In the Face of Fierce Competition ‘Lord’ John Mann Has Won the Award for Most Dishonest Politician of the Year - Again

 Mann combines Opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ with Virulent Racism against Gypsies, Black and Muslim People

Loudmouth Mann confronts Ken Livingstone

I have covered John Mann before when he lied about and harassed a 90 year old Jewish Dr Glatt.

In July 2019 John Mann was appointed by Theresa May as her advisor on ‘anti-Semitism’. In September Mann was made ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ and elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.

When Theresa May appointed John Mann to lead the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ it was a case of one racist appointing another racist

As ‘Anti-Semitism Czar’ Mann saw it as his duty to try and close down media outlets which didn’t conform to his racist Apartheid agenda. Mann is not a man to appreciate irony because if he did he would have known that before the advent of Hitler, Czar Nicholas II was the world’s most infamous anti-Semite who presided over the deaths of thousands of Jews.

Having failed to close down The Canary and Skawkbox, Mann then set his sights on indoctrinating school children. Citing a report from the Henry Jackson Society, a byword in Islamaphobia, he said that he said that

"It is not enough to teach about the Holocaust,"  quoting the report and urged ministers to guarantee funding for schools to teach about contemporary anti-Jewish hatred (i.e. anti-Zionism).

You can get a flavour of the HJS's views on racism from its Associate Director (2011-2018) Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe’. The theme of the book is summed up in its title:

Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in their task by craven liberal politicians The Far Right Is Obsessed With a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe

Murray gave an intellectual veneer to the White Replacement Theory which found its voice at the neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally in the United States when anti-fascist Heather Heyer was murdered as the marchers chanted ‘The Jews Shall Not Replace Us’.

Douglas Murray

The Guardian reported that

Douglas Murray, complained last year that London had “become a foreign country” because white Britons were a minority in 23 of 33 London boroughs.” Murray has also been pictured with Robert Spencer, the far-right US anti-Islam campaigner banned last year from Britain by the Home Office.

In 2012 the HJS's director William Shawcross said “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

The White Replacement Theory leads inexorably to the idea that the White races are under threat because the Jews have encouraged and helped stimulate Black and Muslim immigration whilst keeping their own Jewish state racially pure.

Mann is fond of quoting from the HJS because the anti-Semitism he is concerned about isn’t about hatred or hostility to Jews but about criticism of Israel - the ‘new anti-Semitism’.

Mann is best described by the findings of the Employment Tribunal in Fraser –v- University College Union. The case was brought by a Ronnie Fraser against his own trade union, UCU. He alleged anti-Semitism. UCU’s offence was supporting a Boycott of Israel. Their judgment (para. 148) stated:

Mr Mann … 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 antisemitism 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 his parting shot on leaving the Commons Mann launched an attack on Jeremy Corbyn for having given the ‘green light’ to anti-Semites.

He (Corbyn) has not just hijacked my political party – he has hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.

When John Mann talks about ‘ethics’ it is like a mafia chief giving a lecture on crime prevention or Harold Shipman lecturing on care for the elderly.

If Mann was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism then one would assume that in his 18 year parliamentary career that he was equally vociferous about all forms of racism. In fact no other form of racism disturbed him. But that may be because there were no freebies or parliamentary jaunts to be had.

Mann was one of the few Labour supporters of Brexit in Parliament. Brexit, which was motivated by fear and hostility to migrants and dreams of Empire past, was at one with Mann’s toxic views.

Throughout his time in parliament, Mann was distinguished for his pro-war record. He voted in support of the Iraq war in March 2003.

Not once did Mann speak out against New Labour’s Islamaphobia and demonisation of refugees. When racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was ejected from the Commons for lying about his opponent at the 2010 General Election, he had no greater supporter than Mann.

The Guardian described Mann as Woolas’s best friend, best man and political ally since the first day at Manchester University”. When Harriet Harman suspended Woolas from the Labour Party after his ejection from Parliament, she faced “a backbench revolt”

Among those to have spoken out in support of Woolas was John Mann, a close friend of his… (he) has been backing Woolas via telephone calls with a journalist at the Guardian).

