Bob from Brockley on Ben Gidley and Jackie Walker: Charity for he but not for she

I had some correspondence with a chap called Ben Gidley on the weekend. It was regarding a post on the Bob from Brockley blog which is run by Ben Gidley under the pseudonym, Bob Gordon.

Ben Gidley is currently a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck University.  The photo here is on his Birkbeck page:

He tweets in his own name as @BenGidley.  And here's the pic from that account which leaves me wondering if the above pic is actually him:

And here's the @BobfromBrockley twitter account and the pic that pretentiously adorns it:

Well I suppose there is something Orwellian about his output.

Oh and here's a picture of Jackie Walker which has appeared on many a zionist smear site including, of course, Bob from Brockley:

Bob/Ben had posted something about the Brockley Festival of Ideas which was going to be addressed by Jackie Walker.  I noticed the @BobfromBrockley twitter account tweeting and retweeting against Jackie Walker in the run up to the festival.  I won't replicate all that here.  I just want to post a comment here that won't pass moderation at the Bob from Brockley blog together with the correspondence between us.  Well actually I'll just post the correspondence as my first email to Ben Gidley at Birkbeck includes the disallowed comment:

Ben Gidley

I left the following comment on your Bob from Brockley blog a few days ago:

"Jackie Walker, the Labour left activist with local links who has stirred considerable controversy in the past year with a series of comments on social media and in public interpreted by many as antisemitic"?

You're too modest Bob.  You have been part of this racist inspired and often expressly racist smear campaign against Jackie Walker.
http://brockley.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/free-advice-to-jeremy.html

You even took the opportunity of that post to smear the Jewish activists who support Jackie because she has been wronged as merely and somehow wrongly providing her with "cover".

True, you haven't used your own name to smear Jackie on Twitter. There is overlap between your eponymous and pseudonymous Twitter accounts but as far as I've seen you haven't used your real name, Ben Gidley, to smear Jackie Walker. As BfB you've run the worst possible interpretations of Jackie Walker's remarks, all of which you know to have been lifted out of context and all of which were perfectly reasonable when taken in context.

I notice in your post you're continuing the smearing of Ken Livingstone.  He didn't say anything about "Hitler being a Zionist", he said that Hitler was supporting Zionism in the 1930s.  You've had it pointed out to you on Twitter by Riz Mokal that Ken was actually right in what he was saying and you seemed to accept that.  I should have known you didn't and don't have the integrity to stick to what you know rather than promote the smear line complete with bogus quote.
https://twitter.com/RizMokal/status/726360699086245890

Of course that Boffy chap pointed the (deliberate) error in your earlier post on Ken's remarks http://brockley.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/lenni-brenner-says-kens-wrong.html

But once you're in smear mode there appears to be no stopping you even when you appear to take a pause.

But Ken has a higher profile and a bigger/wider platform than Jackie Walker and of course Ken is white and non-Jewish.

The character assassination of a Black Jewish activist without Ken's profile has been far easier to accomplish. It seems too that it has been far more important to the zionist movement to banish Jackie from mainstream politics than it has to even banish Ken.  But Jackie is being hounded at the grass roots level too.  She has been smeared by the Zionists of the so-called Alliance for Workers Liberty and now she is going to be further smeared by them running a blog post by you on their Clarion website which of course advertises itself, not as an AWL site, but as a Momentum/Labour left site.

And as the post above mentions you too have been actively hounding Jackie within her and your local community in Brockley.

So Bob, without bogus paraphrasing, what has Jackie Walker actually said that warrants the vilification she has attracted and to which you are a party?  And what detailed "free advice to" Jackie would you offer to end this local and national campaign against her?

I had assumed you were simply refusing to approve it but when I saw you inviting comments from Jackie Walker or others I thought the links in the comment might have landed it in your spam filter.  I left another comment without links simply drawing attention to the previous one but still no show. So now you have the comment at your blog and in this email I should be grateful if you would either approve the original, copy and paste the one in this email or reply to this email telling me I can repost the original.

The response I got was from a Bob from Brockley email address under the name Bob Gordon and is a one hit master class in sheer hypocrisy:

I'm very happy to post your criticisms of my position and your claims that I'm part of a campaign  - and maybe try to answer them if I ever find time. What I am not happy to do is give you a platform to attempt to "out" me or whatever the right word is, as I have a number of good reasons for blogging pseudonymously, not least the number of threats I get as BfB from Britain First/EDL types and assorted fascists. I am trying to decide what to do, but haven't had the time to think it through. 

B

Here's my response:

I've noticed and commented on your sanctimoniousness many times. I had no idea how unselfconscious you were about it until just now.

Now you might want to consider the impact you and your cohorts have had on Jackie Walker's personal safety.

Your role was worse than others because you brought the smear campaign down to her and your local level.

I copied Jackie Walker into my email to Ben Gidley and she was broadly happy with it but, after he claimed security concerns, knowing how unpleasant it is to have your safety compromised, in her case, by such public vilification, especially when the campaign has been brought down to a local level, she wasn't thrilled about outing Bob from Brockley as Ben Gidley. Personally I have no such qualms because I simply don't believe anyone is threatening him and given his penchant for pseudonymous smears he deserves to be outed.

Ben Gidley used to be based at Goldsmiths where he was happy to boast about his blog. I know this because friends of mine have been on the staff there.  I already mentioned that on Bob from Brockley he uses the name Bob Gordon.  I remember years ago when I already knew that Bob was Ben someone emailed me to say that Bob from Brockley was actually a Robert Gordon of Goldsmiths. There is a Robert Gordon still at Goldsmiths.  My correspondent was wrong but if people are trying to harm or harass the Bob from Brockley blogger in any way then surely Robert Gordon would have drawn some heat by now.  I'm not aware that he has.

There's a lot more that could be written about Bob from Brockley and Ben Gidley and the former's smears and the latters' vulgarisations. I suppose I should note again that the zionist self-styled trotskyist group Alliance for Workers Liberty is planning on running one of Bob's smear jobs of Jackie Walker on their Clarion mag site which its editor Sacha Ismail claims is a Momentum/Labour left site.

But really I just want Ben Gidley to live and be well and stop being a dick.