Betrayed by Bureaucrats? That Leaked Labour Report and the Disappearing Daily Mirror Article

I did a post yesterday night about how an article in The Daily Mirror about the "leaked Labour report", had been disappeared from its website. I found it on the Wayback Machine and copied and pasted it to my own post without much comment but I am mystified as to its content and why it has been pulled. Most newspapers only do that in extreme circumstances like they've been threatened in some way by the state or by lawyers.

Let's see that article again:

Labour ask police to investigate claims staff worked for Tory election victory 

EXCLUSIVE: Sir Keir Starmer ordered the probe after being elected the new leader of the Labour party - and police have started to look in to death threats made against staff

Labour chiefs have called in police as part of an inquiry into claims party HQ staff worked secretly for a Tory election victory. 

A probe was ordered by new Labour leader Keir Starmer and approved by an emergency meeting of the National Executive Committee last week. 

Death threats and abuse against staff involved have been reported and police called as the wide-ranging probe gets under way.  

A full-scale operation has been mounted to shut down distribution of a leaked report alleging that senior campaign managers were part of a clandestine group trying to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.  

A report has been filed with the Information Commissioner’s Office while an internal investigation is looking at a “serious” data breach via WhatsApp messages and email. 

Party officials have also contacted social media companies to take down any copies of the report still online and local parties told not to share it. 

Crucially, the NEC decided to prioritise the claims made in the report over the circumstances of how it was leaked. 

An NEC member confirmed it was decided to refer the matter to the police, who will be updated on the party’s findings. The inquiry has been fast-tracked to conclude in mid-July. 

There is speculation it may be headed by Lord Larry Whitty, who was party general secretary under Neil Kinnock.

So, the headline tells us that the police have been called to "investigate claims staff worked for Tory election victory". Ok, so already there is ambiguity. Are police investigating the staff for some breach of electoral law or are they investigating those who claim that McNicol, Sam Matthews, et al (the Mirror report doesn't name them) worked for a Tory election victory?

The Mirror then says that "Sir Keir Starmer ordered the probe" [my emphasis] but it hasn't said what the probe probing. It then says that the police are looking into death threats made against the staff. So what started as the possibility of police investigating allegations of serious, possibly illegal, misconduct by a bunch of Blairite bureaucrats quickly becomes an attempt to garner sympathy for the people the police might truly be investigating.

The Mirror was clearly working on the assumption that anyone who follows these things, Labour members and many voters would know about the "leaked Labour report". The report might well be findable on the net but if you can't find it, Craig Murray's report on the report is as good as any except he falls for the false allegations of antisemitism against Ken Livingstone. Sorry, don't let me digress.

Anyway, so the Mirror has said police are on the case of matters in connection with the now famous, in spite of the media and a certain Zionist lawyer trying to bury it, "leaked Labour report" but it doesn't say what the police are investigating apart from death threats and abuse.

Now the evidence of skulduggery and possibly illegality on the part of McNicol and his cohort is evidenced in the report. I mean it's possible that whoever wrote the report simply fabricated the content of emails and WhatsApp messages but a) it's not likely and b) layers have threatened proceedings over Data Protection and breach of privacy. I reckon that suggests that the alleged content of the emails and WhatsApps must be true or else how could it be a breach of privacy or data protection protocols?

And then the Mirror piece gets back to the stuff of the headline. Apparently police have been called to look into the work the skulduggerers were doing to secure a Tory election victory. I don't know if that is illegal or how illegal it was to do what they did. The Mirror kind of says that it's the Labour leadership that has called in the police for this but then seems to be saying that Starmer is more interested in the leaking of the report.

Labour chiefs have called in police as part of an inquiry into claims party HQ staff worked secretly for a Tory election victory. 

A probe was ordered by new Labour leader Keir Starmer and approved by an emergency meeting of the National Executive Committee last week. 

Death threats and abuse against staff involved have been reported and police called as the wide-ranging probe gets under way.  

See? it's all a bit garbled but whereas the "leaked Labour report" purports to show evidence of what it is alleging, where is the evidence of death threats against the people named in the report? The only evidence I heard of a death threat against anyone named in the report was against Sam Matthews and that threat was made by Sam Matthews himself and he admitted, well claimed as much in the now notorious BBC Panorama programme by John Ware supposedly on Labour antisemitism.

The article then speaks of the extraordinary effort going into barring the report from public view and reports of data protection breaches before making this interesting observation:

Crucially, the NEC decided to prioritise the claims made in the report over the circumstances of how it was leaked. 

Now that would be a crumb of comfort if it were true. The claims made in the report are absolutly damning and have already led to the welcome departure of Lord McNicol from the Labour front bench while Sam Matthews seems to have dug in and Zionist and Blairite lawyers together with leading Goyishe Zionist, John Ware, making all sorts of legal threats over I'm not sure what.

After all that, I have no answers and for the immediate term I only have one question, why did the Daily Mirror disappear the article?

Labour ask police to investigate claims staff worked for Tory election victory

That headline replaces my original headline for this post which was something about The Daily Mirror having disappeared an article from its website about the leaked Labour report and the fact that Labour chiefs have called in the police about it. By the time I had got to the end of the post, the article had disappeared from the Wayback machine though they might have some genuine technical problems. Anyway, I've changed the headline on my post to match the original headline from the Mirror piece. Now read on....

