Deborah Maccoby, The Jewish Chronicle and a Smoked Salmon Beigel. Is it Friday already?

Aha!  Deborah Maccoby has reappeared on the Jewish Chronicle website letters page.  I blogged about her letter's appearance and disappearance from the JC website a few days ago.   Here's the letter again:

About free speech

In his Holocaust Education Trust dinner speech (The scourge of antisemitism is changing form, JC, October 20 2017) Andrew Neil erroneously cited the Free Speech on Israel fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference: “the chair of the meeting asked: ‘We demand the right to debate ‘Holocaust: yes or no’”.

The chair of the meeting, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, made no mention of the Holocaust. The guest speaker, Miko Peled, an Israeli-American who is not a member of the Labour Party, said: “This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole spectrum. There should be no limits on the discussion”.

Peled was defining free speech as a principle, not calling for a Labour Party debate about whether or not the Holocaust happened, as was implied by Mr Neil.

Later in his speech, Andrew Neil quoted Mark Twain: “the truth has barely got its boots on before a lie is halfway round the world”.  Exactly. 

Deborah Maccoby, 
Leeds LS17

Apparently what happens at the JC is, on Thursday night the JC print editions get delivered to shops and houses up and down the country.  The date on it is the Friday not the Thursday.  The letters are then loaded onto the website on the Friday bearing that Friday's date and the letters which by now then have all appeared in the print edition.  Well Deborah Maccoby's letter was reproduced in error on the website before it has appeared in print.  Now it is possible that someone at the JC wanted it printed while someone else wanted it pulled but let's just assume that the JC did intend to publish it in today's print edition but published in error on line last week then pulled it and now is pushing it again.

Oi! Now I have to go to Gants Hill to get a smoked salmon beigel and a print copy of the JC.  I'll snap the letters page and post the pic here so watch this space.....

Meanwhile, have a beigel....

UPDATE:

Ok, I had my beigel and two twisted Danishes and bought my JC, £2.50 (ouch!) and here is Deborah's letter taking a good old swipe at Andrew Neil, Orange monster, Tory and Zionist:

Sorry, I'm not very good at that edit malarkey but well done to the JC for publishing a letter completely out of kilter with their standard Zionist fare.

Jewish Chronicle's Maccoby Mystery Suspense

If you read my previous post, you'll know the basic plot.  The Jewish Chronicle published on its website a crop of letters from the print edition.  As it happens, I can now see the plot - which was in my mind mostly - unravelling as I write this.  Well they listed the correspondents in the sub-heading and printed out the letters, including one from Deborah Maccoby.  Well, the next day on the same page, Deborah's name had gone from the sub-heading and so had her letter from the page.

I found the original page on Google cache, did my previous post and tweeted thus:

The @jewishchron has now removed DeborahMaccoby's letter correcting @afneil's misrepresentation of @mikopeled https://t.co/wacde32uDI https://t.co/7sdCqHjBxO

— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) October 29, 2017

And the Jewish Chronicle tweeted their reply thus:

The letter went up online this week too early. If you look at the hard copy of the paper, it's not in there - bec it is running this week.

— The Jewish Chronicle (@JewishChron) October 29, 2017

What that meant was that the print edition of the JC which most people get on Friday carried all the letters published on line on that day, 27 October 2017, but not Deborah's.

Deborah's local JC stockist didn't get their copies on Friday and she still hasn't seen it.  "My" copy is a typical JC and it passes through many family member hands before it reaches my pair.  In fact, I was reduced to buying the blooming thing for the first time since my mother died last year.

And what do you know?

Look at the blurry pic I just took.

I think you can make out the names.  They are:

Jeff Lewis
Avi Moshe
Neville Landau
Josephine Bacon
Rabbi Gideon Schulman
Tony Adler
Barbara Epstein
Bryan Diamond
Neville Goldschneider
Professor Geoffrey Alderman

Now this is where the plot gets a bit thicker.  Let's have a look at the first manifestation of the JC letters webpage:

See the names of the correspondents? Jeff Lewis, Avi Moshe, Neville Landau, Josephine Bacon, Rabbi Gideon Schulman, Tony Adler, Barbara Epstein, Bryan Diamond, Neville Goldschneider and Deborah Maccoby.

