Showing posts with label Stephen Pollard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Pollard. Show all posts

March 05, 2018

Strange Days on Twitter and off Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here it is in tweet form:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodnight
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October 29, 2017

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:
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.
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August 16, 2014

Jewish Chronicle apologises to readers for appearing humanitarian

This is as weird as it's disgraceful.  Apparently The Jewish Chronicle has had complainst about an ad in its print edition yesterday (August 15, 2014) for the Disasters Emergency Committee for Gaza.  Stephen Pollard, the JC's editor, addressed those complaints so:
There has been some controversy over the advert for the DEC Gaza appeal in this week’s paper.

I understand why some people are angry and upset and I thought it important to respond.

This is an advert, and not an expression of the JC's view. We keep editorial coverage entirely separate from our commercial operations.

As editor, I am not responsible for any ads which appear in the paper. It is a critical part of our editorial independence that we do not allow advertisers to have any influence at all on the paper.

The ad was approved by the chairman of the JC, who has no involvement in editorial decisions, as an ad for humanitarian aid which nowhere makes political or partisan points.

Both I as editor and the JC are entirely supportive of Operation Protective Edge, as our coverage has demonstrated. Almost alone in the British media the JC has stressed Israel’s right to defend herself and sought to explain why Israel was faced with no choice but to take action in Gaza.

There is, clearly, a humanitarian cost to that action. But I do not accept the figures touted around much of the media about the level of civilian casualties – many are, I am sure, terrorists.

This is not a JC-backed appeal. We have no involvement in it beyond running an ad, which has appeared in most British newspapers.

Even if you profoundly disagree with the ad appearing in the paper, I hope this will go some way to explaining its presence and that it is in no way part of our editorial stance.

So don't worry readers of the Jewish Chronicle, your weekly community newspaper doesn't do humanitarian when the most moral army in the world has created the humanitarian need.

So what's weird?  The apology by Stephen Pollard is dated August 14, 2014.  Now, whilst the JC is dated for the Friday it appears in most shops and arrives at most subscribers' homes it might appear in some shops and arrive in some homes on the Thursday.  It's delivered to my house on Fridays and I never see it on a Thursday.

So who was doing the complaining?  It could only be people from among the small minority of readers who get their copy on a Thursday, if such people exist.

Let's assume they do exist.  How many could have complained?

Ok, let's assume they don't exist and that no one gets their JC before Friday.  How did the complainers know about the ad if they hadn't seen the paper?

Now go see Stephen Pollard's explanation of how the ad, that appears to have appeared the day after he apologised to readers for its appearance, er, appeared at all.
The ad was approved by the chairman of the JC, who has no involvement in editorial decisions, as an ad for humanitarian aid which nowhere makes political or partisan points.
Now people might think the ad was approved for humanitarian reasons but Pollard is simply contrasting humanitarian with political or partisan, he is not saying that the ad was run by the JC for any humanitarian reason.  Higher up the piece he has already said, "We keep editorial coverage entirely separate from our commercial operations."  In other words, this was a commercial decision.

But now look at the Beeb.  Now I'm surprised that the Beeb has run this story at all since it puts the Zionist movement in such an unfavourable light.

First they let the JC lie for itself:
The weekly newspaper said running the advert was "meant as a purely humanitarian gesture".
Then typically it gave Israel's version of events about the attack on Gaza:
 The Israelis launched a military operation on 8 July to stop militant attacks from Gaza.
 But then comes a gem:
After a DEC advert featured in this week's Jewish Chronicle (JC), a Facebook page was set up calling on readers to boycott the title until it issued a "full apology".
A Facebook page?  The plot thickens....

And what do we see on the Facebook page?  Well, there are 182 likes.  Did Pollard really make the Jewish community look so uncaring for the sake of 182 Facebook likes?

