The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

When you scratch a Liberal you find a Reactionary – The Guardian’s reaction to a Socialist leader of Labour was Predictable

Forget the Chakrbartys, the Gary Younge’s and George Monbiots, the only genuine anti-racist and anti-imperialist journalist with the Guardian these days is their brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell.

Yesterday the Guardian, once again, censured a cartoon in which Israel's racist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu featured. One wonders just what the problem of Kath Viner, the Guardian's cowardly editor is.

Netanyahu has literally allied himself with a party, Otzma Yehudit, which is a neo-Nazi party in order to slide into government once again. He is a man who complained that too many Arabs were voting and who contradicts an actress, Rotem Sala, 'explaining' to her that no Arabs are not equal citizens in Israel.  Israel is a Jewish not a democratic state.

Yet the Guardian's cowardly editor and its equally cowardly journalists maintain their silence as the only socialist on the staff is censured by this bastion of free speech.

Email to Kath Viner and the Guardian's gutless staff by Steve Bell

The rest of them are washed up liberals. Not only did 60 of Labour’s finest racist peers launch an attack on Corbyn yesterday via the Guardian but the paper’s former Jewish Chronicle pundit and her colleagues, Jessica Elgot (who has blocked me on Twitter!) wrote a story based around the treachery of these unelected aristocrats.

He may be a racist but that doesn't stop John Reid protesting about 'antisemitism'

I couldn’t help but notice the name of John Reid.  Ex-Stalinist he has a good claim to have been the most racist Home Secretary in living memory.  It would certainly be a hard fought contest with David Blunkett who tried to stop the children of asylum seekers going to school because then they would become integrated in the local community and harder to remove.

As the Guardian wrote in its more liberal days, i.e. when the capitalist system wasn’t threatened with having a socialist as Prime Minister, ‘Controversial proposals to deny asylum seekers rights to educate their children in British schools are facing a legal challenge because they breach human rights legislation.’ Blunkett wanted separate schools for asylum seekers in detention centres because that would make deportation easier.

Nick Blake QC wrote that:

‘'Blunkett's obnoxious language of "swamping" is unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. How can a separate educational regime for asylum seeking children be other than discrimination?'

 Another New Labour racist who signed the letter from the peers was Beverley Hughes, a former Immigration Minister.  An article ‘Tough new asylum laws 'too draconian' in the Telegraph of all places described how ‘New rules to strip asylum seekers of benefits were condemned as "draconian and appalling" by refugee campaigners.’ New Labour’s Beverley Hughes was quoted as saying that

‘It is a reasonable expectation that desperate people fleeing for their lives will claim asylum as soon as they can. It is not acceptable for people to claim asylum after being in Britain for weeks or months working illegally, simply as a way of staying on at the taxpayers' expense."

Labour peers advert in the Guardian

Here you see their racist logic in action.  Asylum seekers are condemned for working illegally, having had their benefits removed and yet they are also condemned for staying on at the tax payer’s expense. In all the furore over the fake anti-Semitism people forget just how deeply racist these people were. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has brought people like Norman Tebbit even out of the woodwork and that is the best proof there is that if Tebbit and Trump condemn it, then it’s not anti-Semitism.

When people like Reid, Blunkett or Hughes condemn anti-Semitism, we should treat it in the same way as when Donald Trump tells 4 Black Congresswomen to go back to the home they never came from and then adds, for good measure, a condemnation of their ‘anti-Semitism’.

Anti-Semitism today is being weaponised by the Right and it is only fools and knaves like Momentum’s racist fuhrer Jon Lansman who refuses to see it.

That is why I support moves to break away from Momentum since the urgent need today as the vultures of the Right hover is for a fightback against those who weaponise anti-Semitism.  Following the AGM of Brighton and Hove Momentum last night members of the Labour Party have decided to form the Left Alliance in Brighton and Hove since Momentum is incapable of fighting the witchhunt.

Tom Watson lost sleep over 'poor Phil Woolas' Labour's racist MP

Our enemies include, according to the Guardian, Labour Party staff who voted by 124-4 in favour of a motion condemning the Labour press office’s response to the BBC programme.

These are the same people who quite happily expelled and suspended thousands of people suspected of voting for Jeremy Corbyn. When the left gained a majority on the National Executive Committee there should have been a wholesale clearout of existing New Labour staff, both locally and in the HQ.  It is still not too late.

It is not for the Labour Party’s civil service to dictate the politics of the Labour Party and the GMB should be told in no uncertain terms that any staff attempting to dictate the party’s response to the BBC’s Panorama programme, which contained the false and distorted ‘whistleblowing’ of Sam Matthews and company will be dismissed.

