With Its Funding Sources Hidden and Half its Copies Given Away, the Jewish Chronicle is a Propaganda Sheet not a Newspaper

Karen Glaser, its Features Editor, began with an Attack on her Boyfriend for ‘anti-Semitism’ & then Doubled Down with a Stream of ‘Anti-Semitism’ Trivia

The ‘JC’ claims to be the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper but today it’s not possible to call it a newspaper in any meaningful sense. It is a propaganda sheet serving Zionist and Israeli interests. Alan Rusbridger, former Editor of the Guardian asked, Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? It is a question yet to be answered.

What we do know is that in April 2020 the paper was rescued from liquidation by a consortium that was headed by Sir Robbie Gibb, who is a government-appointed BBC director. In his declaration of interest Gibb states that he has a 100% holding of Jewish Chronicle Media.

The problem is that Gibb doesn’t have that money. He is a front-man for person or persons unknown who gifted £3.5 million to the JC. Other members of this consortium included the ex-Labour MP John Woodcock (Lord Walney) who was suspended by Labour for sexually harassing an 18 year old assistant. Others included Zionist operative Jonathan Sacerdoti and John Ware who produced the anti-Corbyn Is Labour Anti-Semitic programme which has been assailed ever since it was broadcast in July 2019 for its dishonesty and downright lies.

Others included chief Islamaphobe and former Charity Commission chairman William Shawcross, who as a director of the Henry Jackson Society, expressed the view that:

 “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.”

 Others included Jonathan Kandel, Robert Swerling of EMK Capital and Tom Boltman, head of strategic initiatives at Kovrr. Why you might ask should anyone invest in a sinking ship? Rats usually leave sinking ships, they don’t join them. What is it about the JC that enables the normal laws of capitalism  to be suspended?

It’s not even as if the Jewish Chronicle has a large circulation. Once upon a time the paper had a circulation of over 50,000.  As late as 2008 it had a paid readership of 32,875. Under the editorships of Stephen Pollard and now Jake Wallis-Simpson it has collapsed to 12,192, of which 5,990 are given away free!

Alan Rusbridger alluded to the reason namely that the JC’s purpose is to ensure that people are ‘swayed by its coverage and arguments, especially in relation to Israel.’  Rusbridger asked what if anonymous foreign backers were to pump money into The Telegraph.

There would, rightly, be a parliamentary hue and cry about their background and motives.

One person who Rusbridger named as a possible backer was ‘right-wing American billionaire, Paul E Singer.’ who has been described as “a longtime supporter of hawkish pro-Israel causes” and is a major funder of the conservative thinktank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose positions “have closely tracked those of the Likud party and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”.

These are not the kind of stories that make it into the Jewish Chronicle - their Jewish readership has to be kept ignorant and uninformed

That is presumably why Karen Glaser, who was previously at the anti-Corbyn New Statesman jumped ship to the JC where she was promoted to chief propagandist and editor of the JC2 supplement.

While she was at the NS I alighted on what I called ‘the most trivial, trite and superficial article that the New Statesman has ever run’. (see below) It was about how she disposed of her Corbyn supporting boyfriend for ‘anti-Semitism’. As I wrote, it should have been called ‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’

No doubt she was head hunted by the JC, impressed at how she had managed to invent out of nothing yet another fake ‘anti-Semitism’ story. Clearly they have been richly rewarded.

In her present job she has written articles such as Why are the Jews overlooking their natural allies? No it’s not the Left and those who fought genuine anti-Semitism in the 1930s and under Nazi occupation in Europe. She was referring to Muslims asking why it is that ‘we neglect more friendly communities’. Muslims are unfriendly.  Why? Because they support the Palestinians.

Other delightful articles from the pen of Ms Glaser include the heavy weight intellectual thesis ‘What fuels antisemitism? A lot is sheer envy’. Ah yes. All that anti-Semitism was just ‘sheer envy’. All those learned scholars who spent years analysing the subject were barking up the wrong tree. The highly cerebral Glaser has discovered the secret of anti-Semitism at last.

And then there is the sad, tear-jerking story of how ‘I’ve been rejected by a Gen Z friend thanks to TikTok and my editor’. Glaser describes how on November 9 she got a text from W saying she was sorry, but our relationship was over. She was “watching an interview your Jake Wallis Simons is giving” on television and,

“truly I don’t know how this is the side you’re on. I am so disappointed and upset and so many other emotions, but I can’t be friends with anyone who defends Israel.”

