John McDonnell to the recent Labour Party Conference.

A General Election is almost upon us, and the choice for voters couldn't be starker. I'm reminded of the words of Rosa Luxemburg. Our choice is "socialism or barbarism". Yesterday, we announced some of our boldest policies yet to rebuild Britain. A Green New Deal for our NHS – investing in solar panels, low emission ambulances and a million trees planted across our hospitals. Free prescriptions to keep our NHS truly free. An end to indefinite immigration detention. The reintegration of private schools into the state sector. This is an exciting time to be a Labour member. Today, I'll be taking the stage to flesh out our plan to overhaul our economy in the name of social justice. We're going to tax privilege, redistribute wealth, and re-invest in public services. Labour is pioneering innovative socialist solutions for our uniquely modern economic problems. I'm proud to be part of our movement.

Semitic conspiracy against Corbyn.

By Kenneth Surin

I’ve just finished reading the uncorrected proof copy an excellent study of the manufactured Labour “antisemitism crisis”. [Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Antony Lerman, Justin Schlossberg and David Miller, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party & Public Belief (London: Pluto Press, 2019)]

The launching point for the book’s analysis is a national poll, accompanied by the use of focus groups, on how people make judgments and form opinions.

The results showed that on average people believed that a third of Labour Party members had been reported for antisemitism. A key part of the authors’ investigation was to examine how it could be that so many people came to believe this when the actual figure was far less than 1%.

The book focuses on how this chasm between (mis)perception came to exist. The authors used questionnaires as part of their survey, and the anonymous written answers show just how ignorant and poorly informed many Brits are— a significant percentage believe what they read in the trashy rightwing tabloids or what they see on TV!

Some focus group members even believed Corbyn would bring in Sharia Law if elected.

Bad News for Labour begins with an overview of the focus group discussions. Several participants in the focus groups who came believing that a third of Labour Party members had been reported for antisemitism revised this number downwards, sensibly, as the group discussions went on and participants took to educating each other.

At the same time focus group members believed the controversy has done serious damage to the party.

What is clear is that for Ukania’s Joe and Jill Normal, who don’t often go beyond the newspaper headlines to look at news sources, etc., it is the case that

MASSIVE MEDIA COVEREAGE OF X = X MUST BE A BIG PROBLEM.

Bad News for Labour then looks at the plethora of competing positions and interests within Labour which created a confusing context for dealing with the antisemitism controversy. The authors identify 3 main areas:

1) the argument that there was a significant and widespread problem regarding antisemitism within the Labour Party;

2) that the issue was being used to undermine Labour’s left leadership, and specifically Jeremy Corbyn, as part of the internal politics of the Party;

3) that the controversy was linked to the defence of Israel and attempts to change Labour policy with regard to that state.

The crucial factor here is that no matter what steps Labour’s left leadership takes to deal with the party’s antisemitism problems (and these steps have been taken, unevenly and somewhat slowly), those bent on ousting Corbyn as leader for reasons internal to the party’s politics will not cease their efforts no matter what Labour does to address antisemitism within its membership.

The perfect example here is Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, who is on the payroll of the UK’s Zionist lobby. Watson did his utmost to stoke the fires of the antisemitism crisis. Sensing now he has played his full hand on this issue, he is currently using Brexit as his foil for attacking Corbyn.

Labour has edged its way towards a fragile truce within itself on Brexit, by making the ridding of Johnson and the Tories its priority, so that having a general election is the first objective, and only after that can such matters as a second EU referendum with options of a viable deal and remain be contemplated.

Watson is now trying to upset this arrangement by saying a second Brexit referendum has to come before a general election (echoing a position taken by Blair a few days before)— a ridiculous proposition, because having a referendum first will simply reopen divisions within Labour that existed during and after the first Brexit referendum. Far better to win an election, which will leave Labour more in control of events (and probably more united by virtue of electoral success), and then tackle the thorny matter of a second EU referendum.

Watson was promptly slapped down by Corbyn.

Bad News for Labour sensibly suggests that the best way for Corbyn and the party’s left to overcome these attempts by Labour’s mainly Blairite rightwing to undermine the Left is for the Blairites to be deselected by their local Labour parties as candidates in the next election.

Several Blairites, knowing they face deselection, have already jumped ship and joined the centrist Lib Dems while a couple went on to be Independents. Other Blairites, knowing which way the wind is blowing, have announced they won’t be standing in the next election.

