Here’s another cartoon in which I express my views on Israel and the fake anti-Semitism witch-hunt that’s been launched to protect it from reasonable criticism. Israel has a policy of demolishing Palestinian settlements it decides are illegal in order to clear the land for the construction of new homes for Israeli settlers. This policy has jumped into high gear as new settler towns are being constructed in the occupied territories. The cartoon therefore shows a squad of Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at a Palestinian family as a bulldozer in the background demolishes other houses.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, unfortunately, chooses to try to silence reporting of atrocities and wrongdoing by the Israeli state. Hence the cartoon shows someone from the Board with the Israeli flag behind him saying ‘If you talk about this, we’ll smear you as an anti-Semite’. Alan Rusbridger has said in a documentary on the Israel lobby presented by Peter Oborne that when he was editor of the Guardian, he would be met by the president of the Board and their pet lawyer if he reported atrocities by the Israelis or the allies. They would complain that the reports would provoke hatred against Jews. When the BBC correctly reported the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by the Lebanese Christian Phalange, who were allies of Israel, the Board accused the Beeb of anti-Semitism and biased reporting.
I’ve also added a caption that says
‘This is a public health warning by the Board of Deputies of British Jews on behalf of Israel’s propaganda department’. It follows the revelation in the Board’s statement for last year that they have connections to the Israeli embassy, the IDF and the Office of Strategic Affairs, which is the department of the Israeli state that runs official propaganda. And as so many victims of the anti-Semitism smear campaign are Jewish – four-fifths of accused Labour party members- it seems very much to me that the Board is now a sectarian anti-Semitic organisation.
First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.
The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.
But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.
As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.
David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.
The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansingof the Palestinians.
This is another video from Middle East Eye that’s been posted on YouTube. It shows mobs of Israeli rioters attacking shops and businesses owned by Palestinians. You can see these thugs waving the Israeli flag. It’s an absolutely chilling sight, especially as it brings to my mind Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht, when the Nazis attacked and smashed Jewish owned businesses. This is very much the kind of video the Board of Deputies of British Jews does not want you to see. Peter Oborne, a deeply principle journalist, who previously worked for the Torygraph, made a video over ten years ago for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby. He interviewed Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Groan, and Avi Shlaim, an Oxford expert on the Middle East. Rusbridger described how, when his newspaper ran stories about Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians and their allies, the president of the Board would turn up with his pet lawyer in tow to complain that the story would increase anti-Semitism. The Board also denounced the Beeb as anti-Semitic because its highly respected correspondents on the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin, also reported Israeli atrocities, including the massacre of Palestinian refugees by their allies, the Christian Phalange. Shlaim stated that the Beeb’s reporting was actually overwhelmingly factually correct, although there were a couple of minor faults, according to an independent review body.
It is Israeli Fascist violence like this that Jeremy Corbyn opposes, not Jews. As have any number of pro-Palestinian Jewish activists – Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and veteran thesp Miriam Margolyes. Nearly ten years ago Margolyes condemned the attacks on Gaza as ‘a proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. It is because of their activism on behalf of the Palestinians that these people have been foully smeared and reviled as anti-Semites.
It’s time this stopped. Terrorism by anyone is wrong, and I don’t agree with the Palestinian attacks either.
But its time the Israeli attacks on Palestinians ceased, Netanyahu condemned for his barbarous treatment of the country’s indigenous Arabs, and the Board condemned for seeking to cover up such racist barbarity.
This is another excellent video from Tele Sur’s Empire Files. In it Abby Martin interviews ordinary Israelis on the street in Jerusalem about the Palestinians and their country. She also talks to Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli human rights activists.
The attitude expressed by these Israelis, many of whom are young people, is that Israel is rightfully theirs by virtue of it being the Jewish homeland 2,000 years ago. The Palestinians have no history there. Some feel that they should be kept separate in their own settlements because they’re a terrorist threat. Others simply feel that they have no place in the Jewish state. Two young women talk about kicking them out in Hebrew, with one telling her friend that she can’t say that. One young man proudly states that he is a member of Lehava, a Jewish organisation set up to discourage mix marriages and interracial romance between Jews and Palestinians.
Several of the speakers claim that the Palestinians are actually well treated. A few deny that they have ever existed historically, and that Palestine was empty before they arrived. They also claim that it is Jews, who have built everything in Israel and improved the land. Israeli should build more settlements and houses for its own people. One young man says that it’s fitting that the Palestinians are suffering because 1,400 years ago it was the Palestinians who threw the Jews out of the country. It wasn’t the Romans. An elderly man believes that the Nazis and the Palestinians were sent to punish the Jewish people for their sins. Some advance the religious justification for Jewish possession of Israel: that God gave it to them. The Palestinians should go back to Iraq or wherever it is they came from. Other people deny that Israel is an apartheid state, with one saying that if you go to Jnin, you won’t see a Jewish face. They also claim that international criticism of Israel and the BDS movement is anti-Semitic, stating that Turkey doesn’t face the same criticism for its settlements in Cyprus and that North Korea, a far worse state, doesn’t experience the same international condemnation. Some state that it is occupation, and that the occupation is good, while others deny that Israel is occupied territory. They argue that it isn’t, because no-one talks about America being occupied because of the English presence in North America. Some people also state that the Palestinians are treated well. They have been given Gaza, and should go back there. And the Israeli state has treated them with restraint. If it were the Russians or Americans, within three days the Palestinians would be gone. One man, who believes the occupation should be more humane, says that he is abuse as a leftist, a terrible insult in Israel, for his views.