My first instinct was to congratulate Glaser on her choice of friends. If only she could emulate them.  But no, it was all self-pity. Glaser wrote:

Ever since October 7, W has been posting endless streams of extreme antisemitic propaganda on her social media platforms. Only she doesn’t realise they are antisemitic because the vicious lies she is spreading are about Israel. She believes there is a bright, clear line between hating the Jews and hating the Jews’ nation state.

It seems that W possesses something that Glaser doesn’t, viz. a modicum of intelligence. To most people there is no connection between hating Jews and hating the actions of a racist, apartheid, genocide loving state. But no, Glaser explains that ‘it’s a popular view among the privileged and educated, two things that W is not.’

Yet even Glaser concedes that ‘W is exceptionally bright so I recommended she read my editor’s book.’ This is a reference to the most turgid book of the year, Jake Wallis-Simpson’s  Israelphobia a book that the Right in this country just loves.

It is no surprise that Spiked the neo-liberal journal of the former Revolutionary Communist Party and its reviewer Daniel Ben Ami loves it. Funded by the far-right oil billionaire Koch brothers of New York it could hardly do any other. 40 years ago I knew Ben-Ami when he was an anti-Zionist before his he and the RCP decided to join the capitalists they had purportedly opposed!

Then there is The Spectator, a right-wing weekly that used to have some integrity. Tanya Gold, of whom I once wrote that she‘is to Journalism what Harold Shipman was to Care of the Elderly’ asked in her ‘review’ Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism? What she should really be asking is whether there is such a thing as ‘Israelophobia’.

But these cloned ‘journalists’ monsters, who call are really just scribes for the ruling class, are incapable of original thought or asking the simplest of questions. For them it isn’t the existence of apartheid, occupation and discrimination that is the problem, it is their critics.

It is like someone in the 1930s suggesting that opposition to Nazism stemmed, not from what they did but anti-German sentiments. In fact that was the position of the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was made up of Tory MPs, Peers and corporate affiliates like Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop, Thomas Cook and the Midland Bank (HSBC) and Lazard Brothers.

All the same arguments about critics of Hitler’s Germany apply to Israel but there is almost no one on the Right, with the possible exception of Peter Hitchens and Peter Osborne, who retain any intellectual integrity and are able to point out the obvious.

The Spectator used to be the house journal of people like Sir Ian Gilmour, its editor from 1954-9 and one of the most cerebral Foreign Office Ministers, who with his brother David penned a searing critique of a revisionist Zionist history of Palestine by Joan Peters.

People like Tanya Gold and Karen Glaser are incapable of admitting that thousands of Jews support the Palestinians for the very same reason that they oppose anti-Semitism. Instead they prefer to sing from a stale ruling class narrative that conflates hostility to Zionism with hostility to Jews as Jews. As Goebbels once remarked, if you repeat a lie long enough then people will believe it.

Until 1945 most Jews in Britain were not Zionists. When Zionism first appeared in Britain at the end of the 19^th century it was opposed by all wings of the Jewish community from the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies to the Jewish Chronicle. Most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.

In the 1900 General Election Jewish refugees from Russia were demonised in the same way as the Boat People are today. The Tories, who today pretend they are concerned about anti-Semitism, were then opposed to ‘Alien immigration’ i.e. Jewish refugees. In the East End the Tories stood virulently anti-Semitic candidates, one of whom David Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants as ‘the very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’

Notwithstanding this the English Zionist Federation supported them. In 1905 Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration introduced, as Prime Minister, the Aliens Act directed against Jewish immigrants.  In 1917 when Lloyd George’s Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration the only member to vote against it was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who accused his fellow cabinet members of anti-Semitism.

Below I reprint an earlier blog on Karen Glaser when she took a swipe against a guy who had the misfortune to end up in bed with her!

Tony Greenstein

Is this the most trivial, trite and superficial article that the New Statesman has ever run?

Or How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape! 