The outrage of the Labour Zionists making life difficult for Corbyn is highly selective. It is certainly true that some of these Labour MPs received antisemitic abuse (though mainly from people who were not party members).

At the same time, the Labour politician Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally who is shadow home secretary/interior minister, was targetted by racists, though this has received much less media attention. Amnesty International’s research showed that Abbott received 45% of all abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the 6 weeks before the 2017 election.

The crux of Labour’s antisemitism controversy is the bruhaha over its grudging acceptance of the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism”. The media’s coverage of this controversy was framed by 2 assumptions: that under Corbyn antisemitism in Labour had become “institutionalized”, and that Corbyn and his associates had failed to counter this.

The IHRA definition is deeply flawed, so much so that it is deemed not fit to be given any legal standing.

Media coverage of Labour’s disputes with this definition cloak this fact by referring to it as “the widely accepted IHRA definition”, “the widely accepted definition put forward by the IHRA”, “the IHRA’s widely accepted definition”, “the global definition of antisemitism”, “the globally recognized definition”, “the near universally accepted definition”, and so on, in effect suggesting that Labour was completely out of line in its reluctance to accept the 38-word definition, despite the fact that a powerful body of legal opinion saw it as a hopelessly vague statement accompanied by a rag-bag of “examples”.

The IHRA examples in effect make it automatic that any characterization of Israel as “racist” is perforce “antisemitic”, in this way placing Israel’s apartheid policy towards Palestinians beyond criticism.

Under immense pressure Labour alas caved-in and accepted the definition and all its examples.

Perhaps the fact that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s announcement in May that it was investigating Labour’s handling of antisemitism complaints following submissions from the Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Antisemitism had something to do with Labour’s capitulation on this score.

Bad News for Labour therefore trades on a double entendre—news that is bad for Labour, but also “faux news” that itself is bad precisely because of its all-too-common distortions, biases, and underlying malicious intent. It’s no surprise that two Murdoch papers, The Times and Sun, have been at the forefront of this campaign against Labour.

Perhaps more surprising are the outfits that kept company with Murdoch newspapers in this campaign against Corbyn, namely, the supposedly objective BBC and the “progressive” Guardian, both of which matched the Murdoch rags step for step in a rush for the gutter.

Bad News for Labour presents a flood of evidence detailing how this campaign was confected and what its effects on the party have been.

Since I’m a British citizen I’ll be in the UK next week attending the Labour Party annual conference as a member-delegate. Testing the waters on this issue will be interesting to say the least.

Meanwhile the media say nary a word about the rampant Islamophobia in the Conservative Party (starting with its leader, BoJo, and his insouciantly feeble jokes about burka-wearing women looking like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”, and so on), and the fact that surveys show antisemitism to be more prevalent in the Tories than it is in Labour.

As Americans say: go figure.

Don’t buy Puma.

The Israeli plot against Corbyn.

 The media and a small group of anti Corbyn extremists are up to the age old trick of throwing mud and lies. The BBC programme Panorama aired a supposed exposé on Labour’s “antisemitism crisis”.

In the Panorama programme, titled “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?”, a series of whistleblowers formerly employed by the Labour party accused the party’s leadership of failing to tackle antisemitism within its ranks.

“Is Labour Anti-Semitic?” is deeply flawed.

For instance it featured Ella Rose and Alex Richardson who had been caught in an Al-Jazeera video-sting discussing ways of neutralizing pro-Palestinian activists in the Labour party with an operative working under the cover of the Israeli embassy (the operative, Shai Masot, was subsequently expelled from the UK).

“Is Labour Anti-Semitic?” failed to name and identify Rose and Richardson as the pro-Israel activists they in fact are.

It also failed to point out that the Al-Jazeera video-sting showed the Israeli embassy’s methods to include political “hit lists” and establishing front groups.

Rose, currently on the executive of the Jewish Labour Movement, which is affiliated to the Labour party, used to work at the Israeli embassy; and Richardson is an aide to Joan Ryan MP, the Labour Friends of Israel chair who left the Labour party in a hissy fit over Corbyn’s alleged “hatred for Israel”.

Palestinian land illegally occupied by Israel.

A couple of points need to be made.

Firstly, the Labour party is of course not completely free from antisemitism. Antisemitism exists across all sections of British society, and the Labour party is no exception.