They’re all proud of their country, and say that people should come there to see how safe it is, and how well the Palestinians are treated.
Barkan states very clearly that Israel is an apartheid state, not quite like South Africa, but it certainly fits the definition of the crime of apartheid under international law. The debate about Palestinian rights is presented as a complex issue due to Israeli self-delusion. The Israelis see themselves, or want to themselves, as liberal and progressive, and so try to convince themselves that it is far more complex than simply Israelis oppressing Palestinians. Barkan states that everyone is brought up to believe this and to be a fighter in the IDF. He believed it, until he saw through it. He also states that there isn’t a left in Israel. Instead there are left Zionists, and the real debate isn’t about whether the Palestinians should have rights, but about whether they want a large Israel with no Palestinians or a small Israel with no Palestinians. They also hide the reality of the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1948. Some, however, will admit it, but say it’s a good thing. He also points out that it wasn’t just Palestinian land and property that was seized, but also their culture. The Israeli National Library went around seizing books from vacated Palestinian homes. There is a concerted effort to erase the Palestinians and their culture from history. Barkan certainly doesn’t believe that Israel should be exclusively a Jewish state. It isn’t a Jewish state, except in the same sense that South Africa was a White state: through force. Palestinians rights should be non-negotiable, and the Israeli apartheid system dismantled.
This is shocking, though it’s not surprising that so many Israelis view Palestinians as terrorists or a security threat. It is also unsurprising that so many of them claim that the land is rightfully theirs based on God’s grant of the land to the Abraham and the Jewish people in the Bible. The Zionist pioneers were secular, but as Jewish authors and activists critical of Israel have shown, they have always cited the Bible as the basis of their claim. Some of the views they advance is just Israeli propaganda. It might have been Golda Meir who started the idea that before the Jewish settlers arrived in the 1890s or so the land was vacant and unoccupied – ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, the slogan goes. This has been long refuted using land records from the Ottoman Empire, so it’s ironic that one of the speakers wonders where the Palestinians were during the centuries of Ottoman occupation. The simple answer is: there. Despite the fact that the Israeli claim has long been disproven, you still hear from American right-wing sites. As for the Diaspora and the Jewish exile, the Palestinians definitely weren’t responsible for that. Jews under Islam were generally better treated and suffered fewer restrictions than in Christian Europe. And you could also argue that the ultimate homeland of the Jewish people is also Iraq. Before he migrated to Canaan, Abraham and his father, Terah, lived in the city of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia.
I don’t believe that all Israelis hold these views. The Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem and others have been very critical of the Israeli state’s increasing encroachment on Palestinian land and the dispossession of its people. But it’s clear that such attitudes are widespread. And it is these genocidal views that the British establishment and organisations like the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and celebrities like Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman are protecting and encouraging when they denounce even the mildest criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. I dare say that some of them may genuinely believe that they are not supporting a form of apartheid, and that the Israeli state is serious about a two-state solution. But Barkan is probably right, and this is just a form a self-delusion.
I don’t doubt that this video is very much the kind of film the Board of Deputies would like to hide, because of the unflattering exposure of the horrendous views of some of the Israeli public. As Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby revealed way back in 2009, the Board tries to silence any critical reporting of Israel and atrocities committed by its armed forces, no matter how factual, objective and impartial, with charges of anti-Semitism and claims that it will cause people to hate Jews. But there are also many ordinary, self-respecting Jews that are deeply critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. And we’ve seen in the recent Labour suspensions of Moshe Machover and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, how these thoroughly decent people are being smeared and silenced in order to give the false impression of a united Jewish community four-square behind Israel.
Which is why films like this are necessary. They need to be seen and made to expose the carefully constructed and maintained lies of the Israeli state and the British establishment. And the people genuinely working for a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, real anti-racist Jews and gentiles, who also fight anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred in Europe and the rest of the world, need to be supported.
One of the points Blum makes in his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, is that the press and the media are complicit in American imperialism and its attendant horrors and crimes through propaganda designed to promote and justify it. And it isn’t what it publishes so much as what it doesn’t report. And news coverage of Israel in America is also very biased. As an example of what American’s didn’t read, he discusses the statement by a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and leaders of the extreme right-wing Shas party, Ovadia Yusuf, that non-Jews were created by the Almighty to serve Israelis. Blum wrote
‘Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel,’ said Rabbi Ovadia Yusef in a sermon in Israel on October 16, 2010. Rabbi Yosef is the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and the founder and spiritual leader of the Shas party, at that time one of the three major components of the Israeli government. ‘Why are gentiles needed?’ he continued. ‘They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [master] and eat,’ he said to some laughter.
