Showing posts with label Adam Wagner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam Wagner. Show all posts

April 30, 2019

When Zionists spoke out against the Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism Equation II

Back in September 2017 I intended to post criticism's by Zionists of the disastrous Fraser v University and College Union (FUCU) case but I only posted this one by Adam Wagner, the increasingly notorious Zionist human rights barrister. Well here's one I remember well by another barrister, well actually a judge and a QC no less, Jonathan Goldberg. He described the Fraser case, brought by Antony Julius, as "an epic folly". Here he is in the Jewish Chronicle answering a critic of his own stance on the FUCU case:

 Why the Ronnie Fraser case against the UCU was a legal and public relations disaster 

 Rebecca from Finchley writes: I was furious to read your comment last week that bringing the Ronnie Fraser harassment case against the University College Union was “an act of epic folly”.  Surely it was high time the Anglo-Jewish community stood up for its rights, win or lose? 

 V Rebecca, I am unrepentant in my view that bringing the Ronnie Fraser litigation was a legal and public relations disaster. All those concerned should first have reminded themselves of the rabbinical saying that “All Israel is accountable one for the other.” 

 It was misconceived in law, wasted a fortune in legal costs (rumoured in legal circles to be over £500,000) but worst of all showed no Jewish seichel or streetsmarts whatsoever. You only litigate such hotly contentious matters if you are being dragged to court as the defendant and thus have no choice, or if, as claimant, you are sure to win. This case sent out the worst possible message to our many hate-filled enemies, namely that rich Jews threw huge resources at a failed attempt to stifle free speech. The result was entirely predictable and had been anticipated by several wise legal heads.

 Those who now react to this defeat with sour grapes should more carefully study the judgment, which even an old warhorse like me had to read three times for all the nuances. See 
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/eemployment-trib-fraser-v-uni-college-union-judgment.pdf 

 From a lawyer’s point of view, it is impeccably written and all too compelling. I cannot see any viable appeal arising from it and I would predict further damage and ignominious failure if such were attempted. 

 I do not accept that the court was antisemitic, as Dr David Hirsh and others have insinuated.  Should Jews now be whiners who cannot admit we fought the wrong battle and miscalculated badly?

 Do those who so rashly suggest on such shaky foundations that an English court was antisemitic have any conception of the damage they are doing to our community thereby?

 Of the 10 factual complaints brought by Mr Fraser against the union, all but one were found to be unmeritorious after an exhaustive 20-day evidential investigation, with detailed reasons being given as to why the court rejected them. And even that one was brought out of time.

 A main premise underpinning the claim — that the union was responsible in law for anti-Israel views promulgated by individual members in its annual congresses and in-house internet chatroom — was held wrong in law. Nor was that by any means the only error of law.

 The underlying notion that a commitment to Zionism should be a “protected characteristic” in English employment law was in my view almost as fanciful as suggesting that supporting Tottenham Hotspur should be a protected characteristic, because so many Jews do so. 

 Who is qualified to say, unless they sat through the 20 days of evidence, that the particular criticisms made of the evidence of Jeremy Newmark and two MPs were not reasonable. And just as important, why did Mr Newmark and the others ever voluntarily place themselves in a position to be so criticised in support of a claim brought on such dubious legal foundations?

 And why should the court be criticised, as so many have done in this newspaper, for saying “a belief in the Zionist project, or an attachment to Israel or any similar sentiment, cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness and, even if it was, it could not be substituted for the pleaded characteristics, which are race and religion or belief.” 

 The critics have chosen to take five words out of context from this much longer passage in order to condemn the court for allegedly not recognising the attachment between the Jewish religion and Israel. In context, the court was saying no more than that an attachment to the modern State of Israel (“modern” is important here) is not intrinsic to Jewishness. And that is surely correct.

 I yield to nobody in my love for Israel and my support for Zionism. But who can ignore the stark fact that many fellow Jews, including, for example, certain Israeli academics and at least one sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews, are among Israel’s most rabid detractors, whereas many gentiles are fervent Zionists (Lord bless them)

 Why was not a fraction of these legal resources used instead to bring a private prosecution against those activists who disrupted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra or the Batsheva Dance Company?

