Why Does Jonathan Freedland Feel the Need to Lie to The Guardian's Readers?

The Guardian's 'Antisemitism' Campaign Against Corbyn Continues Unabated

The latest Freedland anti-semitism nonsense

I’ve long since lost count of the number of anti-Corbyn articles concerning ‘anti-Semitism’ that the Guardian has run in the past 3 years. Five filters have done a remarkable job in collating some of the more tedious attacks by Guardian columnists on Jeremy Corbyn. I have added a couple more on the ‘anti-Semitism’ nonsense. The Guardian and Jonathan Freedland's tedious Campaign against Corbyn. Prominent amongst Jeremy’s critics has been Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s Zionist gatekeeper and a senior Guardian editor

Freedland’s latest effort is Yes, Jews are angry – because Labour hasn’t listened or shown any empathy.  You might have thought in the year of the Windrush scandal, when at least 70 Black people who came to this country 70 years ago, who the moment they landed were citizens of the UK and Colonies.  Despite this at least 70 people were deported to the West Indies.

Some of Jonathan Freedland's anti-Corbyn articles

Jonathan Freedland and a few of his articles on Corbyn and the Labour left and antisemitism

Contrast that with Britain’s Jewish community.  Not one of them have been deported.  They are on average considerably better off than the average white person, there is no police violence against Jews or economic discrimination. The only section of the Jewish community that has suffered racist attacks is the Orthodox Jewish community who are visibly different. Physical attacks on Jews as Jews are extremely rare compared to Muslims and Black people  In short there is no evidence of institutionalised anti-Semitism in Britain compared to the endemic racism against Black and Asian people.  Yet the media is deluged with rubbish articles, of which Freedland’s is one, about anti-Semitism.  You would be hard put to find a Freedland article on Windrush or anti-Roma prejudice.

It is because Jews in Britain today are a comfortably off sub-section of the White population that Britain’s racist tabloids, two of whom employed the poisonous Katie Hopkins, are so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.  The very same papers who demonise asylum seekers.

Freedland’s article yesterday fits into this.  Erroneous, self-centred, dishonest.  You name it then Freedland has managed it. The only Opinion piece in The Guardian which has a balance of contributors is here.

Tony Greenstein 

Nigel Wilmott

Letters Editor

The Guardian

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU,

This is just a few of the Guardian and Jonathan Freedland's attacks on Corbyn

Jonathan Freedland speaking at Chatham House, where the great and the good meet to discuss foreign policy on a non-attributable basis

Dear Nigel,

I realise that this letter, a response to Jonathan Freedland’s latest propaganda blast, is over the normal word limit for a letter, but as the saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.  If you feel that it is too long it can always be referred to the Comment Editor or is that Mr Freedland?

We seem to be in the midst of a full spectrum, all guns blazing, PR offensive on behalf of the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. This week all three Zionist papers carried the same hysterical front page that even Freedland labels ‘over the top’. [Yes, Jews are angry – because Labour hasn’t listened or shown any empathy]

What I find surprising is that Jonathan Freedland, a senior Guardian Editor, whose views on Israel are allowed to dominate the Opinion pages without let or hindrance, feels the need to emulate the principle that if you repeat a lie long enough it is likely to be believed. To deal with a few of Freedland’s points.

i.                   Yes Zion is an integral part of the Jewish religion. However it has never had, until the late colonial period, any political significance. That was why when Zionism arose in the late 19^th Century its fiercest opponents were Orthodox Jews.

ii.                If the idea of Israel/Zion had more than a spiritual significance why was it when the great emigration of two and a half million Jews from Czarist Russia occurred from the mid 19^th century to 1914, barely one percent went to Palestine?  There were no borders stopping them. The religious significance of Zion is not and never has been a justification for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.  Palestine was not a land without a people for a people without a land.  That is a colonial myth.

iii.             Jews in Britain are not an ethnic minority, they are a religious minority and part of white British society.  They are not in any way an oppressed group.