Below is an excellent article on the hypocrisy of Labour’s racist peers and their record of racism, by Aaron Bastani

The Labour Right WouldPrefer a Johnson Government to a Corbyn One. It’s Time to Replace Them

by Aaron Bastani

This was the week when the British establishment, from right to centre, effectively conceded they would prefer a Boris Johnson premiership to a Jeremy Corbyn one. This includes the Labour establishment, of course, the highlight being an advert in the Guardian taken out by 64 Labour Lords criticising the party’s leadership. 

It must be a new low for the Guardian when, in a manner resembling that of the Evening Standard, its commercial arm is indistinguishable from its editorial line. Rather than irritation or anger, the advert left me with a sense of befuddlement: why did Labour Lords pay £18K for negative coverage in a paper so willing to perform the service for free? Unelected legislators paying for newspaper inches in a ‘progressive’ outlet to attack a socialist leader of the opposition – just when you thought you’d seen it all, something else comes along.

The political hue of the signatories was predictable. One was Margaret McDonagh, the party’s general secretary from 1998 to 2001. It was during her tenure that Labour accepted a donation of £100K from Richard Desmond, then proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star. Not long after that contribution, which was known of only by McDonagh and the person who banked the cheque, the former general secretary joined Desmond’s operation as general manager of Express newspapers. Such largesse by the media lothario – whose Daily Star would champion the English Defence League in 2011 – would be significantly outdone, however, when he later donated more than £1m to Ukip.
Another signatory was John Reid, home secretary during the New Labour years and arguably the most authoritarian figure to hold an office tailor-made for such a disposition. While the advert claims the Corbyn leadership has failed “to defend our party’s anti-racist values”, it was Reid who once announced he would target “foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”. He also once boasted he was “throwing out more asylum seekers – failed asylum seekers – than ever before.” As ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric goes, it’s certainly original.

Indeed Reid’s ‘woke’ credentials go so far that he even once took a holiday with Radovan Karadzic – the man responsible for Europe’s most recent mass genocide at Srebrenica. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who wanted special prisons for refugees run by G4S, he proceeded to join the company after leaving government. Like McDonagh, Reid’s trajectory is that of the classic Blairite: unscrupulous bureaucrat to unsavoury lobbyist. 

Then there is Baroness Morgan of Huyton – Sally Morgan to you and I. Morgan was once a trusted advisor to Tony Blair himself. So much so that – along with her then boss – she allegedly blocked the attorney-general from explaining to cabinet the small matter of the legality of the Iraq war. After leaving Downing Street in 2005, she became a non-executive director at Southern Cross Healthcare, leaving a year before the company went bust in 2012. She proceeded to become a senior non-executive director at Carillion, the outsourcing company, which also went into liquidation in early 2018 and is subject to an ongoing investigation by the Financial Reporting Council.

In short, many of the Lords associated with the Guardian advert represent the very worst elements of the Blair era. They are cronies who enabled a racist agenda on immigration; bag-carriers who misled a nation into an illegal war. Their reward is plum peerages with no scrutiny and plenty of perks.
Only days before the advert was published, five members of Labour’s national executive committee, including deputy leader Tom Watson, submitted a motion calling for rule changes to be enacted within the party. This included the demand that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are dealt with by “automatic exclusion” from Labour where there is “irrefutable evidence”. In an opportunistic ploy, typically bereft of considering actual implementation, it’s unclear what “irrefutable evidence” is on Planet Watson. Would Watson himself, for instance, have faced such a measure after running a racist campaign in the 2004 Hodge Hill by-election? After all, one of the leaflets in that very campaign claimed the Lib Dems “want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money, and mine, to go to failed asylum seekers.”

What wasn’t mentioned in this campaign was that the policy in question was Labour’s plan to take asylum seekers’ children away from them and forcibly place them in care. For defending such a brutal, racist policy – and deploying the most audible of dog whistles while doing so – what does Mr Watson think should be his comeuppance?

And what would Watson suggest for his various colleagues, both past and present? Take David Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001 to 2004. He once claimed asylum seekers’ children were “swamping” British schools. And then there’s Jack Straw – should he have been automatically expelled for overseeing the introduction of discriminatory visa policies for Roma people of Slovakian and Czech heritage in 2001? Or perhaps he could offer input regarding Phil Woolas? Ahead of the 2010 general election, the former MP’s team spoke internally of needing to get “the white vote angry”. Such an impulse was the basis for a campaign so ridden with racially inflammatory lies that shortly after winning, two high court judges determined Woolas had acted unlawfully and called for a fresh election. His punishment in the intervening period? A promotion. Watson’s response, rather than to decry his colleague’s lack of a moral compass, was to declare that the judges’ decision was one “we will all regret” and that he had “lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas”.

