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

Marcus Dysch article on Jeremy Newmark disappears from JC website

It's probably an innocent thing but I just tried this Jewish Chronicle link to an article headed, Jeremy Newmark urged to step down as local councillor and I got this:

I always find the JC and Dysch suspect but as I said, it's probably an innocent and google of course has its cache which is here but won't be for long.  So here is that article in full pending its restoration to its rightful place on the JC website:

Jeremy Newmark urged to step down as local councillor

Mr Newmark was advised to “step back” from his role as leader of the Labour group on Hertsmere Borough Council by the authority’s Conservative leader during a meeting in Borehamwood

Marcus Dysch

March 1, 2018

Jeremy Newmark has been urged to stand down as a local councillor following revelations about the circumstances of his departure from the Jewish Leadership Council.

Mr Newmark was advised to “step back” from his role as leader of the Labour group on Hertsmere Borough Council by the authority’s Conservative leader during a meeting in Borehamwood last night.

Morris Bright said Mr Newmark should show “the same deference” to the council that he had paid to the Jewish Labour Movement, from which he resigned as chairman. Doing so would allow him to “defend himself and his reputation”, Mr Bright suggested.

The council leader told a full meeting of the authority that he had been contacted by local residents asking “what the council is intending to do about this matter”.

He revealed he had met Mr Newmark in the days after the publication of allegations dating back to 2013 when Mr Newmark was chief executive of the JLC.

Mr Bright said: “Cllr Newmark was accompanied by councillor Rebecca Butler to the meeting. We spoke openly about the allegations made against Cllr Newmark by a national newspaper.

“I expressed the concern that was being expressed to me around the headlines and stories in the Jewish Chronicle, the Times and other media outlets.

“Cllr Newmark said the claims were ‘largely unfounded’ and ‘largely untrue’ and some were completely false.

“I explained that I was not forming a judgement as to any guilt and that everyone has a right to defend themselves, their name and their reputation.”

Mr Newmark has denied that he misused JLC funds or claimed inappropriate expenses. He resigned as chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement the day after the story broke in February and has made no public comments since issuing a denial to the JC.

Mr Bright added: “Let me repeat here in this chamber and on the webcast what I said to Cllr Newmark at that meeting; and let me be very clear about this… that neither I nor the anyone in my group are implying any guilt on his part at all.

“It is felt though both by my group and by residents who have communicated with me that he should, as indicated by the JLM, allow himself the time and space to attempt in a clear and individual way to seek redress and to clear his name.

“I made this request in person and in writing. I hope now that Cllr Newmark has had time for reflection since we first spoke about this some weeks ago.

“It is appropriate now for him to do the honourable thing and step back from Hertsmere, at what I know must be a difficult personal time for him.

“And I personally wish him well in his efforts to seek to clear his name of these serious allegations.”

Mr Newmark attended the council meeting and spoke after Mr Bright, but did not respond directly to his remarks. It is thought it was his first public appearance since the JC’s revelations last month.

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.

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.

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.

Arjan El Fassed's Mandela Memo was a spoof not a hoax

This will never go away.  Once upon a time a chap called Arjan El Fassed wrote a spoof "Memo to Thomas L.Friedman from Nelson Mandela".  The memo was clearly a spoof and was run in El Fassed's own name. However its descriptions of Israel and the obvious comparisons with South African apartheid were so real that the memo itself was genuinely mistaken for real.  A little checking showed that the memo was not from Mandela at all but some seem to believe that El Fassed was truly trying to deceive people in spite of him having signed off the memo in his own name.  And of course there are anti-Arab racists who have a stake in discrediting any and every Palestinian.

The latest person to mistake the memo for being by the real Nelson Mandela is the Labour MP Chris Williamson and The Jewish Chronicle can't conceal its glee.

Labour MP Chris Williamson is embroiled in further controversy after sharing on social media a notorious faked Nelson Mandela quote that compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.

Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow fire minister – who last week described antisemitism allegations within his party as “bulls**t” – tweeted the quote, which was made up by an anti-Zionist website, as part of an announcement that he had joined a “Picnic For Palestine” event in his Derby constituency last Saturday.

The tweet displayed a photo of Mr Williamson alongside pro-Palestinian activists and included the full version of the quote which has regularly been attributed to Mr Mandela by anti-Israel campaigners.

The quote was revealed as fake in 2007 by Joel Pollack, an American political writer, who found that it was actually written as a spoof memo by Arjan El Fassed, a co-founder of the anti-Zionist Electronic Intifada website.

In the same paragraph as the Mandela "quote" is described as "fake" it is also described as a spoof.  A fake is clearly aimed at deceiving people whereas a spoof is a joke.