iv.             Nowhere does Freedland explain why the Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is not sufficient to deal with genuine 24 carat anti-Semites. This six word definition is more than adequate to deal with those who talk about a ‘hook-nosed, bloodthirsty Jew’. There is also the definition drawn up by Brian Klug of Oxford University, in his lecture ‘What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’? Echoes of shattering glass at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.  Klug’s defined anti-Semitism as ‘a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’  Is 21 words.

v.                Nowhere does Freedland explain why the IHRA definition, 500+ words, including 11 ‘examples’ of anti-Semitism, 7 related to Israel, is necessary.

vi.             Freedland says that the IHRA definition is ‘near universally accepted’. This is untrue. The IHRA definition is rejected by anti-racist, Muslim, Palestinian and civil society groups such as Liberty and the University College Union. It is though universally accepted by state bodies and governments, including the anti-Semitic governments of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria. Yes, anti-Semites have no problems with a definition of anti-Semitism that is based on support for Israel. Today the favourite refrain of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis such as the founder of the Alt-Right Richard Spencer, who defines himself as a White Zionist, is that however much they dislike Jews they love Israel.

vii.          Surely Freedland cannot be unaware that the Trump administration, which combines anti-Semitism and ultra-Zionism, also supports the IHRA?  An administration that contained anti-Semites such as Steve Bannon, who objected to his children attending school with ‘whiny Jewish brats’ and Sebastian Gorka with his membership of the neo-Nazi Vitezi Rend?

viii.       Even leaving the aforementioned aside, why does Freedland feels the need to insult the intelligence of Guardian’s readers?  Does Freedland really have such contempt for their intelligence that he treats them like the Daily Mail treats their readership? Leaving aside Freedland’s cheap reference to Thereisienstadt concentration camp or the gauche picture of the Warsaw Ghetto, although we know that comparisons with Nazi Germany, when made by Israel’s critics, even if they are Jewish, are ‘anti-Semitic’ according to the IHRA.

ix.             Freedland states that ‘the IHRA text explicitly says that if you criticise Israel the way you criticise other countries, it “cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. Most readers will not check the IHRA’s wording and will trust that what Freedland says is accurate. After all senior editors of the Guardian don’t lie, or do they?

x.                In fact the IHRA contains two references to criticism of Israel. The first states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. The only problem is that Israel is a unique ethno nationalist state which is a state of the ‘Jewish people’ wherever they may reside but not of its own citizens. This is entrenched in the Jewish Nation State Bill.

xi.             The second reference states that anti-Semitism consists of ‘Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’ I fail to understand why, even if someone did expect higher standards of Israel (e.g. because it claims the Holocaust as its moral legacy) that that would be anti-Semitic. Racism is about people not states.

In which other liberal democracy would you have demonstrations against minority ethnic groups buying a house in an ethnically pure city

xii.          Israel is not a democratic nation, indeed it is not a nation. There is no Israeli nationality. It maintains a military dictatorship over 5+ million Palestinians and when they protest it guns them down. Israel is a state that uses torture, imprisons and abuses young children and locks people up without trial. Arabs are effectively tolerated guests not even second class citizens of Israel. A situation where Arab Israelis do not have access to 93% of the land, where Israeli Jews demonstrate against an Arab family moving into the Jewish city of Afula is not a democracy. 

Saying Israel is a racist endeavour is antisemitic

xiii.        The IHRA has, according to Hugh Tomlinson QC, a ‘potential chilling effect’ on freedom of speech . No less a person that Kenneth Stern, the author of the IHRA, in a written deposition to the House of Representatives in November 2017 described how the IHRA had been used to ‘restrict academic freedom and punish political speech’ and that it had ‘chilled pro-Palestinian expression.’ How strange that Freedland omitted the above in is heart wrenching tale of Jewish suburbia.

Once again Freedland abuses his editorial position in order to wage a propaganda war against opponents of Zionism and Palestine solidarity campaigners. Not once has the Guardian granted a right of reply to Freedland’s critics.

Freedland repeatedly suggests that the IHRA is the only safeguard against anti-Semitism. He knows that this is a lie but he still repeats it in an article high on verbal flatulence. You don’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to recognise the beast. Kenneth Stern described how a group of Jewish students were subject to anti-Semitic harassment on a US campus which included verbal abuse, chants of “Heil Hitler” and being kicked on a “Kick a Jew Day.” Action was happily taken against the perpetrators. Stern notes that ‘there was no need to consult a definition to make this determination.’