When Harman cast Woolas adrift Mann said that ‘A period of silence from Harriet Harman would now be very welcome.’ Clearly Mann did not understand the irony of him telling anyone to be quiet.

Mann was quoted as saying that Woolas’s ejection had

profound implications for British democracy... Woolas is the first case of an MP being disbarred by the courts for malpractice since 1911.

Woolas did not just lie when he alleged that his Lib Dem opponent supported violent Muslim Jihadists, he deliberately sought a white working class vote by portraying all Muslims as terrorists and violent jihadists. A decision was taken by his campaign team:

to 'make the white folk angry' by depicting an alleged campaign by those who they described generically as Asians to 'take Phil out' and then present Mr Watkins as in league with them.

When it came to the 2014 Immigration Act, which led directly to the Windrush Scandal, Mann abstained. Being an Opposition member it was the equivalent of supporting the government. It was the ‘anti-Semitic’ Corbyn who was one of only 6 Labour MPs who voted against the Act.

In 2007 Mann produced ‘the Bassetlaw Anti Social Behaviour Handbook. It described Gypsies and Travellers as “anti-social elements” in terms similar to the Nazi depiction of Gypsies.

This handbook is designed to help you deal with problems you may face in your street or in your community. There are lots of different types of anti-social behaviour…

Amongst these problems were Travellers. Mann’s advice was

The police have powers to remove any gypsies or travellers, and have powers to direct people to leave the land…

In 2016 Mann was interviewed by Police in connection with his pamphlet.  Gypsies are protected by the Equality Act 2010. 

Ben Bennett, a 13 year old Traveller, who made a complaint to the Police, described how Mann’s pamphlet made him:

‘very upset’. I can’t understand why John Mann MP would choose to talk solely about my community in such a derogatory manner.’

Mann claims he is motivated by the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust but he has nothing to say about how up to one million Gypsies were exterminated in the Porajmos. The Nazis considered criminal, asocial elements just like Mann.

It is no surprise that Boris Johnson, who was notorious for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, made Mann his ‘anti-Semitism Czar’, elevating him to the Lords.

Mann made his intentions known from the start. He was going to concentrate on the Left press. Someone who was genuinely concerned with racism would have focused on the Daily Mail or Sun. Mann’s targets were the alternative media - The Canary and Skwawkbox.

In an article Corbynite sites feature far-right tropes by ‘liar’ Lee Harpin, whose inaccuracies cost the Jewish Chronicle a small fortune, Skwawkbox and The Canary were accused of a “heavily negative coverage of Jewish issues” to anti-Semitic audiences.

What were these ‘Jewish issues.’ Harpin did not say but we can guess - Palestine and Israel. The same Israeli state which has been condemned as an Apartheid state by the world’s main human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Mann has consistently engaged in the guilt-by-association tactics favoured by Joseph McCarthy. If you want a lesson in how to corrupt the English language, take the paragraph below which equates The Canary and Skwawkbox with neo-Nazis on the basis of an alleged opposition to capitalism. Fascists have never opposed capitalism. The Nazis called themselves ‘national socialists’ yet the first thing they did when they gained power was to put trade unionists and communists in concentration camps.

“despite the huge differences in the beliefs that are most foundational to their ideologies, articles published on all three sites share an opposition to capitalism, globalisation, and liberalism, adopt similar positions on many questions of foreign policy, and fulminate against a supposed adversary whose Jewishness is extensively highlighted (even if in different ways).

John Mann - Supports all forms of racism except 'antisemitism'

Even though the Report Antisemitism and the alternative media, which Mann commissioned concedes ‘huge differences’ in their ideology, it draws an equals sign between the alternative media and neo-Nazis. How then does the Report explain the pro-Israel stance of Tommy Robinson? It doesn’t. Instead it say:

TR News, the official website of far-right activist… Tommy Robinson, has intentionally attempted to take the side of Jews and Israel, 

Robinson, like most anti-Semites, openly supports Zionism. Mann’s polemics ironically owe their origin to Nazi propaganda techniques which sought to portray opposites as being equal. For example they equated capitalism and communism, which they held were controlled by Jews. John Mann is a walking conspiracy theory:

TR News has resorted to defending those Muslims who were seen to embrace pro-Western right-wing ideology, the two left-wing websites sought to declare allegiance with the minority of Jews who supported their own viewpoint.