I don't know why this article has been disappeared, airbrushed if you will, from The Daily Mirror's website but thankfully the Wayback Machine and I am posting here in full. To be honest I have only read the headline so far, oh, and a Reddit discussion which slags the headline. So let's have a butchers.

Labour ask police to investigate claims staff worked for Tory election victory 

EXCLUSIVE: Sir Keir Starmer ordered the probe after being elected the new leader of the Labour party - and police have started to look in to death threats made against staff

Labour chiefs have called in police as part of an inquiry into claims party HQ staff worked secretly for a Tory election victory. 

A probe was ordered by new Labour leader Keir Starmer and approved by an emergency meeting of the National Executive Committee last week. 

Death threats and abuse against staff involved have been reported and police called as the wide-ranging probe gets under way.  

A full-scale operation has been mounted to shut down distribution of a leaked report alleging that senior campaign managers were part of a clandestine group trying to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.  

A report has been filed with the Information Commissioner’s Office while an internal investigation is looking at a “serious” data breach via WhatsApp messages and email. 

Party officials have also contacted social media companies to take down any copies of the report still online and local parties told not to share it. 

Crucially, the NEC decided to prioritise the claims made in the report over the circumstances of how it was leaked. 

An NEC member confirmed it was decided to refer the matter to the police, who will be updated on the party’s findings. The inquiry has been fast-tracked to conclude in mid-July. 

There is speculation it may be headed by Lord Larry Whitty, who was party general secretary under Neil Kinnock.

I can't see what's problematic enough for the article to be pulled. It doesn't name any names.

Oh wait. I sent the Wayback link to a friend and she couldn't open it. I said to just click it which I just tried to do and, what do you know? It's disappeared from Wayback. I'll need a masters in Kremlinology to get to the bottom of this one.  This JSF page might be the last surviving record of an unremarkable article except it seems to be trying to make martyrs of the biggest traitors against democracy and the Labour movement the UK has ever known.

UPDATE: 10:57 27/04/2020. I got an email from Wayback Machine early this morning because I had tagged them in two tweets complaining at the disappearance of the Mirror article from their website and they assured me that it was only a technical glitch and that they had fixed it which they have. So apologies to them and you, dear reader (if you exist), for any aspersions cast.  It's business as usual at the Wayback Machine.  BTW, the Mirror article was saved at Wayback three times before it disappeared from the Mirror website.

Geoffrey Alderman on Margaret Hodge

Here's Geoffrey Alderman in The Jewish Telegraph taking a bit of a swipe at Margaret Hodge.  Because of The Jewish Telegraph's habit of pasting the latest article over the previous one I save Alderman's pieces to the Wayback Machine and copy and paste them here:

GEOFFREY ALDERMAN DAME MARGARET HAS SOME EXPLAINING TO DO

THE abysmal showing of the Labour Party in the recent European Parliament elections is the cumulative outcome of many factors. Prominent among them are said to be the prevalence of anti-Jewish prejudice in the party and the party’s seeming inability to confront the difficulty head-on. Of course Labour has a problem with antisemitism. But so do the Tories. So does virtually every mainstream political party in this country. In Labour’s case, however, antisemitism (too often not even disguised as anti-Zionism) has led to the exodus from the party of some of its members, and dire public warnings from others, among the most prominent of whom is Dame Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking and former leader of Islington council. On April 17, in a short but forceful speech in the House of Commons, Dame Margaret gave public expression to her concerns. Born in 1944 as Margaret Oppenheimer to Jewish parents then living as refugees in Egypt, she spoke movingly of members of her family who had been murdered by the Nazis, and she recalled how, on a visit to Auschwitz, she gazed upon a mound of suitcases, one of which she recognised as it bore the initials of her uncle. Powerful stuff! And, politically, more compelling still for what Hodge had to say specifically — and not for the first time — about the Labour Party of which she has been for more than 50 years a member and remains so to this day. Ever since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as party leader, Hodge has, in fact, spent a great deal of time attacking her own party for not doing enough to stamp out antisemitism in its ranks, and she has made no secret of her personal disdain for Corbyn, whom (in a celebrated incident in the Commons on July 17 last year) she reportedly accused of being “an antisemitic racist”. Dame Margaret is unquestionably Jewish. Yet, according to her own testimony (offered in the April, 2019, debate): “My upbringing has been entirely secular. “I have never practised Jewish religious traditions. Neither of my two husbands were Jews. I am a consistent critic of the governments of Israel.” Nonetheless, she added, “my Jewish heritage is central to my being”. In an article in the online Spectator on May 8, I drew attention to the fact that as Labour leader of Islington council from 1982 to 1992, Hodge appears to have played a part — though exactly what part remains unclear — in the council’s decision to approve a planning application that would have led to the destruction of the original 1843 cemetery of the West London Synagogue and the sale of the land to developers. I was part of the ultimately successful campaign to have the decision reversed. So was Jeremy Corbyn. Was Mrs Hodge personally in favour of the proposal? We simply do not know. Hodge has claimed — in The Observer on July 21, 2103 — that she feels “passionately Jewish”. In October, 1986, members of Islington council — not all of whom were Jewish, by the way— were moved to protest against the scheduling of a race relations committee meeting on Yom Kippur. Council leader Hodge apparently saw nothing untoward in attending the meeting. Three years later, the media reported that members of Hackney’s Jewish communities were holding “top-level meetings with Islington council” in an attempt to buy an Islington-owned property in Stamford Hill, which the communities wanted to turn into a nursery and old people’s home. According to press reports, “Islington leader, Margaret Hodge . . . informed groups that Islington intended to use the building for people in bed-and-breakfast accommodation”. Hodge denied that the move was in any way discriminatory. But her apparent lack of empathy with the educational and social needs of practising Orthodox Jews surely needs some explaining. If Hodge wishes to pursue a totally secular lifestyle, that is no business of mine or yours, but she certainly has some explaining to do! E-MAIL: comment@jewishtelegraph.com If you have a story or an issue you want us to cover, let us know - in complete confidence - by contacting newsdesk@jewishtelegraph.com, 0161-741 2631 or via Facebook / Twitter