 Such cases would almost certainly have succeeded. Having recently attended the stellar AIPAC conference in Washington, Rebecca, I have to say this debacle would never have happened in America.

 Unlike in the UK, communal organisations there are not constantly jockeying with one another for power and prestige — and the left hand actually does know what the right is doing.

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March 05, 2018

Strange Days on Twitter and off Facebook

It's been a strange few days on Twitter and now on Facebook and messenger.  I had three little, mostly unprovoked, (by me anyway) skirmishes with fairly high profile Zionists.

It started when I browsed some tweets by Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, a Zionist group owned by Gerald Ronson.  One of his tweets claimed, wrongly, that Tony Greenstein had been expelled by the Labour Party for antisemitism.  The party claimed it was expelling him for "abusive behaviour".  It was well known that they could not make the charge of antisemitism stick.  Even the Times and Telegraph had to humiliatingly withdraw their own false allegations against Tony Greenstein.

Anyway, never one to let the truth get in the way of his struggle to avoid getting a proper job, Dave Rich tweeted as follows:
I QRTd as follows:

Hold this thought.  My tweet is in what I would call a casual factual style, ie, no anger expressed here.

And this is where the spookiness comes in. Simon Myerson QC, a Zionist troll, QRTd thus:
Now Simon Myerson QC really isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. He is mostly an embarrassment to the more genteel in the Zionist movement. He certainly embarrassed a fellow Zionist with his own grotesque antisemitic joke once as you will see.  He also shamelessly uses a Nazi yellow star with the word, Jude, on it as an avatar.  But every point he made was so wrong, I was sure I must be missing something. Could he really be so stupid or so dishonest? The short answer, I now know, is yes.

I thought he must be saying that I am accusing the Labour Party of not simply tolerating racism but actively promoting it. They are tolerating it as the presence of Labour Friends of Israel and so-called Jewish Labour Movement prove.  They are both racist groups supporting Jewish or filtered white supremacy in occupied Palestine.  He also seemed to be saying that Jews sans frontieres is an organisation.  It's my Twitter account and blog. Further he was saying that we (that is I) were not Jewish. It appears now he was saying all of those wrong things, but unlike Dave Rich who has to get stuff wrong to justify his salary, this Myerson guy makes his living out of conveyancing, so smearing people for the sake of the racist war criminals of the State of Israel is his hobby.

Because I could not believe that even a man who makes deliberate wrongness a virtue could not get every one of three points so completely wrong I asked him what he was talking about:


Ok, hold another thought.  This was fairly though not entirely polite, fairly casual and again not the slightest bit angry.

Someone called Harry Tuttle came to the thread to vent my original suspicion:

Myerson broke the thread by QRTing my question rather than doing a straight reply. It was accidentally a smart move because his next tweet just clarified that he had been utterly wrong in his previous tweet:

Ok so he really was saying that I am not Jewish and I am more than just me.  At the same time the idiot was calling me stupid.  How could I know how stupid a QC could be?

Then there was a bit of a strange distraction.  A woman called Liz McCann wandered into the thread.  Liz describes herself on Twitter thus: Labour. Remain. Loves and supports the LGBT community. Often exasperated. Always angry. [emphasis added]. Look:

Here's her thought out contribution, though G-d knows what she was thinking:

She made another couple of fatuous (is that the word?) comments before claiming that she didn't like people being rude to Jews. Actually by then it was only Simon Myerson and her who had been rude to any Jews on that thread unless she thinks me correcting Dave Rich's deliberate falsehood was rude.  I suppose her tweets could be evidence of her being "always angry".  Again, hold that thought.

At some point I rattled the cage of a man who tried to be Zionism's Mr Nice when he described the mainstream Zionists who brought the disastrous FUCU case as "exaggerators, manipulators and arrogant liars". It wasn't quite his own coinage but it was his summation of the main conclusion.  His name is Adam Wagner and somehow he manages to be a Zionist and a human rights lawyer though he has more recently ditched his Mr Nice ambitions. How much balls can one man juggle?