In other words fascist Muslims and Hindus, such as supporters of India’s BJP government are no different from anti-Zionist Jews who oppose all forms of racism. This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that Mann has made into a fine art.

The ‘research’ for Mann’s Report was carried out by Daniel Allington, a King’s College lecturer. Allington selected 20 articles on each site that featured the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Zionist’ for analysis. It clearly did not occur to Mann that what fascists mean by ‘Zionist’ differs from what socialists mean. The report is based on the assumption that ‘Jew’ = ‘Zionist’.

Allington is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s go to academic. His ‘research’ is starts off with the conclusions and then looks for evidence. In other words he reverse engineers his research!

Together with Zionist ‘academic’ David Hirsh, Allington devised a Generalised Anti-Semitism Barometer for the CAA which found that anti-Semitism was more prevalent on the Left than the Right. The Zionist and Tory press lapped it up.

If true this was a staggering finding. Why then had all previous surveys found that anti-Semitism was the property of the Right? What the CAA didn’t advertise was that they had added 6 questions to the original 6 questions (which were themselves debatable).

That the CAA is a dishonest McCarthyist organisation is one thing. That Allington and Hirsh should allow their support for Zionism to fix the results of ostensibly neutral academic research raises questions as to their academic integrity. The questions they devised to ‘prove’ that the left is more anti-Semitic than the Right were:

1.    “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”

2.    “Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”

3.    “Israel is right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.”

4.    “Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy.”

5.    “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”

6.    “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.”

None of these statements are anti-Semitic. According to the OED anti-Semitism is ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’

The dishonesty of Allington’s ‘research’ is staggering. I wouldn’t be comfortable spending time with supporters of Franco. Does that make me anti-Spanish? Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for Jews assumes that Jews aren’t at home where they live. Israel having the right to defend itself assumes that it is under attack. Obviously Israel’s supporters are anti-democratic, as the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism proves. Supporters of Israel do control the media but who says Rupert Murdoch is Jewish? It’s only anti-Semitic if you assume that supporters of Israel and Jews are the same.

The most popular ‘anti-Semitic’ statement was comparisons between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews. But this is a political statement. Were holocaust survivors Ze’ev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana anti-Semitic for writing ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’? and The Need to Forget? Is it anti-Semitic to point out that Nazi mobs chanted ‘death to the Jews’ and Israeli mobs chant ‘death to the Arabs’.

One example of Skawkbox’s ‘racism’ was

“making throwaway references to ‘a former Chief Rabbi with a history of supporting racism’ could contribute to the creation of an impression of Jewishness as inherently suspect.”

So accusing Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of being a racist is anti-Semitic because he was Jewish! Is accusing someone Jewish of fraud, even if they’re guilty, also anti-Semitic because it might imply that all Jews are frauds. This is the infantile level of analysis  of John Mann.

When Sacks died, I wrote that he was ‘An establishment bigot’. Sacks, who compared Corbyn with Enoch Powell endorsed the Strange Death of Europe.

Dishonesty permeates the Report. Because Jewish conspiracy theories permeate the far-Right, the support of Skwawkbox and The Canary for the undercover Al Jazeera programme The Lobby about the influence and activity of the Zionist lobby was anti-Semitic!

But the latter was true. What these allegations have in common is a deliberate confusion of ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’.  And who does this? The same anti-Semites and fascists that Mann purports to oppose.

Liar Lee’s article concludes with a quote from Allington:

 “Government and civil society must encourage use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of low-quality fringe sources,” it said. “We need not be helpless in the face of hatred.”

What Mann and Allington are advocating is state censorship. The reference to ‘high quality reputable sources of information’ is police state stuff. Who decides what’s ‘high quality’? Turkey’s Erdogan would agree with this. Is it the Mail and Sun? Britain’s racist tabloids escapes unscathed. Mann’s concerns are not Jews and anti-Semitism but Zionism and Israel.