Geoffrey Alderman on Jeremy Corbyn in Jewish Telegraph

I'm sad to say that The Jewish Telegraph website is a cheap and not very cheerful affair. I don't know if they maintain an archive but I couldn't find it if they do. Geoffrey Alderman came to the defence of Jeremy Corbyn just recently in the article you see below. He wrote another similar one in The Spectator. I just wanted a quick reread of the Jewish Telegraph article but, alas, it has now gone. This is the url for the original article https://www.jewishtelegraph.com/alderman.html. Click it now and it takes you to his latest article with no pointer to his previous stuff.

Well thank goodness for the Wayback machine.  The Wayback machine is a way of archiving web pages that you think might change or disappear. Simply take a web page's url and paste it into the box marked "Save Page Now" and Wayback saves the page as it was when you do it.  Well as luck would have it, someone did just that with this https://www.jewishtelegraph.com/alderman.html.  And so I can bring you this:   https://web.archive.org/web/20190419203707/https://www.jewishtelegraph.com/alderman.html

It is the only Jewish Telegraph page ever saved to the Wayback machine, so far anyway.

So now, if you see a web page that you think is going to disappear or change and you want the original, screengrab and archive in the Wayback Machine.

Now read on....

GEOFFREY ALDERMAN HORRORS! CORBYN’S A ‘PM IN WAITING’ – ACCEPT IT

WE live in interesting times. Earlier this month, our beleaguered prime minister, Theresa May, invited into 10 Downing Street Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Her purpose in extending this invitation — which he graciously accepted — was to enlist his support in the current crisis over the precise terms of the UK’s exit from the European Union. But don’t worry. I’m not going to bore you about Brexit. My purpose, rather, is to focus on the person of Jeremy Corbyn, whom we must now clearly regard as a potential prime minister. The opinion polls, which for months have been showing the Corbyn-led Labour Party trailing the May-led Tories, are now announcing a Labour lead. I would be the last person to insist that we must trust the polls. We mustn’t. But if a general election was held soon, it is entirely possible that Labour would win more seats than the Conservative Party, whose back has been well and truly broken on the Brexit wheel. In that scenario, the Queen would be bound to call on Corbyn to form a minority government. What, from the point of view of British Jewry, would such a government hold in store? In spite of numerous scare stories, I honestly can’t see such a government banning shechita or brit mila. If Diane Abbott, currently Shadow Home Secretary, found herself actually in charge of the Home Office, would she outrage her many charedi constituents by closing down synagogues and moving to deprive Jews of the rights of British citizenship? Of course not. We might indeed see a Corbyn-led government cosying-up to the BDS movement. Labour is already committed to recognising a Palestinian state “immediately” it forms a government, so such a recognition is a probability. Would Israel then sever diplomatic relations with the UK? I doubt it. The recognition of a Palestinian state would remain a symbolic but, in practical terms, meaningless gesture. Corbyn’s Foreign Secretary (the tactless Emily Thornberry) might enjoy striding on to the podium at the UN Security Council to support — perhaps even to propose — some blood-curdling resolution denouncing the Jewish state as a neo-colonialist plot. She would do so safe in the knowledge that American president Donald Trump would veto it. And let’s remember that on December 23, 2016, in the dying days of the Obama-led administration, a UN Security Council resolution condemning in the most explicit terms Jewish control of the West Bank and east Jerusalem — including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and the Western Wall — was adopted with the full-hearted consent and approbation of Theresa May and her tactless Foreign Secretary, one Boris Johnson. The Tory-controlled UK government could have abstained. It could even have exercised its veto. It chose to do neither. Reacting to that act of betrayal, I outlined in this column on January 13, 2017, a number of concrete measures that those who order the affairs of British Jewry might have taken to signal the community’s anger. I suggested that May and Johnson could be disinvited from all communal events, and that Jewish groups should withdraw from co-operation with May’s government — for instance over security issues and the anti-terrorism “Prevent” agenda. A communal macher took me aside and pointed out that these bold suggestions would never be acted upon, because those who order the affairs of British Jewry would never forego the chance of a Downing Street photoshoot and the yichus that such an opportunity apparently confers. He’s right. By the same token, our narcissistic communal leadership would positively salivate on receiving, and being able to courteously accept, an invitation from Prime Minister Corbyn to take morning coffee or afternoon tea at No 10. As a matter of fact, Jeremy Corbyn has an impressive demonstrable record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives. In 2010, he put his name to an Early Day Motion — tabled by Diane Abbott in the Commons — calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. He was supportive of Jewish efforts to facilitate the speedy issue of death certificates by the North London coroner. In June, 2015, he took part in a ceremony in his Islington constituency to commemorate the original site of the North London Synagogue. Of course, there’s another side to this story. In relation to Jewish sensitivities, Corbyn has on too many occasions acted foolishly, I suspect without thinking through the long-term consequences of his actions. The fact remains that he is a prime minister “in waiting”. We must learn to accept that reality. E-MAIL: comment@jewishtelegraph.com If you have a story or an issue you want us to cover, let us know - in complete confidence - by contacting newsdesk@jewishtelegraph.com, 0161-741 2631 or via Facebook / Twitter