Pretty shocking, right? Apparently not shocking enough for the free and independent American mainstream media. Not one daily newspaper picked it up. Not one radio or television station. Neither did the two leading US news agencies, Associate Press and United Press International, which usually pick up anything at all newsworthy. And the words, or course, did not cross the kips of any American politician or State Department official Rabbi Yosef’s words were reported in English only by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, a US-based news service (October 18), and then picked up by a few relatively obscure news agencies or progressive websites. We can all imagine the news coverage if someone like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said something like ‘Jews have no place in the world but to serve Islam.’ (p. 275).
People won’t have read it or seen it on the news over here either. Peter Oborne, in his documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches in 2009, described the attempts by the lobby in this country to suppress any reporting of atrocities committed by Israel and its allies. One of the talking heads on the programme was Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Graon. He told how, whenever his newspaper did so, he’d receive an angry visit from the President of the Board of Deputies and his pet lawyer demanding that the story should be spiked on the grounds that it would cause Brits to hate Jews. Senior, and very respected BBC journalists like Orla Guerin were also accused of anti-Semitism by the Board because they dared to report on national news the massacre of Palestinians by Israel’s allies, the Lebanese Christian militia the Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. A subsequent inquiry found that the report was not anti-Semitic, and only factually inaccurate in one detail.
Now I can appreciate that there are very good reasons why Yusef’s odious remark shouldn’t be reported. It is precisely the views that the Nazis and other anti-Semites and Fascists have claimed Jews have of gentiles. And claims that Jews believe they are superior to gentiles and wish to rule them are behind all the murderous conspiracy theories about them, theories that led to the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Such views of Jewish racial superiority, as I understand it, profoundly contradict Jewish theology. Contemporary rabbis have argued that Israel’s status as the ‘Chosen People’ does not mean that they are racially superior to anyone us, but rather that they have a special duty as a servant nation to act as moral exemplars, ‘to be a light unto the gentiles’ as the Hebrew Bible states. The prophet Isaiah also states that Jews in exile are to work and pray for the health of the city that they share with their gentile fellows. Since at least the 1920s Jews have been very careful to show that they reject the racial supremacist views that anti-Semites impute to them.
I very well appreciate why decent people would not want to report Yusef’s odious views, especially now with genuine anti-Semitism rising along with racism and Fascism generally. But I believe that these fears are somewhat exaggerated. The great mass of the American and British public, as well as the French, for that matter, aren’t anti-Semitic. Tony Greenstein has published surveys showing that the vast majority of Brits either have a positive view of Jews, or don’t have any particular views about them one way or the other. Less than 10 per cent have negative views of them. That’s clearly too large, but it shows that real Jew-haters are in a minority. Yusef’s views could easily be reported, accompanied by articles making the point that he speaks only for a Fascist Israeli fringe, accompanied by firm rebuttals and denunciations from respected Jewish organisations. There are any number of Jewish critics of Likudnik Fascism.
Besides, Yusef also has other, equally disgusting views about other Jews. A few years ago he got in the pages of Private Eye and a few other publications for what he said about the Holocaust. He declared that the European Jews, who were murdered by the Nazis, got what they deserve because of their sins in their past lives. Yusef may be a Jew, but that’s blatantly anti-Semitic. I understand that it’s also rubbish theology. Judaism doesn’t have a doctrine of reincarnation. The closest I can find to it is the Wheel of Gilgal in Karaite Judaism. If I understand it correctly, this holds that the Lord sometimes gives sinners a second chance and so they are reincarnated after their death. But the Karaites are different from mainstream Talmudic Judaism. Whether you’re Jew or gentile, Yusef’s an unrepresentative, indeed, anti-Semitic, nasty bigot talking nonsense.
But I suspect the refusal to report his remarks isn’t actually about fears that they would promote genuine anti-Semitic. It’s to protect Likud and its coalition partners. An Israeli philosopher and chemist coined the term ‘Judeonazism’ to describe such views amongst Israeli politicians. He was, like many Jews, including Israelis, bitterly critical of the Israeli state’s treatment of the Palestinians. While the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism includes comparing Jews to Nazis, in this case the comparison is entirely apt. Likud and its coalition partners include too many, who have similar views. If Yusef was simply a gutter preacher, whom no-one in Israel listened to, he could be dismissed as yet another fanatical nutter. But he was the founder and spiritual head of one Likud’s coalition partners. His comments should have been reported, not because of what they show about Jews or even Israelis, but because of what they show about Likud.
I’ve made it clear that Fascism, racism and anti-Semitism are murderous doctrines that should be fought everywhere, whether it’s Nazi Germany, Netanyahu’s Israel or present-day China. But by demanding that the western media not report comments like Yusef’s, and the atrocities against the Palestinians that views like his promote, organisations like the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are complicit in the perpetration of this Zionist permutation of Fascism.
Remember what one liberal Jewish opponent of Zionism once said: ‘To be a Jew is always to stand with the oppressor, never the oppressor’. It’s a view that condemns the right-wing media and the Israel lobby, as well as the Likudnik regime they protect.
