Jews Don't Count: a wretched book, cowardly, ignorant and dishonest

Purim is a time of laughter. It is a cross between Halloween and April Fools Day and it was in that spirit that a friend gave me the book because, she said. it's a joke. And so it turned out. I don't even know if Baddiel was joking by writing it. It contains no new insights at all. 

It is basically arguing that Jews should be considered an ethnicity or race (Baddiel conflates the two) mostly because the Nazis did. He ignores that it was actually an aspect of their antisemitism that the Nazis posited Jews as a race but Baddiel swallows whole their pseudoscience (p41) and refuses to consider that Jews in free societies have identity choices denied to the essentially non-white BAME communities.

The positive reviews Baddiel's book has received are either sycophancy or collusion especially those that say it is "well researched". It's a bizarre thing to say about a book which consists entirely of Baddiel's own experiences or whatever he has gleaned from Twitter, Facebook, television and newspapers.

If he had have conducted research he might have written a very different book. For example, he has an officer of an Israel advocacy and Jewish security group tampering with a quote (p68) from Ken Loach to make it look as if Loach had said that "history is there for us all to discuss" to promote debate on whether the Holocaust happened or not. 

He didn't. And when he replicates Loach's son's tweet (p69) objecting to the defamation of his father and calling Baddiel out on Baddiel's own past racism, 

Baddiel sidesteps the defamation issue and accuses Jim Loach of "whataboutery", a concept Baddiel doesn't seem to understand. 

Baddiel's claim to be addressing himself to the "progressive left" by highlighting what he claims are instances of antisemitism on the left is laughable. The progressive left is not Baddiel's milieu and apart from some faked cases, all the examples of antisemitism he gives come from non-left sources. Jenny Tonge (p94) with her LibDem background is a centrist now in the Lords as an independent, ironically since the centre is roughly where Baddiel places himself. Other genuine cases of antisemitism from football club directors (p28) or racist football fans (p13), are likewise not from the left.

The book is  peppered with accidental or deliberate false inferences. Discussion of the case of US Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, (pp10-12) had him and BBC's Justin Webb accusing her, without evidence, of antisemitism. He wildly exaggerated the notorious Mear One mural of 6 bankers (including 2 Jews) lording it over the suffering masses to claim that the bankers depicted in it had hooked noses (p44) and suspiciously he didn't include a replica of the mural so people could see for themselves. 

He quotes the artist's antisemitic response to criticisms of the mural (p41) and then quotes Corbyn asking why it is being removed and referring to other cases of anti-capitalist works being destroyed. But nowhere did Corbyn say he had even seen, let alone that he liked, the mural and certainly he wouldn't have agreed with the artist's response to criticisms.

Baddiel concludes MuralGate by patronisingly suggesting that Corbyn sees the anti-capitalism but not the antisemitism (p46). Another false inference. Again if Baddiel did any research he would know that there are many instances of Corbyn placing his opposition to antisemitism before his anti-war and anti-Zionist positions. He condemned Tam Dalyell when the latter said that Blair was in thrall to a "Jewish cabal" of advisers over Iraq and Corbyn condemned the late Paul Flynn for saying that the UK shouldn't have a Jewish ambassador to Israel. The ambassador in question, Matthew Gould, was a declared "proud Zionist".

Baddiel takes the opportunity thrown up by MuralGate to assert that "There is, on both left and right, of capitalist power being represented as Jewish power" (p46). No examples given, no research required.

Baddiel claims to be a "non-Zionist" and yet he appears to support the IHRA working definition of antisemitism (p74) which essentialises Jews as supporters of The State of Israel. He assumes that opponents of the definition don't care about Jews. It appears that Baddiel hasn't read the definition or, worse, he has. He protests (p75) that during a time of unprecedented pressure on universities over Covid19, one university official expressed irritation at, though Baddiel doesn't mention it, a blackmail attempt by a right wing Tory government to defund universities if they fail to adopt a bogus definition of antisemitism which, if adopted and adhered to, would prevent not just criticism of The State of Israel, which it already has, but also accurate description of its character and its history.  But for Baddiel, the failure or refusal of some universities to succumb to the blackmail shows that they don't care about Jews or antisemitism.