The only good thing about Mann’s Report is that it reflects his own intellectual deficit. It was so poorly argued in its deviously dishonest analogies that only a rogue like Boris Johnson could fall for it.

Before becoming a Czar, Mann was Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. The Committee played an important part in the lead up to Labour’s anti-Semitism smears. The APPGAA was stuffed with members of the Friends of Israel groups such as Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and Bob Blackman. None of them had ever criticised Israeli racism. Bob Blackman was a racist in  his own right. See Tory MP accused of Islamophobia after posting anti-Muslim article on Facebook

The Committee, chaired by Labour MP Dennis McShane, gaoled for his part in the expenses scandal, produced a Report into Anti-Semitism in September 2006. Its ludicrous observations included:

The Israeli government itself may, at times, have mistakenly perceived criticism of its policies and actions to be motivated by antisemitism, but we received no evidence of the accusation of antisemitism being misused by mainstream British Jewish community organisations and leaders.

Ten years later the President of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, attacked Corbyn as an anti-Semite and stated that a Jewish group, Jewdas were ‘the source of virulent anti-Semitism’

The Report stated that ‘anti-Zionist discourse can be polluted with antisemitic themes’ but ignored the far more widespread incidence of Zionist anti-Semites. E.g. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right and organiser of the demonstration in Charlottesville, declared himself a White Zionist. As Ha’aretz noted:

‘In a series of tweets, Spencer writes of his admiration for the law, which confers the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people alone, and says Jews are 'showing a path forward for Europeans'

Israel provides a model for White supremacists. The Jewish Nation State Law excluded Arab Israelis from any claim to the land they live in. It was a blueprint for Jewish supremacy. Yet Mann and the APPGAA never once mentioned that the incidence of Palestinian supporters using anti-Semitic rhetoric is far outweighed by Zionist anti-Semites like Spencer and Steve Bannon who combined anti-Semitism with Zionism (see his description of Jewish children, whom he didn’t want his children to go to school with, as ‘whiny brats.’).

There was no understanding that criticism of Israel was motivated by opposition to Israeli racism. In December 2018 the Knesset rejected by 71-38 a Bill which affirmed a citizens' right to equality and it refused even to debate a bill ‘calling for Israel to treat its Arab and Jewish citizens equally.’

Speaker Yuli Yoel Edelstein denounced the bill saying that:

“This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately. A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset,”

John Mann was one of the main Labour witchunters. In April 2016 Mann staged a confrontation with Ken Livingstone for saying that Adolf Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” calling him a ‘Nazi apologist’ for saying that the Nazis had supported Zionism.

The only problem was that the Nazis did support the Zionists, who were 2% of the German Jewish community. In Zionism During the Holocaust I quote Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who wrote in 1919 that

Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.

Mann called for my expulsion, calling my membership of the Labour Party ‘hugely inappropriate’. Presumably only racists like himself were entitled to be members.

In January 2018 Mann wrote an article attacking Jackie Walker, suggesting that her claim of a witch hunt was a conspiracy theory. He accused Jackie, a Jewish woman, of promoting anti-Semitic tropes. Jackie responded by saying that it was obvious that she was targeted for being a Corbyn supporter and that she had been fighting fascists and anti-Semites on the streets for years and was never accused of promoting anti-Semitic tropes before Corbyn became leader.

Other examples of Mann’s false and dishonest allegations of anti-Semitism were when, in 2012, Mann’s wife was sent a dead bird by a disgruntled local (Roger Dyas-Elliott). Mann later reported this as an incident of anti-Semitism and attributed it to Momentum activists. But Momentum wasn’t set up until 2015 (3yrs after the incident) and was established by Jewish members of the Labour Party!

In August 2018 Mann called for special privileges for Jewish Labour MPs, calling for them to be “automatically reselected at elections”.

In October 2018 the BBC reported that Mann had registered more trips than any other MP, with eight overseas visits on the Register of Interests. Mann claimed the trips were "part of the job". Most were related to his role as UK chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism. Opposing ‘anti-Semitism’ has been very profitable for John Mann.

Tony Greenstein