On Saturday Zelo Street revealed that there’s a real crisis at the Grauniad. Its readership has plummeted and in response, Kath Viner has announced a swingeing round of job cuts and redundancies. Whole sections of the Saturday edition will vanish for good. The Street went on to ponder whether left-wingers should go on defending and buying it. One the one hand, the standard of its journalism is a cut above the rest of the press. On the downside, it ain’t the paper it was ten years ago.
In Zelo Street’s opinion, the paper has conceded too much to the press pack and the groupthink that infests the rest of the media. It would not expose political corruption, like the Hamilton scandal that caused such outrage and merriment in the 90s. Nor would it expose the phone-hacking scandal. It would not go out on a limb to defend whistleblowers from the intelligence agencies, like Edward Snowden. As regards the Labour Party, it backed Ed Miliband against Corbyn, and then Kier Starmer. And it always reported on Corbyn from the hostile perspective of his enemies. And so now it is on its last legs, its supporters like Zelo Street are wondering whether to go on with it. As you can tell from the replies his piece has received, others are very sure they won’t. They despise it for his fascination with America, which has turned its politics to that of American Democratic centrism, way to the right of traditional British politics. They despise the fact that Viner and her lead columnists are all alumni of Oxford University, so that their views reflect those of the metropolitan bubble. And they really hate it for its Blairism, pushed by people like Marina Hyde and Polly Toynbee. This was another cause of its fascination with America, among other things. Blair was a firm Atlanticist, and wished to turn the Labour Party into the domestic equivalent of the Democrats.And they also hate the way it pushed the anti-Semitism smears under Jonathan Freedland.
I share their feelings. I can’t say I’m a Guardian reader – I’ve only ever read it occasionally. In some ways it’s too left for me, and too right-wing in others. As regards the Labour party, it and the Absurder have a long history of promoting the Liberals in the 1975 general election. I believe that in the 2017 election it actually ran an editorial telling people to vote Lib Dem.
And it tried everything it could to smear Corbyn. One of the most risible was a letter it published from some deranged female, arguing that he and Bernie Sanders were obviously homophobes and misogynists because they preferred loose, baggy clothing over fitted outfits. This was back to the bad old days of the male-dominated trade union movements of the 1970s. This was published despite the fact that Bernie has turned up at the invitation of many women’s groups and feminist rallies because of the support he’s given the American women’s movement. I’m sure the same is true for Corbyn. As the former Labour leader has listed break-making as one of his hobbies, he can’t be said to be a stickler for upholding traditional gender roles.
And then there was the anti-Semitism smears. They were pushed as hard as they could by Freedland and others. Many of the hacks, like Jessica Elgot, who co-penned the recent article repeating the libel that Mike was an anti-Semite, were out-and-out members of the extreme Zionists now comprising the British Jewish establishment. As I’ve blogged again and again, they define anti-Semitism almost wholly in terms of anti-Zionism. No Jewish voices critical of Israel, whether liberal Zionist or anti-Zionist, religious or secular, may be allowed to be heard. Historical truth is covered up and propaganda and lies pushed in its place. Corbyn was never an anti-Semite, and neither were his followers. Especially not his followers. But they pushed it until this gentle man, who has actually done so much in his career to support the Jewish community, appeared to be little less than Hitler incarnate.
Rusbridger wasn’t perfect. He seemed almost an enamoured of Blair as the rest of the media. But he stood up to the Israel lobby. He appears in Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby describing how, when he accurately reported atrocities committed by Israel and her Christian allies in Lebanon, he would be paid a visit by the head of the Board of Deputies and his pet lawyer, screaming that it was anti-Semitic. As they did to everyone, even highly respected foreign correspondents like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin at the Beeb. Now that situation has been reversed, with Groaniad hacks publishing dangerous, vile nonsense about how politicos from Poland’s Law and Justice party, which has a streak of anti-Semitism a mile wide, aren’t really Jew-haters because they’re good friend of Israel. Israel is a good friend of every murderous bastard, even if they are real Nazis, so long as they buy their guns and armaments.
Most of the Groaniad’s readers were left-wing Labour. They heartily supported Corbyn, and the Graun repaid them by attacking their hero and, by extension, they themselves, at every opportunity. And the hacks themselves were also hypocrites. One of the commenters on Zelo Street’s article states that none of the named, celebrity hacks on the rag was willing to take a pay cut to protect the jobs of the minions further down the journalistic ladder. And despite its own attacks on the system of unpaid internships, it used more unpaid workers than the other rags.
Viner has only herself to blame for this mess. If she wanted to win back readers, she’d go back on all this, clear out the Blairites and start producing reports and comment from a genuine, traditional Labour perspective. She start protecting whistleblowers and start writing genuinely critical articles against Israel and defend those falsely accused of anti-Semitism. But she won’t do that, because she’s a Blairite through and through.
She is killing the Guardian. And as it stands now, I and thousands of others don’t care if it dies.