In order to falsely accuse the leftish journalist Ash Sarkar of antisemitism he misrepresents her as saying that all Jews are rich. She actually said that unlike racism against other identities the socioeconomic status of Jews is not affected by racism one way or the other. Baddiel even claims to be unable to consider anything other than his own misinterpretation (p26). Again, a lack of research. Why didn't he ask her? Later in the book, because Sarkar used the word "dispossession" in her tweet (p110) about the current situation, Baddiel takes the opportunity to mention his wealthy ancestors as having been dispossessed by the Nazis as if Sarkar was some kind of Holocaust denier. He misrepresents Sarkar three times overall (p120). I'm left with the impression she probably won the argument on Twitter.

Baddiel is a man who has chatted with a PM about a cause of his concern, he met up with Princess Di's lawyer to talk to him for 3 hours about TS Eliot's antisemitism and he had radio 4's Justin Webb contact him to tell him he wasn't advising the Democrats to pitch to antisemitism as Baddiel had falsely inferred. And yet he couldn't even conduct the basic research of contacting people on Twitter to get them to clarify their position before he went ahead and, well, smeared them.

Of course his lack of research wasn't just laziness. It was agenda driven. Why does multimillionaire David Baddiel worry about inflated and invented antisemitism from the redistributive left and not even seem to know about the very real antisemitism of the current PM and some.of his senior cohorts? 

This brings us to his nonchalant dismissal of those Jews with whom he disagrees. Like Howard Jacobson before him, he believes Jews who are perfectly, you might say proudly, upfront about being Jewish, are actually ashamed of being Jewish if they criticise Israel or if they are anti-Zionist altogether. Miriam Margolyes comes in for a particularly nasty swipe here (p30). Also, Baddiel seems unaware of a whole swathe of unabashed anti-Zionist Jews in the Haredic and very numerous Satmar and Chasidic communities who he dismisses on Twitter as "stupid fucking frummers" but doesn't mention them in his book unless he's lumping them in with democratic secularists like myself.

His condemnation of Jewish opponents of Israel like his condemnation of all leftist critics of Israel seems to belie his claim not to care about "stupid fucking" Israel at all.

Actually other Jews Baddiel seems to be unaware of are truly non-white Jews from North Africa and Asia also from other parts of Africa like Uganda. It's an irony when Baddiel makes Jews out to be "not quite" white, he is only referring to Jews who were on the white side of Jim Crow laws in America, the white side of apartheid in South Africa and of course on the white side of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Another thing suggesting his dismissiveness of much Jewishness (Yiddishkeit) is how he treats the Talmud. He dismisses it as a book of exegesis of the Old Testament, codified in the fourteenth century". (p7) It was the 6th century and Old Testament is Christian terminology and a bit of a putdown. He complains that antisemites misquote it to make Jews look bad but a) how would he know? and b) it's not unheard of for Israeli rabbis to embarrass Israel by saying how one day gentiles will be the slaves of Jews.

I really can't see why this book was written at all or why it is being so lavishly praised - including by at least two Tory peers. Ok, I can see why it's being praised by Tory peers and other Rightists. But we have had over 5 years of smears and the progressive left is all but destroyed for a generation. For Baddiel the book seems to be a settling of scores on a platform away from Twitter and real life where his targets cannot have a right of reply. It is cowardly, mean spirited and dishonest.

Israel destroying Palestinian Covid19 Testing Centres - Ethnic Cleansing by Pandemic

Cor, sometimes I think Israel wants to destroy the Palestinians just because they can. Here's a Press Release from Hebron:

Information for a Press Release:

Israel has demolished Hebron’s Covid 19 Testing Centre
Early on Tuesday, 21 July 2020, the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank oversaw the demolition of a Covid 19 Test Center located just outside the northern entrance to the city of Hebron. Hebron is currently the epicentre of the Corona outbreak in the West Bank, accounting for roughly 80 percent of all infections. The Covid Test Centre would have been a key line of defence in the population’s battle to contain the virus.


Background
Construction of the Covid Test Centre had begun in March, with clear signage indicating the humanitarian purpose of the building works. The Centre was located on land donated to the Hebron Municipality by a private landowner.  Since it is extremely rare for Palestinians to be granted planning permission in Area C of the West Bank, construction began without a permit.