Transcript of Professor Cain and Tristram Hunt discussing the antisemitism in Hobson's Imperialism on Radio 3

You will have seen or heard another antisemitism smear of Jeremy Corbyn doing the rounds about how he blurbed a book called Imperialism by J.A. Hobson.  The book contains a an antisemitic reference to Jews by way of an ugly stereotypical description

Here is the BBC Radio 3 Podcast of a discussion between a Professor Cain and Tristram Hunt on the now notorious book, Hobson's Imperialism. 

Anyway, my typing is very poor so it took me forever to type this because there are some people who ought to know better and indeed do know better trying make out that the antisemitism is central to the thesis and that Professor Cain and Tristram Hunt said as much in the podcast.  Needless to say, they didn't.  They said the opposite.

Ok? It starts at about 7:33 into the podcast:

Transcript of Professor Cain & Tristam Hunt discussing Hobson's Imperialism on Radio 3

Tristram Hunt:  Here we see a cartoon in front of us from the Illustrated London News of top-hatted city gentlemen throwing their hats into the air and it says "The reaction on the Stock Exchange to the news of the Boer surrender at Paardeberg 1900".   But there's rather an interesting figure on the far right of it, isn't there?

Professor Cain: Well there's a figure who is clearly drawn as a kind of Jewish financier if you like. And there's no doubt about it that Hobson was quite ambivalent about this side of financial imperialism.  He did show some kind of antisemitic strain.

Tristram Hunt: And the figure we see before us is physically larger than the others. There's the crooked caricature Jewish nose, sideburns and he's not celebrating, he's overlooking it as if to suggest "well this was all in the plan". And is this meant to be in a sense a symbol not so much of a Rhodes as of a Rothschild?

Professor Cain: Yes, I think so and I think the implication is that, although Rhodes is a very prominent figure, it's the senior men in The City who are fundamentally in charge of this operation, this imperialist operation.

Tristram Hunt: Surely there was more than enough to critique in the imperial project and its links with The City without going down the semitic [sic] route.

Professor Cain: [This is at 9 minutes in]  Yes, I think it was a mistake.   What it reflected is the very widespread antisemitic sentiment amongst English intellectuals at that time.  But the fact is that the theory worked perfectly well without invoking any kind of Jewish conspiracy.  What you have fundamentally is what Hobson thinks of as a City conspiracy, not a Jewish conspiracy as such and the theory will work perfectly well without introducing the antisemitic element.

Tristram Hunt: Either way when we look at the power on display at the Stock Exchange and we look at the politicians, the financiers behind the imperial project it suggests some of the strength of the consensus that Hobson was up against, doesn't it?

Professor Cain: Oh yes.

The End

---------------------------------

A Day in the Life of Hobson's Imperialism on Wikipedia

In common with many people when I woke up yesterday I noticed yet another manufactured antisemitism scandal was in full swing. I knew it was manufactured because of the prominence of the words "antisemitism" and "Corbyn" in the headlines.

It turns out that Corbyn wrote an introduction to a book called Imperialism by a chap called Hobson.  I'd never heard of the book, described by Corbyn, apparently. as "brilliant".  It was The Times's Daniel Finkelstein who led the charge yesterday, typically for the antisemitism smears, the day before local elections.

It didn't take long for the poison to spread throughout the media. The words "peculiar race" popped up as the unambiguous description of Jews in Hobson's book.  In one of the anti-Corbyn threads someone very helpfully gave a link to a searchable copy of the book (without Corbyn's intro) online.

Good old Marxists.org.  They have a searchable copy of the book right here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/hobson/1902/imperialism/index.htm

There's only one throwaway reference to Jews by way of the words, "peculiar race" and they're so buried as to be barely even "peripheral" to the entire book. That's me moaning that I now have to search every chapter to then search the words I'm looking for.  The fact is, it is a deeply antisemitic throwaway passage but not a deeply antisemitic book.

So, go to Chapter IV and search for "peculiar" and what do we see:

These great businesses – banking, broking, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting – form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every State, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations. No great quick direction of capital is possible save by their consent and through their agency. Does any one seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?