Last week, presenter Emily Maitlis mysteriously disappeared from an edition of Newsnight, leaving it to be hosted by her colleague Kate Razzall. This was after she had made a few sharp, but entirely fair and justified comments, about Dominic Cummings’ breach of the lockdown regulations in the previous evening’s edition of the programme. This had resulted in the Beeb receiving a nasty message from 10 Downing Street. The Beeb, Razzall and Maitlis herself all denied that her disappearance from the show on the subsequent evening was due to official disapproval. But to everyone else capable of putting two and two together and making four, the link seemed obvious.
Unfortunately, the Tories and their supporters have been out there denying any such connection. One of the Tory-supporting channels on YouTube, We Got A Problem, has instead claimed that Maitlis flagrantly breached the Beeb’s impartiality rule, and was therefore rightly the subject of 40,000 complaints. I haven’t watched the wretched video on the reasonable grounds that if I do, it’ll just make me angry. But even without seeing it, it still seems to me that there are two obvious flaws with their argument. Firstly, Tory anger does not mean that Maitlis broke the Beeb’s guidelines. All it does is show that the Tories are angry. Secondly, how many of these messages are genuine? This is a good, fair question. The Tories have a history of using bots and some of the email and twitter messages that have appeared in the last few years applauding the Tories and particularly Boris Johnson have rung massively fake. There are two many similarities between them and an awful lot of have come from previously unknown internet addresses. There’s also the case of the various medical professionals who tweeted out their messages of endorsement to Boris for his handling of the Cornoavirus. Many of them were demonstrably fake. One of them used a photograph of a Greek paediatrics nurse in London, but affixed it to a fake identity of a gay doctor. The scandal was briefly discussed by the Beeb, who decided that there was too little information to make the connection with the Tories and suggested that it was someone trying to smear them. As the Beeb has a long and infamous history of pushing pro-Tory propaganda, and especially the noxious smears against Jeremy Corbyn over the past four years, I think the opposite is true. The Tweets were fakes from the Tories, and the Beeb was trying to defend them by suggesting that the messages were anti-Tory fakes.
Maitlis’ disappearance was shortly followed by that of Laura Kuenssberg. Goebbels’ true-blue Tory spiritual daughter also vanished from her position in front of the camera to take an unscheduled holiday. This was after she had tried asking further questions about Cummings’ short touring holiday to Durham and Barnard Castle at Bozo’s press briefing, when the Prime Minister stopped the ladies and gents of the fourth estate asking his Chief Medical and Chief Scientific Officers about the affair on the grounds that such queries were political, rather than scientific and medical. Kuenssberg gave no reason for her sudden absence, just the message “Not around for a few days – keep up with [BBC News] and [BBC Politics]“. It’s therefore entirely possible that, despite her loyal support of the Tories and flagrant breaches of the Beeb’s impartiality rules in their favour, she too had been the subject of official disapprobation and had been hit with the ban hammer.
Her announcement that she was taking a short leave of absence was greeted with messages of support by some. Others remembered just how biased she had been, and so sent messages such as “We might get some actual reported news for a change” or ask her if she had, like Maitlis, also been sanctioned. Others reminded her of the occasion a few years ago when she left the Beeb to work for ITV, and Peter Oborne’s tart comment about her being the Beeb’s equivalent of Robert Peston. Oborne is a journalist of immense integrity, who stopped writing for the Torygraph because of the way that paper’s management was demanding that articles should be written to suit their advertisers. He also presented a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 attacking the Israel lobby and urged people to vote Labour at last year’s election.
Zelo Street in their article about Kuenssberg disappearance concluded
‘So what gives with Ms Kuenssberg? Taking a few days off while the country is in lockdown and in the middle of a significantly sized national crisis? Curiouser and curiouser.
There is one further problem: the BBC will manage fine without her. I’ll just leave that one there.’
In addition to its own, innate right-wing bias, the Beeb’s also under additional pressure from the Tories. They want to privatise it for the benefit of their donors in the rival, private broadcasters, like Sky and one Rupert Murdoch. The Corporation is facing devastating cuts and the Director-General is up for replacement in a few years’ time. This brings with it fears that the Tories will impose one of their henchmen, who’ll carry out their plans of closing it all down and selling it off. Boris is already threatening to decriminalize nonpayment of the license fee, which would starve the Corporation of millions of pounds if it goes ahead. It therefore seems all too likely to me that, no matter how impartial or even pro-Tory presenters may be, the Corporation is so terrified of Tory displeasure that any offending journo now faces a few days’ suspension. Even if, like Kuenssberg, they have resolutely toed the government line all the way down the road.
As for the Tories themselves, they’ve shown themselves to be the party of fake news and lying propaganda. Their style of handling the media now seems closer to that of Putin than other, properly democratic nations. If a hack displeases the Arkhiplut, he sends a couple of state toughs round to beat them. Other hazards include being thrown down stairwells.
Johnson hasn’t gone that far yet, but give him time. And the lying Tory media would excuse and applaud such brutality when it comes.