Adam is quietly clever, far more quiet and far more clever than Myerson.  He didn't approve when Myerson cracked an ugly, literally ugly antisemitic joke (see the next tweet), he almost certainly disapproves of his abuse of the Jude badge, and Wagner heartily disapproves of the sheer dishonesty of the likes of Newmark whilst Myerson prefers the "nothing to see here" approach.  They are as different as Blair and Bush and yet they are also as similar as both in the same way.  They both want something they cannot honestly justify.

So here it is in tweet form:

So this presented Adam Wagner with a little local difficulty.  He knows Myerson is an embarrassing berk but he can't take being used by the wrong kind of Jew, me, against the Right kind Jew, Myerson, lying down. So in he comes with a vacuous putdown based on nothing other than he wants to stay onside with the racist movement he belongs to.  It's the Zionist movement but Adam calls it The Jewish Community - capital C, N/B. He made an issue of my not posting in my own name.  A human rights lawyer might believe that I was simply trying to protect my personal safety but what he definitely should have done before tweeting this:

was ask me my name. Of course, the arguments, facts, etc, were/are more important than the identities so his tweet was a cop-out on every level and he managed to get worse with each interaction.

I hope you held those thoughts about anger because in the same thread where a QC who trivialises the holocaust with his avatar, proactively insults his fellow Jews for having the wrong politics and where a self-styled Ms Angry really did get angry, Adam Wagner's parting shot was this (and I know he is too sophisticated not to be embarrassed by it)

A barrister puts two questions in a tweet. I did respond by expressing bewilderment at what was his second bogus allegation. I wasn't sharp enough to notice that bereft of a case for his politics he had to invent a stylistic point over substance.  But having invented an issue and asking two silly questions he then scarpered.  But this is what support for racist ideology does to people. A human rights barrister has to play the fool rather than make an argument. He didn't even have the decency to be intellectually dishonest.  Nope, he was just an idiot and he will remain so as long as Zionism dominates mainstream Jewish communal, not Communal, life.

Oh yes, Simon Myerson came back to the thread to show he had been researching me.  He found a post about me by a Paul Bogdanor who once threatened me over my online presence. But what has spooked me just a tad is since tweeting to Adam Wagner that my name is Mark Elf, my Facebook account has apparently registered suspicious activity so it has been blocked by Facebook. I can't access it and I have no idea what the activity was.  I only used it as my only means of communicating with a homeless Roma woman who I was helping out.  Thankfully, I saw her today and we've established another way to communicate.

But all of the above is not all of the strangeness of my weekend online.  Apparently the Jewish Chronicle website crashed but I was reading an article about Jeremy Newmark and tried to access another and I thought it had been temporarily pulled.  I found the article in google cache and blogged it "pending its restoration to its rightful place on the JC website". I tweeted a link to my post as I usually do and none other than Stephen Pollard comes along to call me a desperate conspiracist or some such.  I countered, that I had twice mentioned that the disappearance of the piece was "probably innocent" but no apology or acknowledgment was forthcoming.  Rather he took exception to another tweet of mine suggesting that the JC was supporting Jon Lansman in his bid to become an even bigger disaster for the left than he has been hitherto.

Please read the article. It is absolutely gushing about Lansman while elsewhere, Jennie Formby is being smeared as an antisemite for which read either an anti-Zionist or an Israel critic or possibly a BDS supporter or maybe even just not Jon Lansman.

So what happened this weekend?  I got mauled by three dead sheep on Twitter, I've been falsely accused of anger issues, lacking intelligence, lacking integrity, oh yeah, accused of conspiracism and I've lost access to my Facebook account.  Ah well, I've still got a kettle and a bed.

Goodnight
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September 20, 2017

When Zionists spoke out against the Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism Equation

I'm going to post articles I find arising out of the old Ronnie Fraser vs University and College Union (FUCU) case where Zionists actually had the decency to be embarrassed over a scathing ruling where some of the UK's leading Zionists tried to make out that Palestine solidarity activism amounted to antisemitic or racial harassment of those Jews (in this case Ronnie Fraser) who support The State of Israel.  One reason for doing so is that they lift the spirits in troubled times and another is that the former critics seem to change their minds and their own old articles get harder to find.  In this case I've already posted the article before but I want them in roughly one place.

This one is by Adam Wagner.  I remember Jews for Justice for Palestinians were quite excited by his article because they mistook him for one of their own, and maybe he was.  He is now an ardent supporter of the bogus IHRA working definition of antisemitism if he recent tweets are anything to go by.  Now read on....