I've read all about El Fassed's explanation about how people got the wrong idea about his spoof memo on his own blog which includes Ha'aretz deliberately smearing him as a hoaxer in 2001.  The Jewish Chronicle however seems to be hedging on whether the memo was a spoof or a hoax.  Sure, they call it a spoof but they say "the quote was revealed as a fake in 2007 by Joel Pollack".  And that's the bit I don't understand.  The memo was written and signed off in the name Arjan El Fassed in 2001.  He and others wrote to many newspapers to explain the spoof and to point to the byline, Arjan El Fassed, in the original.  So how and why did it take Joel Pollack six years to discover that it wasn't from the real Nelson Mandela? And if Ha'aretz was denouncing the spoof  in 2001, why does Joel Pollack get any credit in this at all (including in El Fassad's Wikipedia entry)?

I can't answer the Joel Pollack question but I suspect if anyone thought the spoof memo was really from Nelson Mandela it must be the very real similarities between The State of Israel and apartheid South Africa.

JC denies access to Jackie Walker article

I'm getting an Access Denied message on this Jewish Chronicle post but thankfully it is still accessible through Google cache. Google cache doesn't last long so here is the article in full:

Pressure grows on Labour as Momentum expected 

to 'remove' Jackie Walker

By Marcus Dysch, September 30, 2016

Jackie Walker, vice-chair of the Momentum group, on Channel 4 News (Photo: Channel 4)

Jackie Walker, vice-chair of the hard-left Momentum activist group, is expected to be removed from her position on Monday following comments she made about Holocaust Memorial Day.

The move is expected to be confirmed at a meeting of the committee of the pro-Jeremy Corbyn group after a Momentum spokesman told the Guardian that senior members were seeking to remove Ms Walker.

It is not known whether she will be suspended by the group, or by the Labour Party, of which she is a member.

In Monday’s Jewish Labour Movement training session on tackling antisemitism, which took place at the party conference in Liverpool, Ms Walker criticised Holocaust Memorial Day, claiming it should remember genocides other than the Shoah.

She was told that the annual memorial did recognise other episodes of mass murder, but Ms Walker, the vice-chair of the hard-left Momentum group, went on to claim she had not seen a definition of Jew-hate which she could “work with”.

Ms Walker – an ally of Jeremy Corbyn – was suspended and investigated by the party earlier this year for claiming Jews were responsible for the slave trade and an “African holocaust”.

The renewed calls for her to be expelled from Momentum came as Ms Walker defended herself on Channel 4 News.

In an interview with Cathy Newman, Ms Walker said she was not antisemitic, but admitted to being anti-Zionist.

She added: "Whoever leaked this story from a training event had malicious intent in their mind."

The claims of antisemitism were politically motivated, Ms Walker suggested, adding that “prominent” Jewish groups agreed with her.

There were also reports that Jon Lansman, the Jewish founder of Momentum and a friend of Ms Walker, had “reached the end of his tether” and wanted her to be thrown out of the group.

Further pressure came from the TSSA trade union. Manuel Cortes, its general secretary, said: "I am deeply saddened that a fellow member of our Labour and trade union family holds such antisemitic views.

"I am asking Jackie that in the interests of unity she resigns at once from our party and also as vice-chair of Momentum.

“If she doesn't, both the Labour Party and Momentum need to act to get rid of her at once. Furthermore, TSSA will reconsider our union's support for Momentum if she is still in post by this time next week."

Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-Zionist activist who was himself suspended from Labour earlier this year, wrote to the party’s National Executive Committee members on Thursday night telling them the JLM session had been “a publicity stunt”.

He wrote: “Jackie's points re the Holocaust not being a solely Jewish preserve and the fact that the definition of antisemitism is contested, are not in any way antisemitic.

“This artificial and concocted hysteria has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with the Zionist movement’s attempt to construct a hegemonic narrative concerning the Nazi Holocaust.”

John Mann, the Labour MP who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, said: "Enough is enough. Though she claims impunity for many reasons, Jackie Walker’s behaviour is discriminatory, provocative, offensive and by any standard unacceptable in a modern political party.

"Not only has she caused offense personally, she has inspired waves of antisemitic and racist backlash including Holocaust denial.

"Not only must she be expelled from the Labour Party immediately but all those abusing others in supporting her must go too.

"Temporary suspensions are not good enough, these people must be given permanent bans and no platform to express their antisemitism anywhere in the Labour Party, if we are to be serious about opposing anti-Jewish hatred.”

 The last time I noticed the JC denying access to an article was when it wrote in praise of some pig food product in its travel section and a reader complained. I wonder what's not so kosher about the above article.

UPDATE: 9/10/2016 The article has now been restored to the JC website complete with at least one libel.

Gaza Truths: Deborah Maccoby answers her critics in the JC

Well this is a real turn up.  The Jewish Chronicle has published another letter from Deborah Maccoby, this time answering the critics of her previous letter which was taking Melanie Phillips to task.