 On her blog we learn that Karen Glaser is ‘an experienced journalist’ whose ‘journalism has been syndicated internationally.’ This perhaps tells us more about the standards of journalism today than the quality of Ms Glaser’s output.  Karen tells us that she writes on relationships and Jewish matters and that she has been a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, which is not encouraging given the decline in the latter’s circulation and its role as a Zionist megaphone. She boasts that the guests on her Guardian podcasts have included David Aaronovitch and Melanie Phillips, which hardly gives us much confidence in her claim to be a left-wing British Jew. But perhaps she means a ‘left-wing’ Zionist which is an entirely different thing. In short Karen is just the kind of tame establishment journalist that The Staggers loves to indulge.

The New Statesman, which used to consider itself on the left, has been second only to the Guardian in its venomous attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and its indulgence of his Zionist critics (for example the abysmal article by the Jewish Labour Movement’s Mike Katz and Adam Langleben on why they supported the IHRA). My attention was drawn to what must count as just the most trivial article I have yet read of the anti-Corbyn genre. Ms Glaser’s Why I kicked my boyfriend out at 2am over anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It is the Zionist equivalent of Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster and bears about the same relationship to the truth.

The New Statesman's Bizarre anti-Corbyn Story

Apparently this tragic lonely heart had been in a relationship with ‘Sean’ for some 9 months before discovering his ‘anti-Semitism’. He is you understand a Corbynite and these people are nothing if not clever and devious.  Presumably he hid his anti-Semitism under the bed sheets for all of the 9 months until Karen had her epiphany.  Or perhaps he pretended he was a Tory? We have Karen’s assurance that Tories are never anti-Semitic so it’s no wonder that Karen was fooled by this dastardly swine.

Apparently Sean ‘gestured in exaggerated fashion’ to her many possessions. “Well, your life looks OK to me,” which is proof that she had been sharing her most intimate secrets with Himmler’s bastard offspring. How dare the upstart suggest that Karen’s life is a bed of roses when anyone can see that it consists of tears and strife, toil and trouble to say nothing of public self-humiliation. She had clearly been in bed with an anti-Semite if not a fully fledge Nazi. It is one of life's wonders that Karen is not suffering from PTSD.

When told that she seemed to be comfortably off Karen, sharp as a button, responded instantly that “Lots of Jews had nice apartments in 1930s Berlin,” and we all know what happened to Germany’s Jews. What an insensitive soul she had shacked up with not to realise that Corbyn’s Gestapo was about to nationalise her flat whilst putting her in ‘protective detention’ along with all those other Jewish capitalists.

Karen you understand was doing her best not to appear to be the ‘hyperbolic Jew of anti-Semitic ridicule.’  Rest assured Karen, only an anti-Semite could possibly suggest that you were exaggerating your pain, being hyperbolic or behaving like a typical JAP (Jewish American Princess).  After all, everyone knows that Momentum’s uniform includes regulation jackboots for the day when Fuhrer Corbyn takes control. 

Karen Glaser - A Journalist Whose Talents Lie in Fiction Writing

Karen tells us, in one of those romantic moments that we all treasure, that ‘I really liked’ Sean.  After this public drubbing you wonder what exactly it was that she liked about him, apart from having the patience of a saint or two. You get the feeling that it might have been preferable to have had a relationship with a tarantula rather than take the risk of being Karen’s consort.

And when Sean told Karen ‘that Labour’s anti-Semitism had been massively overstated, that it was essentially a tawdry attempt to smear Corbyn’ you could have heard a pin drop. Its akin to taking communion and drinking the blood of Christ naked or even worse, eating a ham sandwich in an Orthodox synagogue (which the Jewish anarchists used to do!).

However Karen, a woman with a permanently shimmering halo,‘took a deep breath and answered him properly.’ as one should of course though one suspects that she must have considered reaching for the rolling pin.  Our Jewish heroine ‘explained to my lover that this is no laughing matter’.

Here we have an existentialist clash of love and life. When the jackboots are on the doorstep, the last thing you want is for your lover to question your fears of an imminent demise.  Karen was, in essence, a budding Jamal Khashoggi.

Karen patiently explained ‘that there is a consensus across Anglo-Jewry that there is a serious problem of anti-Semitism in Labour’.  And where there is a consensus there is eternal life and truth. Clearly this ingrate, who one assumes isn’t even Jewish, was incapable of demonstrating even the slightest empathy with Karen’t horrible predicament.

