone, who has now resigned from the party because of the smears and suspensions, said in an interview with George Galloway that he had Jewish people walk up to him in the street and tell him that they know he’s not anti-Semitic.

Perhaps that explains the desperation of the Tories to keep repeating the claim. Because now more and more people don’t believe it!

Michael Brooks on Ellen Degeneres’ Hypocrisy and Friendship with George Dubya

Michael Brooks is a co-presenter and has his own show with Sam Seder on Sam Seder’s Majority Report. In this video, he adds his comments to the criticism Ellen Degeneres has earned about her friendship with George ‘Dubya’ Bush and her hypocritical treatment of her writing team. Degeneres, who considers herself politically liberal, and who came out as a lesbian on her own show a few years ago, provoked outrage when she was filmed sitting next George Dubya and his wife at a football game, chatting affably.

Left-wing Americans and others, who simply believe that America’s invasion of Iraq was morally wrong and support gay rights, were understandably upset that Degeneres was sitting with the man responsible for the illegal invasion and for trying to have it written into the Constitution that people of the same sex could not marry.

In response, Degeneres tried to explain herself on her own show. She said that her friendship with the wretched former president was no different than the other friendships she had we people, whose political views she didn’t share. She then said that we all should be kinder to each other.

Sam Seder made a video himself about her attempts to excuse herself. He made the point that Bush was responsible for the deaths, multilation and displacement of millions of people in Iraq and the Middle East. He also rebutted her call for people to be kind to each other on the grounds that you can believe in it, but does it mean you should be kind to a serial killer, who hasn’t stopped killing, believes there’s nothing he’s done wrong and will take that kindness as an indication that you’re fine with him killing.

In this video, Brooks also weighs in against Degeneres. He points out that she’s also a union-buster. Despite claiming that her writing team were all family to her, when they took part in the Writers’ Guild strike she sacked them all and replaced them with blacklegs.

But the main piece of his video is another, posted on Twitter by Rafael Shimunov. This shows the terrible reality behind Degeneres self-justification by placing behind her images of Iraq and its war-torn people. He also points out we shouldn’t be surprised by Degeneres’s friendship with Bush. They’re both part of the rich 1 per cent, supporting each other against the majority.

I realise that this is an American matter, and that Degeneres is hardly known over here, although I have seen her show broadcast on one of the cable/satellite channels. But there are issues of integrity here, which also affect journalists and broadcasters generally. Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair are still putting their oar in about current events, with Blair commenting on Corbyn’s leadership of the party and Campbell interviewing McDonnell in GQ. Both Blair and Campbell share the responsibility of the Iraq invasion with Bush, and could fairly be described as war criminals. They have no moral right whatsoever to give political judgments or recommendations to anyone on the left. At the same time, there is a new film ready to be released about the civil servant, who leaked the papers about the Iraq invasion in order to prevent it. This woman has far more integrity, and the film about her, is in my view, of far more moral worth, than Degeneres’ pleadings for kindness towards a man, who destroyed an entire country simply as a display of imperial dominance and corporate profit.

One of the female Labour politicos – I’ve forgotten who – has sparked controversy because she refuses to be friends with Conservatives. As these videos show, she has a point.