Here's the letter:

Gaza truths

A few points in response to Melvyn Lipitch and Alan Miller (Letters, September 2):

1.  Despite the evacuation of Israeli settlers in 2005, Gaza is under siege and threat of onslaught.

2.  Hamas rocket attacks are provoked by Israel to provide a pretext for massively disproportionate operations against Gaza.

In 2008, Israel broke the ceasefire; in 2014, Israel targeted Hamas, though its leadership had nothing to do with the murder of three Israeli teenagers.

3. In 2013, el-Sisi sealed over a thousand tunnels between Gaza and Egypt without needing to devastate Gaza.   In 2014, the majority of Gaza tunnels did not go under the border into Israel.

 Even the minority that did were used only for military attacks (UNHRC Report 2015, para. 108).

4.  Mr Miller’s last point is a classic example of “whataboutery”.  His own level of ignorance explains why I needed to address some of Melanie Phillips’s misrepresentations.


Deborah Maccoby
Leeds LS17J

Really good stuff.  I particularly like the way she takes another opportunity to condemn "Melanie Phillips's misrepresentations".

What about the Whataboutery? Zios ask Deborah Maccoby

There's been a predictably angry response from Zionists to Deborah Maccoby's letter in last week's Jewish Chronicle. 

The problems with tunnel vision

Your reader Deborah Maccoby (Letters, August 26) questions whether it occurred to Melanie Phillips that the tunnels Hamas builds are for self-defence in preparation for another "murderous onslaught by the IDF" (paraphrased).  I can't answer for Melanie Phillips but that certainly didn't occur to me any more than it occurred to me that the thousands of rockets Hamas aimed at the civilian population of Israel, that precipitated the last conflict, were not in fact belligerent but instead were peace offerings.

Melvyn Lipitch

London SW3

Deborah Maccoby exhibits a level of ignorance beyond comprehension.  Has she forgotten that Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago? Every incursion into the strip by the IDF since that date has been in reaction to continued bombardment, which has become progressively more dangerous as Hamas has acquired more sophisticated weaponry.  

Perhaps, with her undoubted experience of tunnelling, Ms Maccoby could advise the IDF how to discover and seal off tunnels where the exact routes and entry points were unknown to the Israeli authorities until the army entered the strip?  Why should Israel leave the parts of the tunnels within Gaza undamaged thus allowing Hamas to remove the seals and rebuild?

Has Ms Maccoby written to the general press protesting at the deaths of thousands of Arab civilians brought about by the actions of Russia, the USA, UK and other European armies in the Middle East and the tribal slaughter throughout Africa, or is her ire directed solely towards Israel whose only desire is to live in peace with its neighbours?

Alan Miller

London N16 

Maybe they don't know that Ariel Sharon himself referred to the "withdrawal" as disengagement rather than withdrawal or that he said that the disengagement was a "punishment and not a reward for the Palestinians".   I expect the JC to grant the last word to Zionists but it might be worth trying to make honest people out of them.

A response to Melanie Phillips's "Tunnel Vision"

Melanie Phillips had a typically extreme piece in last week's Jewish Chronicle denouncing aid to Gaza as the funding of "mass murder".  To its rare credit, the JC has published a response by Deborah Maccoby.  The JC doesn't publish letters on line so here's the letter which Deborah copied to me:

Tunnel Vision

Melanie Phillips (JC, August 19) writes: "Israeli officials have claimed that every month, Hamas builds another six miles of tunnels whose sole purpose is to deliver killers and weapons to wipe out as many Israelis as possible."

Does it ever occur to her that Hamas builds tunnels as self-defence, in preparation for yet another murderous onslaught on Gaza by the Israeli Army?

Phillips goes on: "A Hamas operative captured by the Israelis last June revealed that terrorists can travel underground throughout the whole of Gaza".

In July 2014, when Israeli launched Operation Protective Edge, which killed 1,400 Gazan civilians, including 500 children, only 12 of the tunnels passed under the border into Israel and these could easily have been sealed off on the Israeli side. The tunnels are built so that Hamas militants can emerge within Gaza and engage with invading Israeli soldiers.


Deborah Maccoby
Leeds

We're not sure who the JC is suggesting is tunnel visioned but Mel does seem to spend more time on hasbara than Deborah does on debunking the same.

JC avoids mentioning lynching of a Jew in Tel Aviv

This is curious.  I was just looking at a Mondoweiss posting about the potential lynching of a guy who crash his car into a Tel Aviv restaurant after the driver suffered a heart attack.  It's worth a lengthy extract from Mondo:

Saturday night, an Israeli driver had a heart attack and lost control of his vehicle on busy Ben Yehuda street in Tel Aviv, ending up crashing into a restaurant and badly injuring two diners, who died shortly after from their wounds.