Again in common with a great many people I had to google "Hobson's Imperialism" because I'd never heard of it and out came Wikipedia on top. I noticed it had sections on its influence on Liberalism and its influence on Marxism but nothing about its antisemitism.  Very strange given its description in "newspapers of record" like The Times and The Guardian as a "deeply antisemitic book".

Now I remember from the great Zio "controversy", Zionists are quite adept at creating a controversy out of nothing and then zipping over to Wikipedia to have a bit of a tamper.  When I first noticed Zionists complaining that the word "Zio" is a putdown for Jews as Jews I googled "Zio". Lots of Italian restaurants popped up because Zio is Italian for uncle. I checked Wikipedia and found in the disambiguation that Zio was coming in at the botttom. A quick check of the edits and, what do you know? Zio as a "pejorative abbreviation of Zionist, often regarded as antisemitic" only appeared at the bottom of a list on 15 March 2016.  The "controversy" began in February of the same year. I think that might have been the actual start of the smear campaign.

Anyway, so I dashed over to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about Hobson's Imperialism.  Here are the contents of the page I saw early yesterday:

Contents

• 1The Taproot of Imperialism
• 2Influence and criticism
  • 2.1Influence on Marxism
  • 2.2Influence on liberalism
• 3See also
• 4References
• 5Further reading

• 
  

Today I looked again because the Hobson's Imperialism controversy is still rumbling on and, what do you know?  Look at the contents now:

Contents

• 1The Taproot of Imperialism
• 2Influence and criticism
  • 2.1Influence on Marxism
  • 2.2Influence on liberalism
  • 2.3Antisemitism
• 3See also
• 4References
• 5Further reading

See what the smear merchants did there? They've inserted "Antisemitism".  Now, let's see what the entry on Hobson's Imperialism lacked for the past 14 years:

Antisemitism

 [edit]Hobson's antisemitic views have been described as influential,^[11][12] and while Imperialism does not contain the "violent anti-Jewish crudities" of his prior works,^[13] it asserts that Jews dominated international finance in Europe.^[14][15] According to history professor Norman Etherington this section on financiers seems irrelevant to Hobson's economic discourse, and was probably included since Hobson truly believed it.^[16]

It's very scrappy, isn't it? Let's check the edits history.

See?

I hope you can see that ok but what happened is, I looked at the page first thing yesterday. There was nothing about Hobson's antisemitism nor the one passage in the book Imperialism that was antisemitic.  Yesterday was 1 May 2019. The last update to the page was 30 April in the evening but it had nothing to do with antisemitism. So sometime yesterday when lots of people were starting to realise that Danny Finkelstein's scoop was yet another rightist fantasy, someone calling themselves Icewhizz decided they had better take notice of what no-one had noticed on a Wikipedia entry in 14 years of edits, re-edits and de-edits.

Well, I suppose we are lucky that Zionism is racism or Zionists might start to notice that the "lower races" of Africa and Asia get more mentions than the "peculiar race" which gets just one mention in the fourth chapter of the book.

Is Corbyn Embarrassing Corbyn or the Zionist "Glitterati"?

I just noticed a Marcus Dysch article in the print edition of the Jewish Chronicle headlined, "Yet again, Corbyn has embarrassed himself".  I googled those very words out of quotes to see if the piece is on line and, yes, it is.  Here's the search, Yet again, Corbyn has embarrassed himself.  And top of the list is Dysch's article.  It's a gripe about Jeremy Corbyn refusing to attend the Balfour Declaration celebratory dinner.

It was, of course, an open secret among communal leaders that Jeremy Corbyn was unlikely to accept their invitation to next week’s gala Balfour Declaration centenary dinner.

The Labour leader, with decades of anti-Israel campaigning under his belt, was never going to sit alongside the country’s glitterati — its political, social, religious, diplomatic and charity leaders — for the slap-up meal.

When the invitations went out, I was told by a senior Jewish Leadership Council figure that no pressure would be put on Mr Corbyn to turn up, nor would a fuss be made if he declined.

After the past two years of trials and tribulations between the Labour chief and the community, there was no desire to cause embarrassment, or a major row, on either side. 

As my source predicted, Emily Thornberry will represent Labour, although the Leader of the Opposition’s office failed to live up to the other part of the prophecy and blame a diary clash, offering instead no explanation for his absence.

So there was a muted response beyond Jonathan Goldstein saying it was “deeply unfortunate” and Hamas welcoming the news.

Let’s be honest, few friends of Israel will have wanted Mr Corbyn there. But it is the principle that counts.

Ms Thornberry filling in for Mr Corbyn at a Labour Friends of Israel reception at the party conference last month brought ridicule on them both when she claimed he was preparing for his speech but everyone knew he was out partying.

For the Labour leader now to avoid this major event sends another clear message, and shames his party. 

If Mr Corbyn wants to be Prime Minister, he needs first to learn how to be a statesman. The great offices of our nation demand more than former backbenchers still clinging to personal grievances.