Ho ho! Zelo Street yesterday published a very interesting and amusing article about the continuing decline of the lamestream press. Jim Waterson, a hack at the Guardian, posted a series of tweets about the latest circulation figures for British newspapers. And they aren’t encouraging. Zelo Street has said for the past couple of months that the press has been badly hit by the lockdown. People simply aren’t buying papers. It’s why the Murdoch rags, inter alia, have been pushing for the lockdown to be lifted and actually took to implore their readers and internet followers to #buyapaper. They’re not remotely interested in the welfare of the great British public. But they are worried about falling sales and what Murdoch and the other chief inmates of News International will do about them – like start laying people off.
Waterson tweeted that, although the newspaper sales figures were supposed to be out that day, the industry had insisted that they should no longer be published. The monthly ABC sales charts have also been permanently stopped because they give a ‘stimulus to write a negative narrative of circulation decline.’ Which in English, rather than the garbled version spouted Newslink’s yuppie manager in the comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey, means that it encourages people to write about how the press is in trouble. Nevertheless, most of the papers did publish their figures. The exceptions were the Times, Sunday Times, Torygraph and the Scum. And the paper with the highest circulation was the Daily Heil, with 944,981 copies sold.
Well, as the character, Gus, once said, I’ll just throw that into your intellectual wok and see if it stir fries.
Zelo Street points out that this is the first time no newspaper has sold less than a million a copies. It also suggests that this has happened to the Sun, which is why the super, soaraway Current Bun is not publishing its figures. It’s possibly been supplanted by the Heil for the first time in 40+ years. The Street also argues quite reasonably that both the Heil’s and Scum’s Sunday editions will have worse sales than the dailies. This means that the press is in terminal decline and we’re entering the endgame.
Novara Media’s excellent Aaron Bastiani put an additional boot into the Murdoch title’s shame. If newspapers won’t publish their sales figures, then the Beeb shouldn’t review their front pages every morning. Unless we know these papers’ reach, it’s just giving them free advertising.
Good point.
Zelo Street also states that the press is probably going to lose even more readers when they work out that the papers they support wanted the lockdown lifted for the sake of their own profits, not out of concern for the public’s wellbeing. A number of may well die from Coronavirus infections picked up when the papers told them that the disease was nothing to worry about. And their survivors will put two and two together and decide not to continue supporting them. Or even bringing a class lawsuit against them.
My guess is that the reason the Torygraph and the Murdoch rags aren’t publishing their sales figures is partly economic. Apart from being embarrassed at how pathetically their mighty organs are doing, they’re also afraid of repercussions from advertisers. If they find out how low the newspapers are selling, they may well want the advertising rates reduced. This will mean a further drop in these newspaper’s income. Which means greater losses, and the threat of even more redundancies.
To many people it will come as absolutely no surprise that the Times and the Torygraph are in such a mess. Private Eye have covered many times their problems and falling circulation in its ‘Street of Shame’ column. In the case of the Torygraph, it’s problems are due to bad corporate management, including a devotion to internet gimmicks rather than solid news reporting and deliberately altering news content in their interests of the advertisers. This last policy so infuriated Peter Oborne that he left the paper and went instead to the Heil, making his own criticisms of it very public. There have already been redundancies and cutbacks, but these have failed to halt the paper’s continuing decline. The Eye has also said that the Times’ sales are now so low, that if it were any other paper it would either have been folded or put up for sale by its management years ago. But it’s the British paper of record, and so allows Murdoch to grab a place at the government table because of its prestige. Which means that if its circulation is so low that there’s no reason the Beeb, or anyone else, should take any notice of it, Murdoch’s ability to influence government decisions, even to act as kingmaker in his decision which party to support, is severely damaged.
Ditto with the Scum. It certainly didn’t have the Times‘ prestige or even its journalistic standards – indeed, it’s a matter of debate whether the scabrous rag had any standards at all. But it was Britain’s leading newspaper with a huge circulation, and more visibly influenced British politics through its shrill trumpeting of everything Thatcher and the Tories ever did, until Murdoch decided to flirt with New Labour. Now that’s also been seriously damaged.
Zelo Street is right in that these newspapers still have an influence beyond their print sales through their online presence, but there are problems here as well. Many of their articles are behind paywalls, which means that many casual readers won’t read them because they won’t want to pay or subscribe to the wretched rags. And if they are free, then it comes from money made from print sales. Which mean that when those go down, the paper’s ability to put up their articles free on the net also declines. The situation does not look good.
I’ve no sympathy for any of these foul rags. I suppose it’ll be a shame if the Times folds, after lasting for nearly 300 or so years. But as it, its Sunday counterpart and the Scum are just rightwing, Tory propaganda rags that lies, smear and libel decent people with absolutely no compunction, as far as I’m concerned it deserves to go under. Britain will be better off without them.
And while we’re on the subject, what about the sales figures for Private Eye? I know it’s a magazine rather than a newspaper, but much of it is news. My guess is that it’s circulation is also falling in line with the rest of the press. It’s hostility and snide remarks about left-wing news sites and internet organisations like The Canary and The Skwawkbox also seem to suggest that it’s afraid of their competition. Private Eye does publish some very good stuff, but it has also promoted the Blairites and the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn’s Labour party, as well as other material which is utterly wrong. So I have very mixed feelings about it.