According to the wife of one of the restaurant owners, Shoshana San, who was an eyewitness, the driver was believed by restaurant-goers and others to be a terrorist. “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious”, she is quoted saying in the Jerusalem Online article. 

Let me translate this coded Israeli language for everyone. “Not a good person” means a Palestinian terrorist. The witnesses thought that the car ramming was an intentional Palestinian terror attack, so although the driver was already unconscious, they “pulled him out of the car” as Israeli NRG noted (Hebrew) and lynched him whilst he was unconscious.

Quite little seems to be said about this lynching. It is very toned down and mostly omitted in Israeli media coverage that I managed to glean in my search. Haaretz and Times of Israel, for example, reported about the accident on the day, stating that it wasn’t terror, and not mentioning the beating. “Six wounded; driver among the fatalities in incident unrelated to terrorism,” said Haaretz. .

Ok, so a guy has a heart attack at the wheel of his car, loses control and the car crashes into a restaurant, killing some and injuring others.  The driver was among the dead.  What killed him?  Was it the heart attack?  Was it the crash?  Or was it the beating?

If we look at the Jerusalem Online post we wouldn't even know if he got killed:

On the morning after last night’s (Saturday) deadly car crash on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, eye-witnesses are still having trouble comprehending it. According to assessments, the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the wheel, which caused him to run over restaurant patrons. The current terror wave attacks caused many people to think that this accident was a planned car ramming attack, which prompted several eye-witnesses to beat the driver after his car came to a stop- according to Shosha San, the wife of one of the restaurant’s owners.

In a radio interview, San recalled the accident and said that the driver was unconscious when he was beaten “by bystanders, not the restaurant staff.” San added: “I thought it was the end of the world and that I was dead, people were screaming. The restaurant was filled with white dust. At first, I thought it was maybe a terror attack.”

San said that the restaurant staff quickly reacted to the accident: “We called the Police and ambulances. We helped people, there was a lot of blood and I was scared.” According to San, other people acted differently because they thought it was a terror attack: “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious.” San also mentioned that the restaurant is still closed due to the serious damage caused by the accident.

No mention of the driver winding up dead but the headline points firmly to the lynching attempt:

Driver of last night’s deadly accident was beaten by eye-witnesses

Now would even a fatal car crash in Tel Aviv normally interest the UK's Jewish Chronicle?  Maybe it would and sure enough Josh Jackman did report on it on the same day as the Jerusalem Online piece. Here's the JC;

Three people have died and six were left injured after a car crashed into restaurant customers in Tel Aviv.

Alan Weinkrantz, president of a high-tech PR company, and 47-year-old Menashe Raz from Ashdod were among those killed on Saturday night.

The driver of the car, a 41-year-old from Ra’anana, was also killed.

Police reports indicated that the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the vehicle, careering into customers sitting outside Furama, a Chinese restaurant in the centre of the city.

A female victim in her 30s was left moderately injured, while five others were lightly hurt.

Police have opened an investigation into the incident, but it is not thought to have been a terrorist attack.

Mr Weinkrantz, a Texas resident in his 60s who was president of Alan Weinkrantz and Company, was in Israel on an annual business trip.

His son Aaron told Times of Israel: "He was planning to come back to the US on Thursday. So this has been real tough and real, just crazy."

Mr Weinkrantz also leaves behind a daughter, Lauren.

Mr Raz was preparing to leave the restaurant after a night out with his wife, three children and sister-in-law's family when the car hit.

His sister-in-law Revital, 25, and his 22-year-old niece Linoy Raz were injured and taken to hospital.

So the JC mentioned what Jerusalem Online didn't but not what the latter did report, ie, that the driver was lynched by bystanders.  Given that he is now dead as a result of something that happened to him that night it could be that he was actually killed by the people who attacked him when other witnesses said he was unconscious.  This was a car crash in a far away city where there are a lot of car crashes and a lot of resulting fatalities.  So what was of interest to the JC?  And whatever it was, why didn't they report the beating by the witnesses/bystanders?  As a far away foreigner I feel the most interesting part of the story is the lynching, not the crash itself.

By the way, the report was first written on 19 June 2016.  It was updated the following morning.  I don't know what was added, taken away or replaced.

UPDATE at 11:15 am 23/6/2016: I've now seen that Newsweek reported what the JC didn't:

The incident, which took place at the Furama Chinese restaurant on Ben Yehuda street in the coastal city, left two people in the eatery dead. The driver also succumbed to his injuries but it is unclear if the beating by the mob is what killed him, or the heart attack that preceded the crash.

So in a report that a driver who crashed his car into a restaurant in Tel Aviv may have been killed by a heart attack, the crash or by an angry mob who mistook him for an Arab, most media that I have seen only see fit to mention the crash itself and the fact that 3 people died.