Where someone is attacked because they are Jewish there is no need to study a 500 word definition before taking action. Jonathan Freedland knows this very well yet he continues to treat the Guardian’s readers as if they were idiots. The IHRA is about curtailing free speech.

Hundreds dmonstrate in Afula recently against the sale of a house to an Arab in a town which is wholly Jewish

If Jonathan Freedland were to come clean for once he would confirm that this is not about anti-Semitism. It is about removing Jeremy Corbyn. That has been the Guardian’s aim for the past 3 years. See The Guardian and Jonathan Freedland's tedious Campaign against Corbyn

Like all too many of his fellows, Jonathan Freedland no longer understands the difference between journalism and political propaganda and mendacious prse. We know that diplomats are sent to lie abroad for their country but does that have to be of Guardian journalists?

Regards,

Tony Greenstein

Yes, Jews are angry – because Labour hasn’t listened or shown any empathy | Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan FreedlandFri 27 Jul 2018 17.37 BST

The row over how to define antisemitism is not just about nuances of phrasing. Failure to consult Jewish opinion has destroyed all goodwill

This week I was in a house of mourning for an evening of prayers for the dead, part of what Jews call a shiva. We were there to remember a woman who had come to this country as a child refugee, having survived the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic. But I was struck by the words of the ancient prayers themselves, wondering what an outsider might make of them. For certain words kept recurring, as the holy texts invoked “the people of Israel” and asked that those grieving be comforted “among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem”.

I found myself thinking that it would be useful for those following the ongoing, apparently neverending row about antisemitism and the Labour party to see what I was seeing. For they would have learned two relevant things. First, that if Jews are hyper-alert to threats, with a radar acutely sensitive to the early signs of danger, that is partly because the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews, is, for us, a very recent memory: part of our own lived experience, barely one generation away. Second, that while so many may wish to draw a clear, bright line between Jews and Israel so that you can hate the latter while showing no hostility to the former, it is a bit fuzzier than that. Because the idea of Israel – not the concrete reality, but the idea of Israel and Zion and Jerusalem – is so deeply woven into Jewish tradition and culture that it’s there in the very words we utter at the most intimate moments of our lives.

The other thing they’d have heard if they had been at that shiva is a room full of Labour-supporting Jews sharing their fears about the party they, their parents and grandparents once called home. It’s the same conversation that Jews are now used to hearing, around synagogues and sabbath dinner tables, and which found expression in recent days in both Margaret Hodge’s outburst against Jeremy Corbyn, in which she called the party leader an antisemite to his face, and in an unprecedented shared front-page editorial published in three leading British Jewish newspapers, declaring that a Corbyn-led government would pose “an existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.

How on earth has it come to this? How have we sunk to the point where the mainstream Jewish community sees Labour this way, and when a longtime anti-racist like Billy Bragg finds himself telling an ethnic minority that they have “work to do” if they are to win back Labour’s trust? Can it really be solely about Labour’s failure to adopt the full text of the near universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, including all its illustrative examples, so that this is an argument about sub-clauses and paragraphs? Is that all this is about?

No. The definition row is the eruption, but the volcano itself goes much deeper. Churning inside are deep incomprehension and distrust, brewed over many years, if not decades.

Start with the incomprehension. Part of the problem is that, for many, all this has seemed rather abstract: people keep referring to antisemitism on the left, but are rarely shown what it actually looks like. For them, the IHRA definition must seem like a weapon to be used against a hypothetical threat. But some of us see daily the tweets and Facebook posts, whether it’s the caricature of a hook-nosed, bloodthirsty Jew posted by a Labour councillor in Derbyshire, the overt Holocaust denial – “Holo-brainwashing”, in the words of a former Labour council candidate in Kent – or the endless talk of Rothschilds, Jewish control of the media, money and all the old tunes played against Jews for centuries. We see it; we get used to it. But it’s not abstract.