What's noticeable about the piece is the sheer arrogance it oozes.  The "country's glitterati" are to celebrate handing Palestine on a platter to the Zionist movement.  Seniors of the Jewish Leadershio Council decided, "no pressure would be  put on Mr Corbyn to turn up, nor would a fuss be made if he declined."  Well that's very big of the big wigs and Mr Corbyn didn't even have the decency to invent an excuse for refusing to celebrate the UK's and Israel's imperial past and present.

But the google search threw up other finds too including the words Corbyn and something with embarrass as its root.  A debate between Corbyn and Owen Smith in the second Labour leadership contest had a LabourList article asking, Was Corbyn "an embarrassment" or did he carry himself "with dignity"?  Of course we now know he carried himself with enough dignity to win the contest.  That was last year, 2016.

The next article in the search with the word "embarrassment" in it was one in the Telegraph.  The word "embarrassment" used regarding his wife's coffee business.  Nothing to do with him and anyway, that was back in 2015.

Next up we have Huffington Post finding "Ex-Jeremy Corbyn Supporters" who "Are 'Embarrassed' They Voted For Him".  That was before the second leadership bid.  2016 again.  I wonder how embarrassed they are now he came close to winning the general election this year.

The list on the google page goes on.  The fact is, Marcus Dysch's arrogance is misplaced.  Corbyn has not embarrassed himself at all.  He has shown himself to be in a position to embarrass the Zionist movement which is precisely why these Zionist "glitterati" aren't making a fuss about the second slap in the face Corbyn has dealt them since refusing to attend a Labour Friends of Israel rally at the recent Labour Party Conference 2017 in Brighton.

So is Corbyn embarrassing Corbyn or is Corbyn embarrassing the Zionist "glitteratti"  You might want to ask or tell Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle.  I can't ask or tell him on Twitter because he's blocked me.

Book Review: The Left's Jewish Problem by Dave Rich

I was asked to review Dave Rich's book for an academic website.  I was asked to take it seriously and write about it as befits a scholarly work.  I found that impossible and wrote the following instead.  Now read on.....

The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism by Dave Rich

I suspect the book is timed to cash in on Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to the leadership of the UK Labour Party as Corbyn seems something of an afterthought for its author, Dave Rich.  Dave is a committed Zionist so no doubt he also wanted to play his part in undermining a left Labour leader who has a high profile in the Palestine solidarity movement.

The book has lots of Zionist staples like the Jewish right to national self-determination. There are lots of stretches of people’s meaning and out of context quotes to portray Israel’s opponents and even victims as being antisemitic.  The holocaust is instrumentalised to justify Israel’s existence without the author realising that this undermines the idea of Jews being a standard case for national self-determination which is supposed to accrue to communities with territorial contiguity and raises the idea that, instead, Jews are a special case.

Dave avoids analysis or even definitions of terms.  He avoids analysis of what Zionism means to its victims.  He avoids saying what it means to or for its Jewish beneficiaries except to say that this ideological choice is an integral part of their identity.  He avoids details around implementation of the Zionist project and he mostly avoids the various imperial supports the project has received and without which Israel couldn’t exist.

Remarkably for a book supposedly about antisemitism, Dave fails even to define that. He doesn’t mention, for example, the so-called EUMC working definition which his employers at the Community Security Trust learned to love.  He certainly uses parts of the definition.  For example, when Israel is compared to the Nazis, this is offered by Dave as an example of antisemitism.  His failure to analyse Zionism or Nazism or refer to the racism essential and common to both enables this given.

Dave’s only mention of Israel’s founding war on the Arabs is plain wrong. Dave claims “five Arab armies had invaded their new Jewish neighbour”.  Arab armies have never invaded Israel. The Zionist movement had already ethnically cleansed 300,000 Palestinians by the time Arab armies mobilised against an already expanding Israel.

He fails to consider the Eurocentrism that would allow for the Labour Party to propose in 1944 the “transfer”, ie the ethnic cleansing, of all of Palestine’s Arabs.  For Dave, the labour movement was all cloth caps, trade unions and Poale Zion (now calling itself the Jewish Labour Movement, JLM).  And somewhere between the old days and the rise of the new left, the youth wing of the Liberal Party, the Young Liberals, decided to call Israel out as a state not significantly different from the apartheid regime of the Republic of South Africa.  Without analysing either Zionism or liberalism, Dave doesn’t have to consider the glaringly illiberal tenets of the former to see how repugnant they are to the young activists of the latter.

And so to the new left whose ideas and genealogy get mangled by Dave.  Where he quotes work, he doesn’t seem to understand it.  Abram Leon for example, is chastised by Dave, of all people, for mostly ignoring Palestine.  But Leon was explaining the Jewish identity, hostility to Jews and the ahistorical nationalism of the Zionist movement. So why mention Leon? Because his book is called The Jewish Question and an idiot called Gerry Downing claims that global affairs are run by what he calls “the Jewish question”. If Downing claims inspiration from Leon then, like Dave, he hasn’t understood him.  Contrary to Dave’s claim, we do not have to read Leon to understand Downing. But the spurious linkage is made because Downing was suspended from the Labour Party during Corbyn’s time as leader even though he survived Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband.

The new left was hostile to Stalinism but not for Dave.  The anti-Zionism that was coming to the fore as Israel’s atrocities became more widely known, is attributable, according to Dave, to the failure of the new left to rid itself of an important tenet of Stalinism: anti-Zionism, itself an aspect of Stalin’s antisemitism. 