However, a 2017 YouGov survey on British attitudes towards Jews, commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), found that supporters of the Labour Party were less likely to hold antisemitic views than those of the Conservative Party or the far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), while supporters of the Liberal Democrats were the least likely to have antisemitic beliefs.

32% of Labour supporters were found to have at least one “antisemitic attitude”, as defined by the CAA, compared to 30% for the LibDems, 39% for UKIP supporters, and 40% for the Conservatives.

Secondly, it has to be admitted that Labour’s response to these charges of antisemitism has been slow and faltering.

The recent creation by Labour of a website titled “No Place for Antisemitism” is therefore a welcome step in the right direction.

Labour has tended to impugn the motives of those accusing it of institutionalized antisemitism, when it should be focusing instead on point-by-point rebuttals of these accusations, since many of them are baseless and often malicious. This was the case with the Panorama programme.

Labour requires departing employees to sign non-disclosure agreements. There can be sound reasons for having such NDAs in any organization, but at the same time they give the impression of being gags on those who leave for whatever reason.

Several former Labour employees who appeared on the Panorama programme breached their NDAs, and of course Panorama made a great show of their “courage in sometimes highly distressing circumstances” by becoming whistleblowers.

Labour needs to reconsider its use of NDAs. Their efficacy is limited.

For instance, a number of the female victims of Trump’s predatory conduct signed NDAs in return for his payments/bribes, but cut themselves loose from their NDAs when the time came. So far Trump, for all his bluster and bullying, has been powerless to stop them.

What Labour needs, among other things, is a rebuttal unit, able to produce material that could be on the air within hours of any groundless charge of antisemitism. This team could speak on its own accord, or perhaps more appropriately, have this material prepared for presentation by suitable party spokepersons.

Rather than saying that the people who appeared on the Panorama programme were “disaffected employees”, etc., which was stating the obvious, a rebuttal unit of this kind could have highlighted the BBC’s disingenuous failure to identify Ella Rose and Alex Richardson as operatives with close connections to the Israeli embassy, and the methods used by the embassy to neutralize opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

This unit could also have been useful in at least one well-publicized case.

The MP Chris Williamson, a staunch Corbyn supporter, was suspended, then readmitted, but has now been suspended again from the Labour party for saying it has been “too apologetic” when dealing with the so-called “antisemitism crisis”.

Here is what Williamson actually said:

“We’ve done more to actually address the scourge of antisemitism than any other political party, and yet we are being traduced.

The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party.

I’ve got to say I think our party’s response has been partly responsible for that. Because in my opinion we’ve backed off far too much, we’ve given too much ground, we’ve been too apologetic”.

Williamson was therefore saying that his party had been too apologetic in its response to accusations of Labour “antisemitism” (many of which have been found to be manufactured), as opposed to being too apologetic about Labour’s antisemitism per se.

Williamson apologized quickly for failing to be more judicious in his language, but ruthless opportunists, most of them in the media, foisted the latter of the above construals onto him, and the dirt stuck.

A rebuttal team would have been able to respond immediately, and while this might not have been completely successful, it would at least have done something to stem the deluge of false accusations falling on Williamson.

Another thing such a rebuttal team can do is to specify any direct financial ties existing between those bent on charging Labour with antisemitism (many of whom belong to the party’s Blairite remnant) and the UK’s pro-Zionist lobby, and as the already-mentioned Al-Jazeera sting revealed, even the Israeli embassy in London.

A monthly release of a carefully-researched fact sheet updating information on such financial ties could also be one of the tasks undertaken by the rebuttal team.

There is nothing inherently problematic about providing information about which organizations have which politicians on their payroll (for this is what such financial ties amount to)— campaigning groups in the UK and US supply information regularly about politicians who are on the payroll of individuals (the Koch brothers in the US, the Brexiter Arron Banks in the UK) or organizations such as the pharmaceutical industry (the Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker); gambling interests (Louisiana politicians seem particularly susceptible to its donors); the tobacco (the Tory grandee Ken Clarke), brewing and distilling industries; financial services (the Democrat Chuck Schumer, aka the Senator for Wall Street); carbon-energy industries (such as the Virginia Republican congressman Morgan Griffith in the district where I reside); the US gun lobby (many Republican politicians); AIPAC (numerous US politicians of both parties); the press (both BoJo Johnson and his erstwhile rival for the Tory leadership Michael Gove have been paid handsome sums by rightwing newspapers while purporting to be journalists); and so forth.