 Legal Ruling Shines Unflattering Light on the Anti-Zionism Equals Racism Campaign
By Adam Wagner, Cartoon Kippah
April 05, 2013
Sometimes we need an outsider’s perspective to bring into focus uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Just before the Passover festivities, the Employment Tribunal released a 45-page judgment full of Biblical fury which did just that.
The judgment was about a legal claim brought by a maths teacher, Ronnie Fraser, against his teaching union. He claimed that the Union had harassed him in breach of equality laws due to its handling of the Israel-Palestine debate.
The full judgment can be read here (PDF). If you have any interest in Jewish communal politics and in particular how the Israel-Palestine debate is handled, I highly recommend you read it. Perhaps set aside half an hour over a well-earned post-Passover sandwich – it’s worth it, I promise.
I won’t try to summarise Employment Judge Snelson’s findings here, but I would like to draw out a few points. The main one is that the Claimant, represented by solicitor Anthony Julius, lost in a big way. This was a total, unqualified demolition job. As an outcome, it really was ten plagues bad.
The language of the judgment is harsh and at times sarcastic. As a lawyer, you can take it from me that it doesn’t get much worse than this. This was a “sorry saga”, the Tribunal “greatly regret that the case was ever brought”, at its heart the case was “an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means”. Perhaps worst of all, the claim showed a “worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression.”
Let’s just step back for a moment. Just because a judge rules on something doesn’t mean they are right. Judgments get appealed and overturned. Reading this one, and not having been in court for the weeks of evidence, there are at least two possibilities. First, that the Tribunal has taken an irrational or perverse dislike to the claimant, his lawyers and some of his witnesses – that is a real possibility, given how scathing the judgment is. The second is, however, is that the Tribunal has got it broadly right, having listened to the extensive evidence and nonetheless dismissed the case out of hand.
As I said, I wasn’t there – this is an evidence heavy case so you really have to have sat through it to reach a proper conclusion. But assuming for the purpose of this article that the Tribunal did get it right, there is a lot here to be worried about.
Preposterous
Let’s take just a single paragraph, number 148. Here the Judge is summarising his conclusions on the claimant’s witnesses who included British Jewish luminaries such as the author Howard Jacobson. Some gave “careful, thoughtful, courteous evidence”. Others however, “seemed more disposed to score points or play to the gallery rather than providing straightforward answers to the clear questions put to them.” Again, ouch.
Particular criticism was reserved for Jeremy Newmark, the Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, a committee of community grandees:
We regret to say that we have rejected as untrue the evidence of Ms Ashworth and Mr Newmark concerning the incident at the 2008 Congress… Evidence given to us about booing, jeering and harassing of Jewish speakers at Congress debates was also false, as truthful witnesses on the Claimant’s side accepted. One painfully ill-judged example of playing to the gallery was Mr Newmark’s preposterous claim, in answer to the suggestion in cross- examination that he had attempted to push his way into the 2008 meeting, that a ‘pushy Jew’ stereotype was being applied to him. The opinions of witnesses were not, of course, our concern and in most instances they were in any event unremarkable and certainly not unreasonable. One exception was a remark of Mr Newmark in the context of the academic boycott controversy in 2007 that the union was “no longer a fit arena for free speech”, a comment which we found not only extraordinarily arrogant but also disturbing.
Wow. Here are some words you never want to hear in litigation: “untrue”, “false”, “preposterous”, “extraordinarily arrogant”, “disturbing”. To recap, this is the Chief Executive of an organisation which is arguably now the main ambassador of the Jewish Community to the wider British community. This may all be unfair and perverse, but if it is not then we should be worried about the implications.