On July 12th, with the Test Centre only two days away from completion, the Israeli Civil Administration issued demolition orders, using the controversial Military Order 1797, which has been criticised by human rights lawyers for the way in which it bypasses normal recourses to appeal.

This is not the first time that Israel has moved to squash Palestinian pandemic responses:
back in April, the Jerusalem police closed a COVID-19 testing station that was opened in the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem, citing a law prohibiting Palestinian Authority activity in the city.

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.

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:

State of the left: Labour expels someone for antisemitism and the Morning Star publishes a (terrible) poem in his honour. https://t.co/mXTBxfWfCm

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) February 21, 2018

I QRTd as follows:

This is interesting. A self-styled antisemitism watchdog (read charlatan) says @TonyGreenstein was expelled by @UKLabour for antisemitism. He was not. He was expelled for consistent anti-racism, specifically anti-Zionism but the charge was "abusive behaviour". Do keep up Dave. https://t.co/heAtzvdFXU

— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) March 1, 2018

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:

Interesting take. @UKLabour promotes racism says non-Jewish organisation which claims to be Jewish in its title.
No wonder they don’t want to be part of the Labour Party then.
Oh. https://t.co/lSzReQUmcp

— Simon Myerson QC (@SCynic1) March 2, 2018

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:

On a point of clarification, sir, what the flip are you talking about? If I understand you correctly you are so wrong on every point you make I think I can't have understood you correctly.

— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) March 2, 2018

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:

Simon likes to allege leftist jews are not jews. He can't cope with the fact that jews have a range of political opinions.

— Harry Tuttle (@arryTuttle) March 2, 2018

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:

Non-Jewish organisation with Jews in the title blames Jew for its own lack of intelligence. https://t.co/cUHrr7NiPh

— Simon Myerson QC (@SCynic1) March 2, 2018

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:

That truly is *utterbollocks*.

— Liz McCann (@mccann_liz) March 2, 2018

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:

The problem with Zionists is there is no case for Israel so all they can do is smear, troll or silence Israel's critics. But @SCynic1 is in a class of his own cracking antisemitic jokes & seeing @Jeremy_Newmark as a man of integrity https://t.co/IO6ifsq6qO pic.twitter.com/6SfZy3wVzO

— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) March 2, 2018

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:

Nothing screams integrity like sniping from behind an avatar

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) March 2, 2018

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)

I just can't take you seriously when your default position seems to be anger and vitriol. What's in it for you? Do you enjoy it? I genuinely don't understand how people can spend so much time causing arguments

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) March 2, 2018

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.

I really should stop looking at this troll. But he just makes things up about @JewishChron.
He says we support Jon Lansman to be Labour’s Gen Sec. Pure fantasy. We have never and would never express a view. https://t.co/SY5pWMaMre

— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) March 3, 2018

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

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.

Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah

Here's an article on Ken Livingstone by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group.  In it he seems to come on the side of those seeking Ken's expulsion from the Labour Party:

If  Livingstone had had the nous, he would have simply noted Shah’s acknowledgement that she had crossed a line into antisemitism, welcomed her apology and then used all the weight of his background in anti-racism in London to utterly condemn the Tories for their thoroughly racist campaign against Khan. That could,  and should, have been the story. Instead he tried to excuse Shah’s tweets as “completely over the top but … not antisemitic”. Immediately after this came his infamous remarks about Hitler and Zionism.

David goes on to take exception to Ken invoking Lenni Brenner as a source for his Hitler/Zionism remarks.  David finds Brenner's work wanting.

Brenner’s book reads much more like tabloid journalism than any serious academic study. It makes crude allegations of Zionist-Nazi collaboration, treats the actions of some Zionists as representing all Zionists, and utterly distorts the power relations between Zionists and Nazis.

Within the same article David mentions the main victims of Zionism who have been absent from most of this bogus antisemitism campaign, the Palestinians:

this whole effort to try to find evidence of Zionists behaving badly in the 1930s in order to expose the way Zionism behaves today, is such a poor way of supporting the Palestinians and their just demands. It rests on too many crude generalisations. You do not have to go back to Hitler and the 1930s in order to expose and challenge the oppression of Palestinians by Zionist ideology and practice today.