The new left together with mass immigration ushered in the rise of identity politics.  For Dave the new left likes identity politics like children used to like playing cowboys and Indians.  New leftists like to be the Indians, then they can wear keffiyehs and run around upsetting cowboys like Dave.  Dave doesn’t consider the various issues arising out of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural working class and how the leftist demand for equality means more than simple bread and butter issues.  He doesn’t dismiss identity politics out of hand.  He even admits that Zionists have played identity politics themselves and even got away with it for a while which is presumably why they are now trying it on again.  The problem here is that for Zionists it is a game of pretending that ideology is identity and that’s too absurd to sustain.

For Dave, organisations, like ideologies, become identities.  There’s a whole chapter on When Anti-Racists Ban Jews.  Back in the late 1970s some university Jewish societies were banned over their affiliation to the World Zionist Organisation and Congress.  The ban was under students’ union’s “no platform for racists” policy, it wasn’t the banning of Jews as Jews. There were leftists who opposed the ban because they claimed that it was wrong tactically. Dave seems to have tried but could not find a former supporter of the no platforming of Jewish societies who would now say that the policy was actually antisemitic.

Dave’s Conclusion doesn’t actually conclude.  It’s anecdotes about events since he wrote the book.  Among others, there’s Jackie Walker’s hacked facebook conversation with a Zionist friend about Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Dave attributes this to the influence of an antisemitic Farakhan disciple rather than a clumsily and privately expressed statement of fact.  He then berates her for saying that she was being targeted for her support for the Palestinians. There was a clue in that she was hacked by the Israel Advocacy Movement.  But to add to his omissions, Dave doesn’t do detective work.

The Video the Board of Deputies, Momentum's Jon Lansman & Politics Home tried to ban

Sheesh, I thought this video was lost and gone forever.   I first heard about it via this piece in Politics Home.  Here look:

A controversial video criticised as a “slap in the face” by Jewish campaign group is still posted on Jeremy Corbyn’s official Facebook page, PoliticsHome can reveal.

The film, made by Mr Corbyn’s campaign team, features his supporters responding to a number of accusations often levelled at the Labour leader’s backers.

One of the questions is ‘Do you promote anti-Semitism?’ – in reference to a string of suspensions and expulsions over the last year.

One of the participants in the video throws away a piece of paper with the question written on it and says “so that’s gone as well”.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews spoke to veteran left-winger Jon Lansman, Mr Corbyn's campaign director, who apparently agreed to withdraw the video.

It has since been taken down from YouTube and the main page of Mr Corbyn’s Facebook account, but it is still available to view on the ‘videos’ section of his page.

“The dismissive video was a ‘slap in the face’ for the Jewish community,” said Board of Deputies chief executive Gillian Merron in a statement released last night.

“Having spoken directly to campaign director Jon Lansman, the Jeremy for Labour campaign now recognises the inappropriate message conveyed and has committed to remove the video and apologise. This is the right result.

Now, after a couple more paragraphs Politics Home hosted the video that the Board of Deputies had complained about and Jon Lansman had apologised for but now look:

I think we can guess that under the capitulationist advice of Jon Lansman, Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook probably zapped the video too.  I asked one of the participants if they retained a copy but they hadn't. I was getting frantic.  Even when Politics Home hosted the video it couldn't be downloaded.   But when you see the video you will see that there was nothing in it to complain about or to apologise for which I am guessing is why Politics Home removed it.  And now thanks to Jamie Stern-Weiner who found it on YouTube here it is:

So just like the whole of the antisemitism smear campaign against leftists and Palestine solidarity supporters this is yet another case of "nothing to see here", which in the case of Politics Home and probably Corbyn's Facebook page is now literally true.

PS: I've just seen that Harry's Place has missed the point of the removal of the video and hosted it on their racist site.  It was actually HP's David Toube (he calls himself Habibi) who uploaded it to YouTube but rather smartly disabled the comments.

A "little bit of a conspiracy": a bit of an antisemitic trope or a bit of an understatement?

Let's have a look, shall we?

I wouldn't have noticed this but for The Community Security Trust's Dave Rich agreeing with what looked like an allegation from Linda Grant that Jeremy Corbyn is himself antisemitic.

@lindasgrant if Milne was a mensch he would have replied "no, I've known him for years he's a decent guy we just disagree." But he didn't.

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) June 1, 2016

A quick scan of Dave Rich's Twitter account yielded this little gem:

“There is a little bit of a conspiracy going on”. Jackie Walker certainly knows her antisemitic tropes, doesn't she? https://t.co/DPcQW1FStG

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) June 2, 2016

 A "little bit of a conspiracy going on" now has the official stamp of disapproval from the provisional wing of the Zionist movement in the UK.