British politicians and their financial sustainers in the UK’s Zionist lobby should in principle not be entitled to exemptions on this score.

All that needs to be done by Labour is for the facts be stated, with no overlay of commentary.

As a good-faith gesture, the politicians mentioned on this fact sheet could be invited to submit whatever corrections or clarifications they wished.

It may surprise some that the supposedly “liberal” Guardian is spearheading the “antisemitism” campaign against Labour. Far too many people have illusions about The Guardian.

The Guardian, throughout its history, has been a supporter of the centrist Liberal party, now existing as the LibDems. Its support for Labour has largely been confined to the non-socialist Blairite ascendency within the party.

Only four of its current columnists– Aditya Chakraborty, George Monbiot, Frances Ryan, and Gary Younge, each redoubtable in their own way– operate fully outside the confines of a centrist political agenda.

The driving force behind The Guardian’s “antisemitism” campaign against Labour is another columnist, Jonathan Freedland.

Early on in his career Freedland was The Guardian’sWashington reporter. In the days when he was less well-known he put his email address at the bottom of his articles. After reading a biased piece by him on the US and Israel, I emailed him pointing out the details of a Zionist predisposition in his reporting. I did not expect a reply, and got none.

Since then Freedland has gone on to greater things within The Guardian, and he now has oversight of the paper’s editorial line on all matters concerning Israel.

Two things seem of particular concern to Freedland.

The first is to have the flawed IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Association) definition of antisemitism foisted on to the Labour party.

This “definition” is hopelessly imprecise, so much so that it has no standing in law. It is accompanied by a smorgasbord of “illustrations” of antisemitism, with no attempt made to delineate, let alone justify, the possible reasoning behind the choice of the “illustrations” in question.

The definition states:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”.

Most of the “illustrations” are uncontroversial for anyone who is not antisemitic, but others are not. The latter have in fact a particular bearing on support for the Palestinian cause:

+ accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nations;

+claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour;

 + applying double standards by requiring of Israel conduct not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;

+ drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The clear intent behind this particular set of “illustrations” is to conflate criticism of Israel with “antisemitism”.

Anti-Israel or anti-Zionist remarks however are not antisemitic as such.

Analogously, when an African (say) makes an anti-US statement, he/she is not somehow being “anti-Caucasian” or “anti-Christian”, or whatever, as such.

Only someone quite stupid, or downright malicious, won’t be able to grasp this simple point.

Hence, it should be evident to those who are fair-minded and objective that Israel is a racist endeavour– Israeli law now stipulates that Israel is the state for Jews (only) despite the fact that 20% of its population is Arab.

Israeli conduct falls short of standards expected of democratic nations– e.g. using military snipers to murder and wound with impunity medical personnel and journalists in Gaza, all clearly identified by their clothing.

There are aspects of Israeli policy and practice with tangible similarities to the Nazis– arbitrary confiscation and demolition of Palestinian dwellings, the use of attack dogs to bite and corral non-violent demonstrators, the repeated use of collective punishments, starvation as a weapon of occupation, the deliberate destruction of agricultural crops, the use of snipers to target unarmed civilians, and so forth.

These similarities have to be specified precisely and in detail—simply saying something along the lines of “Israel is like Nazi Germany” won’t cut the mustard, since it will be pounced on by Zionists, who will take the opposite line and point to instances where Israel is not like Nazi Germany (and obviously there are such instances).

Freedland’s second concern has been to preempt a Corbyn premiership. Corbyn has been a long-time supporter of Palestinian rights, and his premiership could involve a significant reassessment of UK policy on such issues as BDS.

Ireland has already taken a lead on BDS among European countries, by banning all products from the illegal settlements, and the fear among Zionists is that Corbyn and his Labour colleagues could turn out to be a tad more radical than the Irish, i.e. by recognizing Palestine as a state.

Therefore, at least one question needs to be posed to Corbyn’s pro-Zionist detractors in the Labour party (and The Guardian) who accuse him of being an antisemite:

“If Labour under Corbyn recognizes Palestine as a state— would you consider such recognition to be an act of antisemitism?”.

With the connivance of the media, Corbyn has had several purported cruxes, nearly all fake, posed to him by pro-Zionists within his own party and their supporters in the media.

It is high time Corbyn and his supporters took their turn to engage Zionist critics such as Jonathan Freedland with Labour’s own precisely-phrased and fact-checked cr