I have a few problems with David Rosenberg's take on all this and here's something I wrote elsewhere:

Did Naz Shah actually apologise specifically for saying "the Jews are rallying" for Israel or was it a more mealy mouthed showtrial sort of apology couched in terms that failed to pinpoint what she had actually said that was antisemitic?  I thought it was the latter. In fact the more she apologised the more she seemed to be saying something like, "I'm sorry I said whatever I said, I had no idea of the extent to which the Jews rally for Israel".

And did Ken Livingstone actually make an intervention? Or was he invited to a radio interview with Vanessa Feltz? I thought that was the latter.

The first mention of Hitler was by Feltz and Ken responded.  He seemed to be pointing up the hypocrisy of the Zionist movement on the whole question of Nazi Zionist collaboration or of comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

Certainly Ken invoked Lenni Brenner as a source but there are many sources to support the idea of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis including some that say that Hitler himself must have intervened to maintain Ha'avara when other leading Nazis were against it.

I think to gift the Zionists by throwing Ken under the bus when the NCC seems to have deliberately avoided examination of what Ken (and by extension, Naz Shah) actually did say would be a major mistake not least because if Ken's offence in the eyes of the NCC was to defend Naz Shah then what becomes of people who defended Ken?

My own view is that the NCC didn't expel Ken and avoided discussion of the "historical facts" because, as David said, most of what Naz Shah said wasn't antisemitic and what she did say that was antisemitic was no different from what most Zionists say (and indeed did say at that appalling select committee).  

The NCC avoided what Ken said about Hitler, Nazism and Zionism because what Ken said was broadly correct regardless of whether we run with Lenni Brenner as a source or not.  (eg, see this)

Of course this isn't now simply about the NCC charges. Ken is now being condemned for defending himself whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Regarding whether or not an exposé of Zionist collaboration with antisemitism or nazism is good or bad for the Palestinians is irrelevant given that Ken isn't being accused by JLM or the NCC of not being good for the Palestinians and if he was being good for the Palestinians no doubt he'd be accused of antisemitism for that.

So I don't think we have to twist or ignore facts to support Ken Livingstone. We should welcome a more forensic examination of all of the facts of both Ken and Naz Shah's cases.

For a more detailed examination of the case of Ken Livingstone and the NCC see this article, Compulsory Lies by Mike MacNair in the Weekly Worker.

Deborah Maccoby clarifies Howard Jacobson's "Let's be clear...." article

I've just been having a bit of a natter with Deborah Maccoby by email and she mentioned Howard Jacobson's appalling Observer (in print, Guardian online) article headed,  Let’s be clear – antisemitism is a hate apart

I have now read Jacobson's piece, which was in print in the Observer on Sunday....it is typical Jacobson logic....what he seems to be saying is: the Palestinian solidarity movement thinks that Zionism is racism and that therefore anti-Zionism is not racist; Jacobson claims that on the contrary Zionism is not racism; ergo anti-Zionism must be racist; because it is racist it is antisemitic, because antisemitism equals racism; at the same time, antisemitism is unique and different from any other racism!  That is Jacobson logic.....

Brilliant! Short and to the point.

See also Tony Greenstein's blog here: http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/as-guardians-anti-semitism-campaign.html

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.

Judaism Jim but not as we knew it

This is getting totally weird.  First we had the spectacle of the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, lying about the origins and status of the modern ideology of Zionism within Judaism, now we've got an antisemitism watchdog reinventing Judaism too.  I thought one of the most famous of the Jewish high holy days was Yom Kippur.  I also thought that Yom Kippur was a fast and that everyone knew it, even non-Jews.  Well now it turns out that Yom Kippur is a festival and has been since as far back as 1948. See this from Dave Rich's book, The Left's Jewish Problem:

Well I'm not aware the left has a Jewish problem but the right definitely has a Judaism problem.

Are Zionists trying to cause Antisemitism?

I've just been reading Dave Rich's ludicrous book, The Left's Jewish Problem.  I've returned to it because I was looking at another book, a serious one this time, called A History of the Jews Ancient and Modern, by Ilan Halevi.