So what was Jackie Walker thinking of when she invoked this "antisemitic trope"?  Let's have a look at The Jewish Chronicle.  I mean, I hesitate to allege a conspiracy but whenever lots of people in lots of media are saying the same wrong thing about someone falsely accused of antisemitism, the JC is usually in there somewhere.  And their headline:

Jacqueline Walker claims her suspension from Labour was part of a conspiracy

Now immediately we ought to smell a rat because Dave Rich put his quote in quotes.  That is, it was an exact quote.  Where he messed up is he made out "a little bit of a conspiracy" is an "antisemitic trope".  The antisemitic trope about conspiracies is usual the worldwide Jewish conspiracy theory.  That's the idea that all of the world's Jews are party to the same conspiracy to the benefit of all Jews and to the detriment of everyone else.  Not so much a little bit of a conspiracy but a literally impossibly huge conspiracy.

Now the JC was a bit smarter than Dave Rich (who isn't?).  They've made out that Jackie Walker could have been suggesting that the smear campaign against Corbynistas and Palestine solidarity supporters is part of a much bigger conspiracy.  That seems to be what they are attempting with their headline.  But they didn't just run with a headline.  They ran the story and like Dave Rich they seem to have run real quotes that contradict the headline:

Ms Walker, who was readmitted to the party after being suspended over allegations of making antisemitic comments, said: “There is a little bit of a conspiracy going on”. 

Speaking at a meeting in Brighton last night, she told a 50-strong audience that she had been abroad when she was informed of her suspension last month. 

She said: “Look at the date of the Jewish Chronicle when that came out. I was actually in Turkey.“My letter suspending me was actually dated 4 May. The Jewish Chronicle published the story about me on 4 May. 

“Now, you have to put two and two together. What you will know is that somebody in the [Labour] compliance unit, or around there, is leaking information out to the media.

Conspiracy? Well ok, but just a small one, like Jackie Walker said.

Now let's have a look at the case of Tony Greenstein and his suspension from the Labour Party.  Tony was told that he was being suspended because of certain things that he had said but he wasn't told what those things were.  Curiously, The Times and The Telegraph were told what those things were and they said that Tony had said that the Jews had supported the Nazis' antisemitic Nuremberg Laws.  Tony of course had said nothing of the kind and for fear of libel action by Tony (who knows his legal stuff) both The Times and The Telegraph ran retractions.

So the false allegations against Tony Greenstein were leaked to and published by The Times and The Telegraph and before the allegations were put to Tony.  Whoever the leaker was must have known that the details were going to be published.  Conspiracy?  Ok, make it a double!  Cheers, or L'chaim as we rootless cosmopolitans like to say.

So whilst Zionists can make an "antisemitic trope" out of just about anything, the suggestion that the smear campaign against various Israel critics looks like it is indeed a bit of a conspiracy.  I know size isn't important but "little bit" appears to be a little bit of an understatement.

Zionists order Corbyn to follow John Vorster to Yad Vashem

This is interesting.  Having jumped through hoops to appease the UK's Zionist movement it turns out that Jeremy Corbyn may have disobeyed a direct order to indulge in a bit of holocaust hypocrisy at Israel's holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.  Here's The Guardian:

Jeremy Corbyn faced fresh criticism over his handling of antisemitism allegations after Labour’s sister party in Israel said it had had no reply to a letter its leader [Isaac Herzog] sent to him a month ago expressing dismay and inviting him to Jerusalem to see the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

Visits to Yad Vashem are something of a walk of shame given some of its past visitors.  Here's John Vorster, a one time president of apartheid era South Africa and a nazi internee during WWII:

The picture is from Yad Vashem's own website.

And apart from Israel's own leaders, Vorster isn't the only racist to have graced Yad Vashem with his presence.   Here's Poland's Michal Kaminski of the virulently nationalist, Civic Platform Party visited Yad Vashem too:

Here's Tony Greenstein on Kaminski:

Kaminski led the campaign against a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Jews in Jedwabne by Poles in 1941 (see )  Kaminski was formerly a member of the fascist National Revival of Poland Party. 

Vorster and Kaminski are just the kind of people you might expect to turn up at the jewel in the Zionist crown.  That tribute to Jewish suffering that says that no-one else matters and Israel can do no wrong.

And so to Corbyn:

Herzog invited Corbyn to bring a delegation to Yad Vashem to witness that the last time the Jews were forcibly transported “it was not to Israel but to their deaths”. An Israeli Labour party official confirmed that it had “not had a reply” after rumours circulated in the Jewish community in London that no response had been received in Jerusalem or issued from London.

 So no answer from Corbyn so far so we can only hope that if he does ever answer he won't make that walk of shame.

But not content with implying that Corbyn has done something wrong, rather than the first thing he's done right since this whole orchestrated smear campaign began, Toby Helm (The Observer journo who wrote the piece) managed to take do something no self-respecting journalist should ever do.  He took a Zionist's words at face value.  Let's see that again:

the last time the Jews were forcibly transported “it was not to Israel but to their deaths”

Now that's just not true.  There have now been many instances of Jews being forced to go to Israel when they haven't wanted.  Even West Germany back in the 1980s handcuffed Soviet Jews and bundled them on to El Al planes bound for Israel.  Poland had an antisemitic campaign in the 1960s where an agreement with Golda Meir had Jews being forced to go to the Israel they didn't even approve of.  And with the collapse of the Soviet Union Jews who wished to go elsewhere once again found themselves being forced to go to Israel. For that unhappy episode, see 972 Mag.