And after the "correction":

See the names?  Jeff Lewis, Avi Moshe, Neville Landau, Josephine Bacon, Rabbi Gideon Schulman, Tony Adler, Barbara Epstein, Bryan Diamond and Neville Goldschneider.

Now this chimes with what the JC said in their tweet.  You see?  Deborah Maccoby's letter wasn't published in Friday's print edition.  But scroll back up and see Professor Geoffrey Alderman in the print edition but not the webpage.  More mystery.  What happened to the Professor?

But back to Deborah.  According to Deborah, she sent the letter in good time for publication in last Friday's edition so if it was going to be published she would have expected it to be published then.  Now the JC, via its tweet, seems to saying that her letter is going to be in this Friday's edition.  Before I saw the last print edition today I had assumed Deborah's letter was in that one.  So now, if the JC, is saying that Deborah's letter is pegged to go into the edition of  Friday 3 November we can expect to see the letter in print on that day and on line on the same day.

In the meantime. let's see that letter again in case it does another disappear:

About free speech

In his Holocaust Education Trust dinner speech ( “The scourge of antisemitism is changing form”, JC, October 20 2017) Andrew Neil erroneously cited the Free Speech on Israel fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference: “the chair of the meeting asked: ‘We demand the right to debate ‘Holocaust: yes or no’”.

The chair of the meeting, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, made no mention of the Holocaust.  The guest speaker, Miko Peled, an Israeli-American who is not a member of the Labour Party, said:

“This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole spectrum.  There should be no limits on the discussion”.

Peled was defining free speech as a principle, not calling for a Labour Party debate about whether or not the Holocaust happened, as was implied by Mr Neil.

Later in his speech, Andrew Neil quoted Mark Twain: “the truth has barely got its boots on before a lie is halfway round the world”.  Exactly. 

Deborah Maccoby, 

Leeds LS17

I must say, I'm still puzzled about Professor Geoffrey Alderman.  Why didn't his letter appear on line?

Spot the difference as the Jewish Chronicle removes a published letter from its website

My friend Deborah Maccoby had a letter published in the Jewish Chronicle last week which read as follows:

About free speech

In his Holocaust Education Trust dinner speech ( “The scourge of antisemitism is changing form”, JC, October 20 2017) Andrew Neil erroneously cited the Free Speech on Israel fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference: “the chair of the meeting asked: ‘We demand the right to debate ‘Holocaust: yes or no’”.

The chair of the meeting, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, made no mention of the Holocaust.  The guest speaker, Miko Peled, an Israeli-American who is not a member of the Labour Party, said:

“This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole spectrum.  There should be no limits on the discussion”.

Peled was defining free speech as a principle, not calling for a Labour Party debate about whether or not the Holocaust happened, as was implied by Mr Neil.

Later in his speech, Andrew Neil quoted Mark Twain: “the truth has barely got its boots on before a lie is halfway round the world”.  Exactly. 

Deborah Maccoby, 

Leeds LS17

The link to the letter was here.   Clicking on the link though, you will not now find the letter.  Thanks to Google cache I know that you would have seen the letter if you'd have clicked the link between some time on 27 Oct 2017 and roughly "28 Oct 2017 02:46:01 GMT".  But now, sadly it's gone.

It's a real shame because I tweeted the link and it got several retweets and likes:

Would you believe @afneil said “the truth has barely got its boots on before a lie is halfway round the world”? https://t.co/qZ5crxP5mb pic.twitter.com/67uwiHPHdi

— Jews Sans Frontieres (@jewssf) October 27, 2017

The removal of Deborah's letter from the webpage involved significant changes to the page's appearance. Look, here it is before:

Obviously, scrolling down you would see the letter, which fortunately still appears in Google cache together with the link to the Andrew Neil article which Deborah was criticising.

And here's the page after the letter was removed:

I can't help wondering if Andrew Neil (on Twitter as @afneil) asked @StephenPollard to have the letter removed.  But whatever or whoever caused Deborah Maccoby's published letter to be removed from the Jewish Chronicle, thanks to Google cache and to me everyone can see the letter and everyone can see that it has been removed.

Who knows?  Maybe the Jewish Chronicle will restore the page to its original splendour.