At this point I feel duty bound to point out that Israel was founded in order to stop the Karens, Beckys and Sarahs of this world bedding down with shegetzes. For those who are unacquainted with these things let me explain that the shegetz like its female counterpart, the shiksa, is derived from the Yiddish word sheketz, which roughly translated means an abomination, an unclean thing, a detested thing.  Rabbi Jack Abramowitz described it as "simply indefensible", "inherently condescending, racist and misogynistic". Nonetheless non-Jewish boyfriends are inherently risky.

This is the real racism not fake anti-Semitism

However I digress. Karen is nothing if not broadminded and despite being a Zionist had no objection to having a shegetz for a partner. One can only hope that she has learnt her lesson and that in future she keeps it in the tribe. If she were in Israel she would be known as a trollope and worse. Miscegenation is taken seriously in the Holy Land because it isn’t so much a question of religion but racial purity whereas in the diaspora these things are only too common.  50%+ of American Jews 'marry out'.

Karen whose patience is one of the most loveable things about her, tried to explain to this non-Jewish parvenu that ‘if Tory politicians had done half the things to any other ethnic group that Corbyn has done to the Jews, leftists would be baying for blood.’

Now I know that the anti-Semites who read this blog will probably scoff and chuckle at this but Karen has a point. In fact a number of points. After all it is well known that when it comes to ‘other ethnic groups’ the Tories are a model of British tolerance and good manners. Indeed the party of the grisly May has never, as far as I am aware, ever advocated discrimination against anyone on the grounds of religion, race or sexual orientation. Enoch Powell is but a distant memory.

Yes I know that the Tory party are in alliance with a range of anti-Semitic parties (at least 3 – Swedish Democrats, Poland’s Law &; Justice and Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom Parties) – in the European Conservative and Reform group in the European parliament.  Of course Tory MEPs voted to defend the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a vote of censure recently. But quite rightly Karen would have dismissed this as totally irrelevant.  She’s not talking old-fashioned anti-Semitism i.e. hatred of Jews she is talking Israel and hatred of Zionism.

Perhaps someone can supply the name of Jewish people killed by the Police in custody?

The Windrush scandal was merely a figment of someone’s imagination.  ‘Hostile environment’ policy? That’s just another name for global warming.  Stop and search? That’s just the Police being helpful to Black kids who’ve lost their way in life. Black deaths in custody?  Well everyone has got to die somewhere.  Clearly Karen has got a point.  If other ethnic groups had suffered  a fraction of what Jews have had to put with under Corbyn, that pound shop British Goebbels, then us leftists would have risen up.  It could well have turned into another Peterloo such would have been our anger.

And when Sean asked, ‘as Corbynistas always do’ what Corbyn had actually done, then Karen went through her ‘grim list’.  And for the doubting Thomases here let me assure you that the list is indeed Grimm as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 

All of these men according to Karen Glaser have 'hook noses'

Having been provoked, beyond endurance, by her non-Jewish lover, Karen let forth: There was his absurd claim that Hamas and Hezbollah ‘are dedicated to peace and justice’ when we all know that it was Hezbollah which invaded Israel in 1982 and again in 2006.  Indeed this terror group occupied a large swathe of land in Northern Israel for years with a puppet Zionist in charge.

As for Hamas, we all know what they are capable of.  They even send forth hundreds and thousands of demonstrators to the fence with Israel with strict instructions to get themselves killed, forcing the poor Israeli boys to do just that.  Because as we know ‘Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of the Jews’ (it doesn’t!) and it would seem the destruction of the Palestinians too.

Then there is Corbyn’s defence of the blood libeller Raed Salah (again not true but what’s a lie between lovers?) to say nothing of his membership of Facebook groups ‘where deeply anti-Semitic posts are the norm’ (also not true) and ‘his siding with those behind the now infamous Nazi-style mural showing hook-nosed anti-Semitic caricatures, getting rich on the backs of the world’s poor.’ The latter refers to a mural of 6 bankers, 4 of whom were non-Jewish, none of whom had a hook nose. Why let a few facts come between lovers?

Of course there will be some cynics reading this who will be credulous at this point but I ask you to restrain your laughter.  This is a serious and difficult matter for Karen who ‘tried to explain to the man with whom I’d just shared my bed just how painful this all was.’ Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will by now realise the difficulty poor Karen was in.  The conflict between her love and lust for Sean and her horror at his clear anti-Semitism posed a dilemma that no woman should have to undergo.