As for the rest of the press, their mostly right-wing propaganda rags, and so absolutely nothing worthwhile will be lost if they go under as well.
Zelo Street this afternoon has posted the results of a very interesting poll conducted by Sky News. The channel took a survey of 1,652 Brits, asking them about the lockdown, whether they trusted BoJob and Starmer, and also if they trusted the media, among other questions. Zelo Street’s article concentrates on the results for politicos and the media. Which are, ahem, interesting. And not good news for any parties, but especially not the ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate.
The channel reported that although they were increasingly anxious and sadder, the British public were emphatic that the lockdown should continue. 51 per cent of the public trusted Johnson to tackle the Coronavirus, but 39 per cent don’t. This gave our clown prime minister a score of +12.
Only 25 per cent of those polled trust Starmer, while 34 per cent don’t, meaning that he has a score of -9.
Trust in journalists was very low. Zelo Street began its article by stating that the British press has been at the bottom of the league in Europe in the esteem in which it is held by the public. It’s trusted even less than the press of countries that have, within living memory, been dictatorships, like Spain, Portugal and the eastern European nations. Only 24 per cent trust TV journos, while 64 per cent don’t, giving them a net score of -40. Only 17 per cent responded that they trusted newspaper journalists, compared to 72 per cent who didn’t. They therefore had a score of -55.
Ian Dunt, a broadcast hack, tweeted that it was hard to overstate what a disaster those results were. A tweeter identifying him- or herself as the CEO Antifa answered him with “Remember when Peter Oborne tried to warn you all about this and got blacklisted by most publications?”. Zelo Street reminds us that Oborne, a journo of immense integrity, has warned for some time of the tendency of some in the broadcast media simply to repeat the claims of anonymous government spokespeople. He named Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston as two serious offenders. Zelo Street concludes
‘Now has come the public’s verdict. Don’t say you weren’t warned, media people.’
It’s shocking and dispiriting that just over half of the British public trust Johnson to battle the Coronavirus. This is despite the long list of his failures, beginning with the Tories’ underfunding of the NHS, their refusal to update the plans for a pandemic emergency and take on board the lessons from wargaming such an emergency way back in 2016, to Johnson’s refusal to heed medical advice back in January and impose a lockdown. It ignores the way Johnson, and some in the Tory ranks even now, pushed a pseudo-scientific commitment to herd immunity, which could leave up to 200,000 – 250,000 dead, in favour of the economy. And then there is the continuing failure to order sufficient supplies of PPE for the front line medical and care workers. The FT has now stated that the official figure of 18,000 deaths is an underestimate. It does not include those dying in care homes or at home. The real figure is 41,000. Some of these people could have been saved if Johnson had acted sooner. If he’d actually gotten off his Eton-educated arse and attended the Cobra meetings. If he really had worked all hours round the clock, instead of just having his shills tell us that, while he bunked off at weekends. If he actually took the work of government seriously, instead of simply acting out his power fantasies.
Nevertheless, the stats also show that trust in Johnson is falling. When Hope Not Hate did a similar poll a couple of weeks ago, they put trust in Johnson at 64 per cent. It’s down 13 per cent. No wonder that the Tory spin doctors are putting up fake twitter accounts and Tory front organisations are putting up spurious signs, all telling us how wonderful Johnson is and how the emergency services and NHS staff love him. He and his followers are afraid, because if the trend continues, after a couple of weeks trust in him will be as low as Starmer’s.
As for the public distrust of the Labour leader, some of that is a successful hangover from the vicious media campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. But some of it may well be due to his own background in the Labour far right, his lack of response to Johnson and his failure to act so far against the plotters and intriguers that deliberately sabotaged Labour’s election campaign. As has been pointed out, Starmer was a participant in one of the coups against Corbyn. He managed to score points earlier this week against Dominic Raab at Prime Ministers’ questions, but mostly he’s been quiet. He has taken zero action against the plotters, racists and intriguers named in the leaked report, instead seeming determined to find and punish the whistleblowers. Members are considering suing the party and asking for a return of their subscriptions on grounds of breach of contract because of the antics of the Labour plotters. If enough people did this, it would wreck the party.
Starmer could regain public trust by acting decisively against the plotters in the leaked document. The media now consider it a non-story, because it doesn’t conform to their predetermined desire to paint Corbyn as an anti-Semite. But he could make it the story and, if properly advised, actually do something Corbyn couldn’t do and take control of the narrative. He could also gain more trust by actually increasing his public profile. By taking the lead and publicly criticising Johnson. The way is open for him to succeed and gain the trust of the public.
But I fear he won’t, because that means acting against the very same right-wingers who worked hard to put him, or someone like him, in place as leader of the party.
But the media are in a marginally worse position, as their venality and bias has meant that public confidence in them, and especially after their massively biased reporting of Corbyn and the Labour party, is now at a record low.
If this continues, then, when the lockdown is lifted, the press will still see a collapse in readers because by that time people will have worked out that they’re missing nothing by not buying them and their lies.