In Rich's book he gives Tony Greenstein a few mentions one of which is as follows:

Tony Greenstein, who was, and remains, an avid proponent of the idea that the Zionist movement benefits from, and proactively encourages, anti-Semitism (including, he alleges, collaborating with Nazism).

Having read his book it is clear that Dave Rich is in deep denial about the many crimes of Zionism including that little bit in brackets on the end of the snippet.  I'm saying Rich must know about the several instances of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. The guy has a PhD and now a book on anti-Zionism and antisemitism.  Could so many years of research (ok the book was a rush job) really not yield to Rich what it has to serious scholars?

But that wasn't what made me return to the book.  If you look at the way the Zionist movement is throwing its weight around in the UK ever since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, it's not an edifying spectacle. I mean it must be causing antisemitism given the unjust and unfounded nature of the allegations.  Even the Home Affairs Select Committee on Antisemitism admitted in its report that there was no more antisemitism in Labour than in any other mainstream party but that it was going to try to get laws passed making it difficult or impossible to criticise Zionism.  This must cause great anger among those minorities who really do suffer everyday threats of violence and on-going social and economic exclusion.

It does look a lot to me that the Zionists do want antisemitism and Tony Greenstein is right.  Other reviewers of Dave Rich's book have noted that while he tends to conflate Jews and Zionists he never really defines or analyses Zionism in terms of beneficiaries or victims.  He simply says that Jews are instinctively bound to Israel or some such.  Having read his shock horror response to Tony's calm take on the Zionist approach the diaspora it is possible that he really doesn't know much about Zionism except that it established a state in Palestine for people like him and me to call our "homeland".

So back to Ilan Halevi. I was reading one of the bits on Zionism when this quote from Theodor Herzl leapt out at me:

We shall have to sink still lower, we shall have to be more widely insulted, spat upon, mocked, beaten, robbed and slain before we are ripe for the [Zionist] idea.

Well, I'm guessing that Dave and co. aren't quite trying to make that happen, though their recent exclusion of Haredi Jews from the Home Affairs Circus means that they don't much care for those Jews who are the most "widely insulted, spat upon, mocked, beaten, robbed" and possibly "slain".  Of course some of those ignored Haredi Jews are Neturei Karta so they'll never be ripe for "the idea".


But I digress.  Tony is of course absolutely right.  The Zionists want the real antisemitism, as in racism against Jews, but they want to forbid anti-Zionism, that is the racists want to forbid anti-racism.

See a difference between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism? No problem, just erase the line

I read Dave Rich's book recently and he mentions having done a PhD. I was curious about it so I googled Dave Rich PhD. Top of the list was The Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism's "About" page, and there's Dave.

Dr Dave Rich
Associate

Dave studied for his PhD at the Institute. His research covered the emergence of left wing anti-Zionism in Britain after 1967, particularly in student politics, and responses to it from UK Jewish organisations. He is particularly interested in the relationship of anti-Zionism to antisemitism, and the boundaries that separate them, that fuel debates over the ‘new antisemitism’.

Dave Rich works for the Community Security Trust which claims to oppose antisemitism but seems to put more energy into opposing criticism and condemnation of Israel.  And now having read the book, The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, it turns out that Dave has been looking at the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism so that he can claim there is no difference.  He does this by claiming that Jews have such an instinct for supporting the colonisation, conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine that to oppose the Zionist ideology amounts to antisemitism.  This of course involves the redefinition of antisemitism so that anti-racists become antisemitic. Sadly it also has the effect of making ill-informed people subscribe to the old antisemitism because of course Dave and others like him, including now a Home Office Select Committee have decided that Jews and Zionists are the same thing.  All very sad and very irresponsible.

I didn't find the PhD by the way. I would be curious to have a quick look at it because Dave certainly doesn't seem to be down the intellectual end of the Zionist movement.

I wouldn't recommend the book.  There's a withering review on Red Pepper here and the always (overly) polite Richard Kuper has done one on Amazon here.