Karen however was nothing if not patient with her errant Sean.  She explained that in the past decade some 40,000 Jews had emigrated from France to Israel.  Of course, like all Zionist statistics this is somewhat misleading. After the murder of 4 Jews in the Hypercacher supermarket in 2015 Israel did its best to stimulate the emigration of Jews.  Netanyahu came over to Paris to tell the Jews there that their ‘real home’ was Israel but not only did they not come in the expected numbers but of those who did come ‘many of them are also returning to France in greater numbers’ according to Andy Semotiuk. Zionism’s answer to anti-Semitism has never been to fight it but to do what the anti-Semites want, which is to leave and set up their own racial state. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2014 there were 6,547 Jewish emigrants from France and in 2015, despite the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher murders the number rose only to 6,628. In 2016, the number dropped to 4,239 and in 2017 there were only 3,157. In the first five months of 2018 there were just 759 emigrants. In short there are lies, damned lies and Karen’s statistics. Why the Expected Wave of French Immigration to Israel Never Materialized

Karen, whose patience with her shegetz, was almost superhuman, explained to the anti-Semitic misfit that ‘mocking Jews when they call out anti-Semitism, is analogous to white people telling black people they are imagining their experiences of racism.’ Well put. Read from the crib sheet with perfection. The only problem is that Jews in Britain are White not Black.  Not only White but the most privileged section of the White community in terms of socio-economic status. It was noticeable that in all her examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ none of them actually related to anything that has actually disadvantaged British Jews.  They all related to Israel. Strange that.

Even worse poor Sean then blurted out that ‘Jews have money, don’t they?’ whilst hastening to reassure Karen that he wasn’t talking about her.

By this time, you will understand that Karen Glaser had just about had enough of Sean and quite understandably she exploded. Anti-Semitism in her boudoir was really too much. Since Jews don’t have saints, one almost wonders whether Pope Francis might help out and canonise the Blessed Karen Glaser.  I realise that you have to be dead before the process of beatification begins but I’m sure that Karen, halo intact, could be made an exception. She patiently told the miscreant that:

‘the point is that anti-Semitism is never about Jews and the actual lives they lead, and one of the central tropes of anti-Semitism is the pernicious association between Jews and money. It never, ever goes away. For many on the left this means that the Jews can never be oppressed or exploited but are, in fact, the source of others’ oppression and exploitation. That’s why Corbyn couldn’t see anything wrong with that vile mural. It matched his world view.

You will understand I am sure the magnitude of young Sean’s offence. Indeed I am surprised that Karen didn’t pick up her phone, dial 999 and report him for a hate crime.  I should imagine that 6 months in the clink might be the best cure (since being deprived of Karen’s nocturnal favours probably won’t be punishment enough).

Before m’lud pronounces sentence it is probably fair to quote a couple of Jewish experts who can be witness to Sean’s anti-Semitic crimes.

The first is William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society. In his book The Right, Left and the Jews, (Croom Helm, 1982) Rubinstein writes that

the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size : indeed the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.... it has made Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.

While there have been many wealthy and powerful Jewish individuals and dynasties throughout modern history, only since the 1950s has Western Jewry as a whole risen into the upper-middle class. And the Jewish proletariat transformed itself into a near-universal Jewish bourgeoisie.’ p. 51

Perhaps we should quickly pass on since it’s obvious that this Rubinstein fellow is also anti-Semitic. How about the much more reasonable Geoffrey Alderman, who is a right-wing columnist for the Jewish Chronicle?  In his book ‘The Jewish Community in British Politics, Clarendon Press 1983, Alderman writes (p. 137)

the tendency for British Jews to be found in the higher social classes is very evident. In 1961 over 40 per cent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 per cent of the general population. The electoral consequences of this trend become clear when it is remembered that , at the time of the 1964 general election which Labour won, three -quarters of the top two social classes supported the conservative party.

Hmm. Maybe not. So it seems that not only is Sean right about Jews being more prosperous than the average Gentile but we have also stumbled on the real reason why so few Jews vote Labour today. Nothing to do with that left-wing Adolf Corbyn.  It would seem that it’s no longer in their interest to do so, as just about anyone who has lived in a Jewish community will tell you. They are insufferably bourgeois.  It was not for nothing that in Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley Jews constituted one of her main support bases.