The second level of incomprehension relates to Israel. Defenders of Labour’s code of conduct say it was necessary because the IHRA version conflates legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This makes plenty of Jews want to slam their heads on their desks in frustration, partly because the IHRA text explicitly says that if you criticise Israel the way you criticise other countries, it “cannot be regarded as antisemitic”, and partly because these Jews criticise Israel all the time themselves – never more so than in the week after Israel passed an appalling nation-state law which, in effect, officially confirms Arab-Israelis as second-class citizens.

Bragg worries that the IHRA will silence the pro-Palestinian voice. But the only pro-Palestinian who needs to fear the IHRA is the one who wants to say Jews are disloyal to their own countries, that Jews are Nazis and that the very idea of Jews having a homeland of their own is “a racist endeavour”. You can say all of those things more easily under Labour’s new code – the age-old accusation of disloyalty, for example, is no longer classified as antisemitic – which is one reason why the vast bulk of the Jewish community opposes it.

But the IHRA itself, properly applied, allows plenty of scope. You can, if you want, say everything the state of Israel has done since its birth has been racist. All it prohibits is branding as a racist endeavour “a state of Israel” – the principle that Jews, like every other people on Earth, should have a home and refuge of their own. And if you want to make a serious analogy with the historic past, you can do that too, because the IHRA allows for context. Given all that, when Jews hear that the IHRA is not good enough, so that Labour had to draw up a code of its own, they wonder: what exactly is it that Labour wants to say about us?

Still, as I say, this is not really about clauses and paragraphs. If there had been goodwill and trust, Labour could have sat down with the Jewish community and ironed out any wrinkles, perhaps by adopting the IHRA’s definition in full and then adding a couple of caveats explicitly protecting free speech. The trouble is, there is no such trust, and Labour attempted no such thing. Instead it drew up its code of conduct itself, without consulting the organised Jewish community at all.

This, not any particular form of words, is what doomed Labour’s code. It’s as if Labour unilaterally decided to rewrite a widely accepted set of guidelines on sexual harassment, in defiance of opposition from every women’s organisation and without consulting them, and delegating the task to a majority male sub-committee, and then expected women to applaud the new document. Every leftist, every Corbynite, would howl at the absurdity of the party thinking it knew best. (They’d keep howling even if a handful of women intellectuals sympathetic to the party leadership, but out of step with majority female opinion, insisted on talking up the new code as an improvement.)

Yet, when Jews express their disquiet, they are not greeted with empathy and solidarity from the army of self-described anti-racists. Instead, they face an online horde shouting in their faces, accusing them of dishonesty, of smears, of ulterior motives and hidden agendas, of shilling for an Israeli government many of them oppose. And it ends in the dispiriting sight of a good man like Bragg – no antisemite – taking up a position antagonistic to Jews, telling them they need to behave, just to defend the party and the leader.

So yes, maybe that editorial printed in the Jewish newspapers was over the top. But you know what? It reflects the anxiety that many, if not most, in the Jewish community feel. And given our history and the hyper-vigilance it has left us with, it might be an idea to stop wagging a finger and telling Jews, yet again, that they’re wrong – and just listen.

Reinstate All Those Expelled - End McNicol's Regime - No IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

Picket Labour Party National Executive Committee Meeting - 11.00-1.00 pm 17 July 2018 Southside

Fabian Imperialism is alive and kicking at the New Statesman

The Staggers Support for Zionism and Apartheid is bolstered by the fake anti-Semitism narrative

 

Emblazoned across the New Statesman’s masthead is the slogan ‘Free thinking since 1913’. Unsurprisingly it is a lie but all organisations like to wrap themselves in a comfort blanket. In the 1930’s it was best known for its support for Stalinism, the purges included. Its commitment to ‘free thinking’ did not extend to publication of George Orwell’s dispatches from the Spanish civil war, because they criticised the Stalinist attacks on the Anarchists and POUM.