Then came the MPs. Not just any MPs, but Denis MacShane and John Mann, both well known to the Jewish community; Mr MacShane chaired the The All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, Mann authored the Football Association Taskforce on Tackling Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Again, it’s bad:
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). Mr Mann could manage without even that assistance. He told us that the leaders of the Respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates but did not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing differently. He did not claim ever to have witnessed any Congress or other UCU meeting. And when it came to anti- Semitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.
As I said, wow. These are MPs who have been lionised by the Jewish community, and in particular the Jewish Chronicle (perhaps not incidentally, Anthony Julius chairs the JC board, a point highlighted by the Judge). ”And on the topic of that Parliamentary Committee”
157… 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.
The sarcasm drips off that final sentence, doesn’t it? Ultimately, the Tribunal concluded that contrary to the claimant’s arguments, the Union’s meetings were “well-ordered and balanced” and that almost the entire case was “manifestly unmeritorious”. Most importantly, the Tribunal rejected out of hand the argument that “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel or any similar sentiment” can amount to a protected characteristic.
Lessons not learned
Where does this leave us? It is tempting to see this “sorry saga” as no more than an unfortunate and hubristic litigation fail, or an “act of epic folly” as the Jewish Chronicle’s ‘Ask the QC’ QC Jonathan Goldberg commented. But I think there are wider lessons here which we would ignore at our peril.
Anyone who follows Jewish communal politics and reads the JC will recognise many in the cast of characters as well as the arguments. Anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian campaigners are regularly branded as anti-Semites. Despite the good work of organisations like Yachad, this is still a regular and well-supported narrative at the centre of much of the Jewish communal response to criticism of Israel. But that approach – which really amounts to communal comfort food – has clearly failed. And yet it is still wheeled out: watch, for example, this stirring but flawed recent speech by the Chief Rabbi to AIPAC, an American pro-Israel lobby. They hate us, so they would say that. Etc.
Of course, some criticism of Israel is linked to or motivated by anti-Semitism, but isn’t it time to stop using vast resources to paint legitimate debate as racial hatred? As well as failing miserably as an pro-Israel argument, this approach also risks fatally undermining work against real anti-Semitism. Aren’t we just a little bit ashamed for major communal leaders and organisations to have backed a claim showing a “disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression”?
In a prediction of Michael Fish quality, the JC originally said of the case that unless UCU repented its “clear antisemitic behaviour”:
we could be set for this decade’s version of the Irving trial – a specific case which acts to crystallise broader themes and issues
It certainly did crystallise broader themes and issues. But not the ones the cheerleaders hoped for. As said above, it is possible that this Tribunal reached a perverse decision. No doubt some will say so once the recriminations begin to fly. I imagine some will even accuse the Judge of anti-Semitism. But assuming for a moment that he was right, we should, as a community, be embarrassed by this ruling. It involved not just the looney fringe but central figures in the community, who have been branded exaggerators, manipulators and arrogant liars. More importantly, the ‘anti-Zionism equals racism’ argument is plainly bankrupt and has no purchase in wider society. We should move on to something which might actually work. And that is the lesson of this sorry Passover saga.
Adam (@adamwagner1) is a barrister specialising in human rights & medical law. He is founding editor of UK Human Rights Blog….”