Back to the Beeb:
Meanwhile, Israel's embassy in the UK issued a statement in which it said its own concern about the DEC appeal "stems from the fact that the list of charities on the DEC includes Islamic Relief Worldwide, which has been designated in Israel recently as an unlawful association, for providing support and funnelling funds to Hamas, a terror group designated in the UK.
"Surely this must raise cause for concern for the public donating money for children, when one of the donors has been officially declared to be using that money to support a recognized terror group," it said.
I would guess that this brings us closer to why Stephen Pollard has flaunted the sheer cruelty of Zionism.  It cannot possibly have been 182 or whatever many ordinary Joes complaining via Facebook.  Last I heard the JC had a circulation of about 30,000 and I remember reading that advertisers like the JC because it passes through the hands of every literate member of every household to which it is delivered.  182 is a pretty small proportion of its total readership.  But the State of Israel, now that's a different story.  The JC exists to promote the interests of the entity.  I reckon it was a telling off the JC received from the Israeli embassy that had Stephen Pollard suggesting his readers are a bunch of Nazis.  The only other explanation might, just might, be he doesn't like the Chair of the JC and dangerous "humanitarian" was the only putdown he could think of.
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April 06, 2014

Good Faith in the Jewish Chronicle?

Wow! I'm surprised to see a very good letter in The Jewish Chronicle. Unfortunately they don't publish their letters on line.

In the interests of balance, for which the JC has never been renowned, the good letter followed two simply appalling ones, the first of which says that the BDS movement, "fails to recognise any rights of Jews to live within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel".

Anyway, here's the good one, painstakingly copy-typed by me:

It is quite extraordinary that critics of some of the policies and actions of the state of Israel (Leader, Architects of Hate, March 21) still have to face accusations of antisemitism.

Surely it is not too difficult to understand the difference between an ethnic/religious group and a state.All states are open to criticism, and that includes Israel.  Indeed, the accusation of antisemitism is absurd: verging on defamation: 20% of Israelis are not Jewish, but many critics of Israeli actions are.

The distinction is so obvious that it is difficult to understand how the accusation can be made in good faith.

Prof David Pegg and Dr Monica Wusterman, St Paul's Square, York.
They're basically calling Stephen Pollard a liar so it was big of him to publish it. It would be bigger of him still if he stopped making these bad faith allegations in the first place.
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March 31, 2014

Whatever happened to that Jewish prick?

Jews for Justice for Palestinians has a post about the Royal Institute of British Architects vote to call on the International Union of Architects to give their Israeli counterparts the boot and the Jewish Chronicle's rather nutty response to the same.

Actually, here are all the links:
1) Statement from JfJfP;
2) Richard Kuper: Absurd, malign and plain wrong, unpublished letter from Richard Kuper for JfJfP;
3) JC letter: RE: “Architects of Hate”, letter from Abe Hayeem, published with one omission;
4) RIBA V-P: A complex decision but not antisemitic, letter from Peter Oborn, published;
5) JC: Israeli architects ask David Cameron to block RIBA boycott, Marcus Dysch on Israeli architects with misguided beliefs on powers of a British PM;
6) JPost: Israeli architects appeal to Foreign Ministry, Britain against boycott threat, ditto, though it’s a propaganda point as it also makes a rhetorical link to women’s rights;
7) Jews sans frontieres: Bar Mitzvahs and Boycotts, welcomes the RIBA decision and points out the popularity of their building (photo above) for bar/bat mitzvahs;
8 – JC editorial: Boycott hypocrites, having read the above, the JC calls on the faithful to boycott the RIBA
When I read Stephen Pollard's desperate outpourings I thought, "what a fucking prick" and my mind wandered back to when The Jewish Chronicle called itself "the organ of British Jewry".  I remember I used to wince whenever I saw that.  Don't they know there's a double entendre in there somewhere?  Well I did notice that they no longer run that subtitle but when did they ditch it?  Whatever did happen to that Jewish prick?

And another thing, we know where Stephen Pollard is, well roughly anyway, but where is the Chair of The JC's board, Anthony Julius?  I remember there was a sighting some months ago but one between FUCU and now.

Now, where was I?  Oh yes, whatever did happen to that Jewish prick?
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