PS: I've decided to save people work by posting in full Richard Kuper's review here:

The Left’s Jewish Problem is an ideological tract and an intervention in the current battle in the Labour Party. It is designed to show “a sickness at the heart of left wing British politics… silently spreading, becoming ever more malignant” (cover blurb). That sickness is the sickness of antisemitism.

Of course there are antisemitic ideas around in Britain and it would be nonsense to assume that the left was immune. But Rich is on a mission to show antisemitism as widespread, systematic, hegemonic on the left.
As Rich is aware, there isn’t much Jew-hatred of a traditional kind around on the left, There is, rather, he believes, a different kind of antisemitism, expressed as an anti-Zionism of the left, in which movements and thinkers have come to view Israel and Zionism as “a product of western colonialism rather than a liberation movement against it”.

That large sections of “the left” fell out of love with Israel and came to rally around support for Palestinian rights and a Palestinian state is relatively uncontested. But why the change? For Rich, this shift couldn’t be a response to events, analysis, or improved understanding. It was, rather, an ideological hijacking by the “New Left”.
Rich’s New Left, with Corbyn as its embodiment, is a curious construct. “As New Left superseded Old,” he writes, “so identity politics replaced class politics as its primary mobilising idea… [This New Left represents] a new social class, rooted in intellectual and cultural professions, populated by public sector workers whose political agenda would come to be dominated by identity and iconoclasm.”

So the movement behind Corbyn is somehow viewed as a break with all tradition, rather than a popular, deeply-rooted, left trade-union and social movement, trying to incorporate class and identity issues, in a desire to restore something of older Labour concerns: equality, social ownership, trade-union rights, anti-imperialism and more.
Rich operates with free-floating, unchanging essences. So Zionism is, was and always will be nothing but self-determination/national liberation. Who could possibly criticise that? So by definition describing Israel as a colonial-settler or apartheid society can’t have any truth in it. Is can only be an emotional attempt to demonise Israel. For Rich, such concepts are products of a New Left mind set: the apartheid analogy was “hardwired into left wing anti-Israel politics in Britain during its formative [anti-apartheid] years in the 1960s and 1970s.”

But what if these concepts are gaining ground precisely because they make increasing sense of an emergent reality? Events have played crucial role in shifting ideas on the left in relation to Israel-Palestine – from the 1956 Suez invasion to the televised spectacle of phosphorus bombs falling on Gaza and bodies of children in the rubble.

Whatever Zionism might or might not have been originally, what has it become? Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank continues unabated. Green-line Israel’s discrimination against its increasingly second-class Palestinian citizens, and their physical displacement in the Negev, rolls on. What Israel is now needs to be judged by what it is doing, not by its ideological self-image. Israel’s actions are what are delegitimising it, not any antisemitism of the left.

It is clearly wrong to argue that all claims of antisemitism are simply made in order to silence criticism of Israel. Allegations of antisemitism should be taken seriously and investigated swiftly. But making an allegation is not the same thing as establishing a fact. Rich is entirely oblivious to (or simply ignores) the context in which recent accusations emerged – why, for example, emotionally charged posts and tweets from the 2014 Gaza war should only be dredged up in 2016, under Corbyn’s leadership. It does not take much to see the timing as contrived, rather than an innocent desire to unmask antisemitism.

Clearly, insofar as some remarks are antisemitic they need to be confronted. Conspiracy theories, e.g. that Israel founded Isis or that Jews escaped 9/11, should be dismissed out of hand. Individuals who make them should be dealt with appropriately. But appropriately means appropriately. It doesn’t mean suspensions without charge, condemnation without a hearing, or leaking stories to the Jewish Chronicle or Daily Telegraph - in short, the weaponisation of antisemitism and the complete absence of due process we have witnessed in recent months. On all this Rich has nothing to say.

If Rich’s book encourages us to be more precise in our language, to temper how we express our emotional outrage at the things Israel does with impunity, to be more strategic in how we build support for Palestinian rights, it may (inadvertently!) achieve something useful. But in its own terms, it must be treated as a polemical intervention rather than a serious analytical contribution to our understanding of antisemitism (or the left) today.

Good stuff. I said Richard is very polite. The Red Pepper review though is a real skewering but I gather Dave and his CST cohorts are paid to be a brazen embarrassment to the Jewish community.