The junk Zionist article that Jasper Jackson refused to allow a reply to

Born in the womb of Fabianism, the New Statesman soon abandoned even a token relationship to socialism, hence why its current editor Jason Cowley claims it is ‘celebrated for its progressive and liberal politics.’ The New Statesman does not do socialism or anti-capitalism, though a couple of its contributors would probably claim a passing attachment to socialist politics.

The New Statesman was formed in 1913 by Beatrice and Sydney Webb and it was as devoted to the British Empire as the Tories. Unlike the Tories who made no secret of their belief that they intended the Empire to last forever, a source of perpetual unearned riches, they were the moral wing of imperialism which held that colonialism was an act of self-sacrifice. The New Statesman believed that Britain was holding the colonies in trust for the natives as and until they had reached the requisite stage of civilisation.

Laurie (Red) Penney has been defanged - a lifestyle columnist

Sydney Webb was the prime representative of this wing of moral imperialism. As Lord Passfield, he was Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Dominions in the 1929-31 MacDonald government. In this capacity he issued the Passfield White Paper in response to the Report of the Hope-Simpson Report which arose out of the 1929 Arab riots. It recommended drastic reductions in Jewish immigration to Palestine. For anyone wanting to understand the background to the apartheid nature of the State of Israel today then this Report is required reading.

Crossman was the most ardent Zionist of all the New Statesman's editors

In A Nation Reborn Crossman regrets that the Zionist settlers didn't achieve their goals earlier since then they could have wiped out 'the aboriginal population'

The New Statesman has a long and inglorious record of support for Zionism. Perhaps its most openly racist editor was Richard Crossman (1970-72, though Paul Johnson runs him a close second), who served as Housing Minister in the Wilson government. In a memorial lecture to Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President, in 1959 Crossman regretfully noted in respect to the colonists, that “No one”, at least until the 20th century, had 

“seriously challenged their right, or indeed, their duty, to civilise these continents by physically occupying them, even at the cost of wiping out the aboriginal population”. 

If only the Zionist settlers had “achieved their majority before 1914, they would have been accepted without any compunction of any kind”.  

Owen Jones - the Guardian's tame left correspondent plies his wares at the Staggers

Crossman’s views about the rights and duties of settler colonialism fitted in with the moral debt that the civilised nations owed to their backward brothers. Settler colonialism, be it in southern Africa or the Middle East was seen as the most efficacious means by which the natives might be civilised. If that meant wiping out some of them, as a way of teaching good manners, then that was a price worth paying.

Sydney Webb/Lord Passfield the New Statesman's founder later became Colonial Secretary

Zionism was the bastard offspring of the New Statesman’s political and cultural outlook. It was seen as redressing an age old wrong, fitted in with the romantic imperialist view of the ‘restoration’ of the Jews and of course was of benefit to British imperial interests in the Middle East. 

Kingsley Martin -   The New Statesman's longest serving editor

It was only under the editorship of Bruce Page (1978-82) and his successor Hugh Stephenson (1982-86) that the Palestinians began to get more sympathetic coverage in the New Statesman, in part because of the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when over 20,000 Lebanese were killed. 

Supporting Zionism today

Although the New Statesman carries a few articles today on particular Israeli outrages, it is a firmly Zionist publication. What the New Statesman will never do is question the reasons why Israel behaves as it does.  It will not question Zionism, the ideology and movement that  created the Jewish, i.e. Apartheid nature of Israel. It is perfectly happy to carry articles on the Gaza massacres, when Israel gunned down over 120 unarmed Palestinians, especially when penned by the far-Right editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, but it won’t ask why there is land and education segregation in Israel.

The New Statesman really think its being clever to get the Jewish Chronicle's far-Right editor to issue a mild rebuke to Israel - the New Statesman preferred White liberals to Black spokesmen for the liberation movements in South Africa too

Pollard is well qualified to write articles on the murder of Palestinians being a member of the cold war Henry Jackson Society, former Editor of the Daily Express and someone who declared that Polish anti-Semite Michal Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ 

Kaminski supported the campaign to rehabilitate the name of Jedwabne, a village in Poland where, in 1941, up to 1600 Jews had been herded into a barn which was then set alight, by their fellow Poles.  As Pollard explained, although an anti-Semite Kaminski was also a strong supporter of Israel.