The Cartoon Kippah website linked in the headline is now gone.
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April 10, 2013

UK Zionism at the crossroads?

Metaphorical crossroads are funny old things. They usually amount to a fork in the metaphorical road rather than a four way crossroads that you'd intuitively visualise. The crossroads at which UK zionists are at, thanks to the FUCU case, is the one you'd visualise.

There appear to be four possible ways zionists can go.  Only two have manifested themselves so far but one, the usual one, intellectual dishonesty and bullying opens up a new one of accusing the judiciary of antisemitism and even antisemitic conspiring or conspiracy theorising.  And the other, admitting the game is up for the lie that anti-zionism is itself racist opens up another one, that of abandoning zionism altogether or going over to a benevolent form of zionism which doesn't involve Jewish statehood at all.

The denial road consists of denying that in bringing the FUCU case, the zionists did nothing wrong.  It can consist of pretending that what the Employment Tribunal (ET) decried as hopelessly factually flawed, was simply technical or that sound facts were badly expressed.  A kind of better luck next time approach.  Zionists have been very badly stung by this and there aren't many introspective pieces on this.

The Jewish Chronicle ran a front page last Friday, which contained the seeds of three out of four possibilities:

Here's the denial approach:
communal organisations which had supported the lawsuit closed ranks. A spokesman for Fair Play, the anti-boycott campaign founded by the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, said: “Years of campaigning inside UCU had convinced us and many union members that the union was incapable of fairly tackling complaints of antisemitism by itself. Supporting Ronnie was the right thing to do.”
Here's another try by Paul Usiskin on The Daily Beast's Open Zion:
Ronnie lost his case. Reading the 50-page Tribunal Finding is a multi-faceted emotional experience. The Employment Tribunal is just that, and it is clear that its members felt their context was being overwhelmed, if not abused, for a matter so vast. But when law is confronted with matters as passionately contested as these, it produces conclusions that are constrained by law and law alone.
Completely false, of course. Words like "untrue", "without merit", "preposterous", "arrogant", "unmeritorious", "disturbing" are not legalese.  They are English and they relate to the facts of the case.

This first course involves redefining Jews as people who either practice or are the descendants of people who practiced Judaism together with a commitment to the zionist project or the State of Israel.  This was touched on in the JC front page article:
Eric Moonman, co-president of the Zionist Federation, said that this was a “wrong and worrying interpretation. It presents a very real issue for a different campaign to make sure there is an accepted definition of Jewishness which highlights the integral nature of Israel to Jews.”
The idea here of course is that if they can have Jews redefined as zionists, anti-zionism will then become antisemitism.

Actually the ET already dealt with this fight against reality:

150 It seems to us that a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel or any similar sentiment cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness and, even if it was, it could not be substituted for the pleaded characteristics, which are race and religion or belief.

So even if they redefine Jews, it shouldn't help them falsely accuse people of antisemitism.  It won't stop them trying.

A more extreme form of denial is that of Dr David Hirsh of Engage.  He had two opinion pieces in the same edition of the JC, here and here.  They are basically a restatement of his "preliminary response", the funniest version (going by the comments) of which appears at Jim Denham's Shiraz Socialist blog.

Let's just take one allegation from Fraser's complaint (h/t Philip Roth) as related by Hirsh:
Gert Weisskirchen, responsible for combating antisemitism for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) asked the union leadership for a meeting to discuss antisemitism relating to the boycott.  The union did not meet with him.  When 39 union members protested publicly, the union ignored them.
Remember, this was after the FUCU ET judgment had been published and read by Hirsh.  Let's look at how the judgment deals with the Weisskirchen affair (which is actually worth a dedicated post of its own.):

161 Complaint (4) is palpably groundless. On our primary findings, Professor Weisskirchen was not ‘rebuffed’. Mr Bennett reasonably challenged the arguably intemperate accusation of anti-Semitism levelled at the Respondents. The evidence does not substantiate the allegation that the Respondents refused to
meet Professor Weisskirchen. No ‘unwanted’ objectionable conduct capable of supporting a complaint alleging a statutory tort is made out. 
Hirsh is close here to alleging, not just antisemitism on the part of the ET. but a conspiracy involving the ET and the UCU to make out that a failure to meet with this Weisskirchen chap amounted to a "rebuff" by the UCU and not the other way round.

So there is denial and denial plus counter-allegation.  Hirsh represents the latter.

Then there is a the far more honest approach taken by Adam Wagner in Cartoon Kippah:  As the ET judgment oozes contempt, so Wagner's case oozes dismay.  He sees the crossroads ahead:
I imagine some will even accuse the Judge of anti-Semitism. But assuming for a moment that he was right, we should, as a community, be embarrassed by this ruling. It involved not just the looney fringe but central figures in the community, who have been branded exaggerators, manipulators and arrogant liars. More importantly, the ‘anti-Zionism equals racism’ argument is plainly bankrupt and has no purchase in wider society. We should move on to something which might actually work. 
Now often I say there is no such thing as an honest zionist. This guy seems to prove me wrong.  And I'm glad to be wrong.

These are three of the roads.  The one of denial means ignoring the ruling as simply bad news, the road that could lead to, if Hirsh et al are followed means widening the net for those falsely accused of antisemitism.  It's not just trades unionists and activists but also judges, the state itself, in our case, the UK.  It seems a risky strategy to me.

The third road means an abandonment of the lie that anti-zionism is racist.  But if the critics, opponents and victims or Israel are making fair comments, might they also be true comments?  And if that is the case, might this untried road of zionist honesty find itself on the fourth road, which is the fact that there is no case for Israel?

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