Okay, it’s the beginning of March, Boris Johnson’s government has settled into its new round of incompetence and personal vindictiveness, and the Tories have been caught in another islamophobia scandal. According to the Mirror, 20 Tory members were expelled for their horrendous views on Islam. BBC Politics Live in its wisdom decided to discuss the issue of race. Unfortunately, one of the guests they chose to talk about it was Daily Heil hack Melanie Phillips. The author of Londonistan, which claims that London is now seething with Islamist terrorists and that Muslims are intent on destroying western society, her views on race are closer to Tommy Robinson than Dr. Martin Luther King. And like the rest of the Israel lobby, she confuses anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. According to Zelo Street, she began by expressing her views on the leading contender for the Labour leadership. Keir Starmer, she opined, was a ‘very decent guy’, and she was sure he was going to put in eye-catchingly good measures to get rid of people, who have not been got rid of. As for Rebecca Long-Bailey’s response to questioning the day before, she declared that Long-Bailey was trying to avoid the fact that she had gone along with something she should never have gone along with, along with many other members of the Labour Party. Which was, she then explained, that Starmer wasn’t going to get on top of this problem. And that problem went beyond the Labour Party and permeated progressive politics. And it was all about hostility to Israel. She said
“It’s wrapped up in attitudes to Israel. It’s wrapped up with beliefs that what’s being talked about isn’t really anti-Semitism, it’s not really prejudice, it’s simply an attempt to stop criticism of Israel. In other words, even among people of goodwill, there is a very widespread failure to understand quite what this thing is that has come out of the woodwork, and until and unless people are prepared to acknowledge precisely what it is, and acknowledge the enormity of it, and the depth of it, no-one’s going to get on top of it”.
As Zelo Street points out, not only is Phillips highly presumptuous in arrogating to herself the authority to define what anti-Semitism is, she expands it so that it includes legitimate criticism of Israel. Even the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which includes amongst its examples criticisms of Israel, also allows legitimate criticism.
And Zelo Street also pointed out that Philip’s opinions were at variance with the facts. After all the evidence of anti-Semitism was passed to the cops, the rozzers only charged one person. Five were arrested, but four of them – three men and a woman – were released and told they would face no further action. That’s out of a party with nearly half a million members.
The Street concludes
‘If what Melanie Phillips was talking about “goes very deep”, how come only one person was charged with an offence? After all that evidence was handed over to the Police? After all the hype, if there was such a serious problem, wouldn’t one expect the numbers to be rather more significant than that? It’s almost as if someone was exaggerating.
Not that one could ever accuse Melanie Phillips of such behaviour. Perish the thought!’
In fact nearly all the allegations of galloping anti-Semitism in the Labour Party are fact-free. The people accused and expelled, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Cyril Chilson and many others, were smeared because they were supporters of Corbyn and/or critics of Israel. They are all genuine anti-racists, but the whole point of the anti-Semitism witch hunt is to close down criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, regardless as to truth or legitimacy. Eleven years ago Peter Oborne, a former Telegraph journalist of immense integrity, who just before the election announced his support for Corbyn, present a Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 on the Israel lobby. He talked to former Groaniad editor Alan Rusbridger, who told him that whenever the newspaper published a piece on Israeli atrocities, the head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews would turn up with his pet lawyer, moaning that coverage of such events would result in a rise in anti-Semitism. He also discussed how the Board had accused the Beeb of anti-Semitism because it dared to cover the massacre of Palestinians by the Lebanese Christian Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during that country’s civil war. The Phalange were allied to Israel, and therefore the coverage was anti-Semitic. And so were the very respected Beeb foreign correspondents, Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin, who reported it. When the Beeb tried to defend them, the defenders, in true witch hunt fashion, were also accused of anti-Semitism. And that included David Attenborough, the very well respected wildlife presenter and former head of BBC 2 many decades ago. The documentary interviewed the Oxford academic Avi Shlaim, an expert on Middle East affairs, who revealed that the Board’s complaints had been examine by the broadcasting regulators, and rejected except on a minor point. The Beeb’s reportage had been correct.
But this is immaterial to the Board and the rest of the Israel lobby. What matters is defending Israel, whatever it does. Even when that includes shooting nurses and unarmed protesters dead and torturing children. And the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is an important weapon in its defence. Because it states that some criticism of Israel may be anti-Semitic. This is expanded to mean all, or as many as the Israel lobby can get away with. It’s why Kenneth Stern, the Zionist American academic, who was one of those who formulated the definition, has criticised it for having a chilling effect on free speech about Israel.
The Tories and the Israel lobby are terrified of legitimate criticism of Israel. So terrified in fact, that they ignore the fact that anti-Semitism is far more prevalent in right-wing parties, and that almost all of it in this country comes from the far right. And so Melanie Phillips and her ideological ilk have precious little to say about members of the Met police having connections to real Nazi organisations, or Tommy Robinson greeting his supporters with ‘Shalom’ and appealing for more money to overthrow the White race – a clear reference to the real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
No, they’re far more worried about a united, resurgent Labour Party. A party that would allow legitimate criticism of Israel. And that says much about their racism and hypocrisy.
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