Supporting the Anti-Semitism Witchhunt in Labour 

It is no surprise that the New Statesman has been one of the most fervent supporters of the right-wing Labour Zionist campaign to paint the Labour Party as overrun by anti-Semitism. What is surprising is that this dedication extends to providing PR coverage for different factions within the Jewish Labour Movement, the British wing (or sister party) of the racist Israeli Labour Party.

Early last week a report appeared in the Jewish Chronicle stating that  the JLM’s war criminal Chair, Ivor Caplin (Defence Minister at the time of the Iraq War), after having met with Labour’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby, was happy with the Labour Party’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct.  And so he should have been since it rested on an amended form of the fake IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

However when news of this leaked out Caplin was subject to furious attacks by his fellow Zionists. What his opponents objected to in the new Code was best put by Pollard:

‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’ [The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve Labour’s anti-Semitism guidelines. Here’s why]

The Staggers Corporate Editor - Jason Cowley

Caplin had clearly forgotten that the anti-Semitism witchhunt had nothing to do with anti-Semitism as opposed to Zionism and Israel. Even worse he didn’t seem to grasp that the purpose of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt was that it had to continue unti Corbyn’s resignation.

You might expect that the New Statesman would cover these things fairly and accurately.  That would be naive.  Instead it ran a PR puff on behalf of Caplin’s critics The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve Labour’s anti-Semitism guidelines. Here’s why.

The article by Katz and Langleben, the latter a councillor who had managed to wage a successful campaign to convince the electors in West Hendon that Labour was anti-Semitic.  So successful was he that they decided to oust him! Their article is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky called the manufacturing of consent. It rests on the taken for granted assumption that there is, what the authors call an ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ in the Labour Party.  The only crisis is the continuing levelling of false accusations by the Israeli states surrogates.

For the past three years the Labour Party has been the subject of a concerted campaign of false and bogus accusations of anti-Semitism.  It began with allegations that Corbyn had associated with a holocaust denier and its most recent manifestation was the bogus issue of Corbyn having defended an allegedly anti-Semitic mural on the grounds of free speech.

What is the role of the New Statesman?  Has it ever critically evalued the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign which stretches from those well known anti-racist papers, the Sun and Mail to the neo-liberal Guardian and the BBC? Is the New Statesman’s role simply to echo the ‘anti-Semitism’ drumbeat of the mass media?

There seems to be an open door in the New Statesman to any propaganda which reinforces the wall to wall media consensus that the Labour Party is overrun with anti-Semitism.

It is no surprise that in the wake of the attack and pending demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, to say nothing of Israel’s gunning down of over 120 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, that Zionist organisations should resort to the tried and trusted tactic of alleging anti-Semitism. 

The JLM, of which Langleben and Katz are senior officers, is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, whose Land Settlement Division funds the settlement expansion in Palestine that dictates the demolition of Palestinian villages. Did it ever occur to the New Statesman that this might have some bearing on the PR puff that constituted Langleben/Katz’s article?  Did it ever occur to Jasper Jackson. who commissioned the article  to ask how the JLM’s affiliation to the WZO squares with their professed support for a  two state solution?

When I spoke to Jasper he didn’t seem to have a clue about the issues.  He was unable to even comprehend what the significance of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was and why Zionist groups were so keen on it rather than the 6 word definition in the OED.

I therefore submitted a response to the Katz/Langleben’s PR puff.  According to Jasper it was unsuitable.  Why?  Well of course he had no answer.

Tony Greenstein 

Although flawed Labour’s Anti-Semitism Code at least makes an attempt to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

I can quite understand why Mike Katz and Adam Langleben of the Jewish Labour Movement are busily trying to repair the damage caused by their Chair, Ivor Caplin giving his assent to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct.  However the internal difficulties of the JLM are less important than the principal issues at stake such as the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in the battle against the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.

Anti-Semitism is remarkably easy to define. It is not a mystery. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’.  According to the definition drawn up by Oxford academic Dr Brian Klug “Antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.”  If you ask the man (or woman) on the Clapham Omnibus what is anti-Semitism they will tell you that it is someone who doesn’t like Jews and they would be right.  Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with opposition to Zionism or criticism of Israel.