The ever patient Karen, who truth be told wanted to hang on to Sean if at all possible, then got on to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. I know what some of you malcontents are going to say. That people like Geoffrey Robertson QC have slagged it off as being not fit for purpose but as Karen explained the IHRA

‘was written in response to this hatred, a definition to help European police forces and prosecutors better understand it. That’s why the Labour Party’s refusal to adopt it in full for so long caused huge hurt and pain.’

And nothing defines our Karen so much as pain.  Her article oozes the stuff. The fact that the IHRA mentions Israel more than Jews is completely irrelevant. Its sole concern is anti-Semitism. After all it’s a Working Definition on Anti-Semitism and has been for the past 14 years. What further proof do you need of its relevance than the fact that all those Tories support it? There is barely an anti-Semite in the world, Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, who doesn’t support it.

Up piped our irrepressible Sean ‘“Britain has hate speech and anti-discrimination laws.  Why do Jews need additional protection?” A good question you might think but I beg you to understand that this last, flippant comment was what we in the trade call the straw that broke the camel’s back (if comparing a Jew to a camel isn’t anti-Semitic).

The legendary Robert Fisk of The Independent

You will now understand why Sean’s insolent and brazen refusal to emphathise with his erstwhile lover led to the breakdown of a beautiful relationship. One can only imagine the pained expression on Karen as she barked ‘I think it’s time for you to leave’.

As St. Karen of Golders Green explained to The Stagger’s readership

‘Corbynistas’ standard response to Jews is that they know their claims of anti-Semitism are false and that they make them to smear the Labour leader. Of course this doesn’t explain why this woman threw her (now ex) lover out of her freshly painted flat at 2.30 am.’

Never a truer word spoken in jest.  Karen is right. Sean’s impudence doesn’t explain why ‘this woman’ behaved as she did.  I can only presume it was a product of the fact that for all her wittering about ‘anti-Semitism’ she could not explain how it was that anti-Semitism had only risen since Jeremy Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party and why Tory links with genuine anti-Semites never seemed to get a look in.  Or indeed why, if Labour was indeed anti-Semitic  it was the papers of the Right, like the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Hitler in the 1930’s and which opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Nazism, who were hottest on Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

One of a rare breed - Robert Fisk - The Independent's Legenday Middle East correspondent

 There is only one moral one can draw from this story and it is an old one.  Hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Karen Glaser deserves to be scorned and treated with complete disdain and contempt for the dishonesty of this account, from beginning to end. If it did indeed occur then we can rest assured that it is a parody of the breakdown in her relationship with ‘Sean’.  I suspect, like the odyssey of the Children of Israel in the Sinai desert it is a comfortable myth which hides more than it reveals about Karen’s personal life.

It would of course be interesting to hear Sean’s account of this fairy tale but for the New Statesman to do that would be to break a habit of a lifetime.  It would mean conceding a right of reply to someone who had been abused and traduced. Even if his name has been changed there is no doubt that there will be people who know of Karen’s ex-partner and will think worse of him as a result.

However that is as nothing when one considers that Sean should count himself extremely fortunate to be free of this hectoring, bullying, self centred and superficial woman. That she is probably typical of British journalists and the staff on the New Statesman is indeed a cause for reflection if not concern. Pundits and commentators today are little more than prostitutes doing their proprietor’s bidding. Their opinions are for sale and any journalist with an independent streak is unlikely to gain and retain employment on most newspapers.

Patrick Cockburn - part of a journalistic dynasty 

I can think of just two, possibly three, journalists who retain any credibility or independence today.  Patrick Cockburn, the legendary Robert Fisk and John Pilger. The first two are employed by The Independent and Pilger has no regular paper.  Instead we have a succession of mediocrities flitting between The Guardian, New Statesman and BBC, none of whom challenges the neo-liberal view of the world that sees capitalism as a good thing and inevitable and which is incapable of marrying up things like poverty, global warming and climate change with the social and economic system that produces these phenomenon.

Perhaps I have wasted too much time on Karen Glaser, who is really just an insipid and insignificant reflection of other peoples’ thoughts. Someone who retails hasbara  as her own original thought and whose view of the world is coloured by her own perception of her ‘oppression’.  At the end of the day Karen Glaser’s article says as much about the editors at the New Statesman as it does about her.

Below is a letter I rushed off to the New Statesman. It will not of course be published. (it wasn’t!)

Tony Greenstein