Denis MacShameless: Working Definition of Chutzpah!

Disgraced former Member of the UK Parliament, Denis MacShane was a witness for Ronnie Fraser in the FUCU case.  He was still an MP at the time.  Here's what the Employment Tribunal judgment says of his (and John Mann MP's) evidence:

We did not derive assistance from the two Members of Parliament who appeared before us. Both gave glib evidence, appearing supremely confident of the rightness of their positions. For Dr MacShane, it seemed that all answers lay in the MacPherson Report (the effect of which he appeared to misunderstand).....Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.

This was published on 22 March and since then I have been looking out for members of the motley crew around Ronnie Fraser to pop their heads above the parapet to explain away their shame.

Now MacShameless has a self-serving piece in Ha'aretz misrepresenting almost every aspect of the judgment:

I sought to make sense of the recent ruling on Ronnie Fraser, the college lecturer who sought to persuade an English legal tribunal that the ban decreed by his union against contact with fellow Jews in Israeli colleges and universities was anti-Semitic in its politics.

That's just from the intro but it gives you a taste of what's to come.  The judgment is remarkably straightforward and the language is perfectly accessible.  To imply that one has to struggle to make sense of it is itself a lie.

And here's  another taste since it takes him so long to get to the point:

To read in full the banal, contemptuous dismissal of Ronnie Fraser's efforts to show that a one-sided ban on contacts with Jewish academics in Israel, decreed by the U.K.’s University and College Union (of lecturers), was an assault on his existence as a Jew, was a miserable experience.

That might explain why he hasn't linked to the judgment itself.

Of course, trying to use an employment tribunal as a means to take on institutional anti-Semitism was always a risk......[an "epic folly" even]

To Ronnie Fraser's brave legal team I expressed my concern that employment law judges were not people who were intellectually equipped to deal with the UCU's action against Jews in the U.K. and in Israel. But they believed that the law exists to protect the individual against a powerful, wealthy organization like a trade union.

Now that is interesting.  Not the ludicrous notion that a zionist lawyer cares about the powerless against the powerful.  The bit where he claims he warned Fraser's legal team of a possible disaster.  I know he can deny that that is what he is saying, but that is certainly what he is implying.

The ugliness of the tribunal findings beggars belief. The European Union's definition of anti-Semitism is dismissed. The work of the House of Commons Committee of Inquiry into anti-Semitism that I chaired – which forced a change in government policy to acknowledge anti-Semitic attacks - is rubbished. The efforts of Fraser to use the law are openly insulted. The view of an important public Commission of Inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of a black youth, Stephen Lawrence, which stated that the police are obliged to investigate crimes that the victim of discrimination or attacks believes to be motivated by racial or religious hatred, is thrown away.

The European Union doesn't have a definition of antisemitism to dismiss.  He is of course referring to the what's commonly known as the EUMC working definition and it wasn't dismissed, it was discussed:

52....As we have mentioned (and will more fully explain in due course), the Claimant bases his case in part on the rejection by the Respondents’ Congress (in 2011) of the ‘Working Definition’ of anti-Semitism produced by what was then the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (referred to above and below as the EUMC). He was content with that definition. Others disagreed, regarding it as exposing critics of Israel to the unfair accusation of anti-Semitic conduct. They pointed to the fact that the definition might be read as branding attacks on Zionism as anti-Semitic and precluding criticism of Israel save where ‘similar’ to that levelled against any other country

The working definition is also touched on, though not in name, in paragraph 47 referring to an earlier case:

Unlike the instant case, the racial basis for the charges was not said to be Jewishness but Israeli nationality. The Sheriff dismissed the charges, holding that the prosecution must be content with a charge of breach of the peace (to which there was no apparent answer). On the subject of freedom of expression, he remarked (para 46):

And if persons on a public march designed to protest against and publicise alleged crimes committed by a State and its army are afraid to name that State for fear of being charged with racially aggravated behaviour, it would render worthless their Article 10(1) rights. Presumably their placards would have to read, “Genocide in an unspecified part of the Middle East”; “Boycott an unspecified State in the Middle East”, etc.

The judgment didn't simply rubbish the rubbishy All Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Anti-Semitism, it exposed it as utterly bogus, especially in its treatment of the UCU:

157 Complaint (2) is also devoid of any merit. The Respondents defended themselves courteously but robustly against treatment by the Parliamentary Committee the fairness of which was, to put it at its very lowest, open to question.

Regarding the Stephen Lawrence Report, zionists have been misrepresenting one feature of it which is that victims of an offence are entitled to be taken seriously if they believe the offence against them to have been motivated by racism.  Zionists have been trying to make out since publication of what is more commonly known as the MacPherson Report that this means that representatives of minority groups are entitled arbitrarily to define what they believe to be racism against their community, period.  It's ludicrous and it trivialises a real issue for black and other minority communities in their dealings with various institutions.  But what did the judgment say again about MacShane and MacPherson?

For Dr MacShane, it seemed that all answers lay in the MacPherson Report (the effect of which he appeared to misunderstand)

You can say that again! Oh, I did say that again.

Of course there will be some Jewish legal experts in London who insist the case should not have been fought.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. My guess is that MacShane read the withering criticisms of Adam Wagner and Jonathan Goldberg QC.  Also, he comes close to contradicting his earlier warning to the "Fraser's brave legal team". Thinking about that again, when he warned the legal team, he cannot simply have meant that this could go either way because any adversarial case could, in theory, go either way.  Ach, why even consider it? We've only MacShane's word for what he did or didn't say anyway.

Ok, that wraps it up I suppose.  Let's just see how MacShane is signed off:

Denis MacShane (@DenisMacShane ) is Britain’s former Minister for Europe and author of ‘Globalising Hatred: the New Antisemitism’ (Weidenfeld, 2008).

No mention of his being an Ex-MP.  Do they know he is an Ex-MP?  Do they know why he is an Ex-MP?  Dishonesty is the answer to that.