Katz, Langleben and the pro-Israel Board of Deputies are insistent that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism is the only definition that matters. Why?  It is a strange definition that is over 450 words long. As Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote, the IHRA definition ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

The reason why the IHRA is so long is because it attempts to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It is therefore not at all surprising that the Zionist movement in this country has reacted furiously to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct which removes 4 of the 11 ‘illustrations’ of anti-Semitism in the IHRA.

In the words of Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard, the problem is that instead of adopting the complete definition ‘Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’ For all of Katz and Langleben’s sophistry, their concerns relate to this one central point.

Katz and Langleben refer to the widespread adoption of the IHRA whilst failing to mention that the University College Union and Liberty have both rejected it because of the threat to freedom of speech that it poses.  Anti-racist and Muslim groups have also opposed it because it does nothing in the fight against racism.  The fact that the College of Policing has adopted it, given the record of police racism in this country, is not encouraging.

Yes it is true that 31 countries have adopted it, but the fact that these countries include the anti-Semitic governments of Hungary and Poland, to say nothing of the V-4 Visegrad Group should be a source of shame not pride.  What conclusions should we draw about a definition of anti-Semitism that Viktor Orban can sign up to?  This is the same Orban who believes that Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary during the war, who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz, was an ‘outstanding statement’.

The government of Poland too, which made it a criminal offence to mention the fact that thousands of Poles collaborated with the Nazi murder of Jews is also happy with the IHRA.

Perhaps Katz and Langleben would care to read Chemi Shalev’s, Menachem Begin Would Be Ashamed of Netanyahu’s Whitewash of Hungary’s anti-Semitism, Poland’s Holocaust Revisionism?  in Ha’aretz.  Shalev was referring to the recent endorsement, by the Prime Minister of Israel, of an accord with Poland’s anti-Semitic government which endorses a policy of  covering up small matters like the burning alive of 1,600 members of the Jewish community of Jedwabne , who 77 years ago were herded into a barn by fellow Poles. This is the real anti-Semitism that Katz and Langleben are silent about.

I don’t hear the JLM protesting about the invitation that Netanyahu has extended to his friend Viktor Orban, to make a state visit to Israel later this summer.  Meanwhile Jan Tomasz Gross, Anna Bikont and the other historians who uncovered what happened in Jedwabne, Radzilow and other villages in Poland face being sued in Polish courts.

Katz and Langleben’s allegation that ‘The Jewish community have clearly outlined their own definition of Jew hatred’ by which they mean the IHRA is simply untrue.  If you were to stop most Jewish people in the street and ask them what anti-Semitism was they would say hatred of Jews not criticism of Israel. What Langleben and Katz mean refer to as the Jewish community is the Zionist movement.

Nor is it true that Poale Zion/JLM have been the Labour Party’s Jewish affiliate since 1920.  It has been Labour’s Zionist affiliate. This is part of the shameful record of Labour’s support for the British Empire.  Unfortunately the Labour Party supported the colonisation by the Zionist movement of Palestine as it did many other colonial adventures.  The JLM is not a group that anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews are able to join.  Indeed the JLM is open to non-Jews who are Zionists.

Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct has many flaws, not least the fact that it rests on a cut down version of the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism.  You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Instead of amending the definition they should have junked it altogether. Anti-Semitism is not a mystery that needs a special definition.

At a time when the far-Right in Britain, Europe and America overwhelmingly supports the Israeli state and Zionism and when the founder of the alt-Right, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declares himself a White Zionist the attempt of Katz and Langleben to pretend that their opposition to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct has anything to do with fighting hatred of Jews is risible.

Tony Greenstein  

The original article by Mike Katz and Adam Langleben is The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve Labour’s anti-Semitism guidelines. Here’s why

See also:

New Statesman Bows to Zionist Censorship as they Delete Article on Israel’s Occupation

New Statesman Feels the Heat as Hundreds Protest The Censorship of Palestinian Article - Zionist UK Media Watch Denies Its Role