Remarkably Woolas’s son, Josh Woolas, was one of the 200 “current and former Labour staff and supporters” who condemned Labour’s handling of last week’s Panorama documentary in a recent letter. Did he pen anything when his own father’s campaign explicitly aimed at getting the ‘white vote’ angry? I suspect you know the answer to that. Interestingly, he participated in his own smear campaign in 2016. Like father, like son.

But even more absurd than the Guardian advert and Watson’s motion is the fact we now know it was former general secretary Iain McNicol who made the former party staffers on Panorama sign their non-disclosure agreements. This means the ‘whistle-blowers’ appeared on the same programme, saying the same thing, as the man who had allegedly curtailed their ability to speak the truth. Of course John Ware, who produced the programme, didn’t deem that detail important enough to mention.

Confronted with an increasingly deranged Labour right and their allies in parts of the media, it’s important to grasp what all of this represents: a last ditch effort to stifle any chance of a Corbyn-led Labour government. This now has an added urgency given that a general election looks increasingly imminent. The default approach of the Labour leadership so far, not unwisely, has been to ride such provocations while getting on with the slow business of transforming the party. But the reality is without mandatory re-selection it’s difficult to see how the leadership can maintain a semblance of party cohesion, especially in government.

Every single Labour MP now needs to face a trigger ballot as soon as the opportunity arises. Why? Because there is absolutely no chance of a successful political programme aiming to deal with Britain’s biggest problems – from rising racism to falling wages – with many of these people as Labour MPs. The last ten days have proven that beyond all reasonable doubt.

Published 18th July 2019.

Open Letter to the Guardian’s Gary Younge – Why the Double Standards Over Israeli Apartheid?

Why is it so difficult to understand that Labour’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ Crisis Has Nothing to do with anti-Semitism?

I have to admit that I was taken aback when I began reading Gary Younge’s article If you didn’t desert Labour over the Iraq war, why give up on it over Brexit? Younge described how in 2002 he accompanied Tony Benn on his lecture tour around Britain.

Although I was only half reading it my eye was caught by the remark:

‘The fudge on Brexit is most often mentioned, with the party’s ineptitude – or worse, complicity – over antisemitism coming second.’

Younge then went on to compare this ‘complicity’ with the Iraq war and the pauperisation of asylum seekers. I thought at first that maybe this was just badly phrased. 

When I continued reading it was clear that this was not simply clumsy wording but an attempt to link Labour’s appalling record of racism with the current allegations of anti-Semitism. 

when Jews do not feel welcome in the Labour party because they are Jews then that is a serious problem. This issue has been handled badly and at some point that shifts from a bureaucratic matter to an ethical one of institutional indifference. There are clear moral reasons why anyone, but particularly Jews, might abandon the party.

This mass-sensitisation to and mobilisation against prejudice both within the party and without is to be welcomed. I do, however, wonder where that sensitivity was when senior figures in the party were burqa-baiting, accusing the children of asylum seekers of “swamping” schools, celebrating the Empire and branding the Liberal Democrats as “on the side of failed asylum seekers” while Labour was on “your side” (a byelection campaign run by the deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson). The point here is not to change the subject but to contextualise it. Labour has a history of both fighting bigotry and harbouring and, at times, propagating it...  It is helpful to understand the issue of antisemitism in the party as part of a continuum ....

The Guardian has played a leading role in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Corbyn and the left in the Labour Party.

This must qualify as the one of the most moronic of Guardian headlines by this ex-editor of The Mirror

The Five Filters web site has compiled over 100 Guardian headlines attacking Corbyn and Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. A non-stop propaganda barrage. The Guardian’s attack, led by the ‘liberal’ racist Jonathan Freedland, has been part and parcel of its drift to the neo-liberal Right. My favourite was Roy Greenslade’s Yes, Jeremy Corbyn has suffered a bad press, but where's the harm?

This is Nick Cohen's bizarre verdict on Wikileaks giving the Guardian a scoop about how the US machine gunned from the air Iraqi civilians including 2 Reuter's reporters

The Guardian's shocking betrayal of Julian Assange

The Guardian has been guilty of a shocking betrayal of Julian Assange. The attack of Guardian journalists such as Suzanne Moore was described by John Pilger as ‘slow witted viciousness.’ The Guardian also supported Carl David Goette-Luciak a ‘journalist’ who was little more than an agent for Trump and the CIA in Nicaragua before he was deported.

Because Canary supported the deportation of this ‘journalist’ the Guardian, cancelled the annual Black History lecture on their premises by Canary editor, Kerry Ann-Mendoza, much to the delight of Tory blogger Guido Fawkes.  A decision that Younge supported.

Having been a reader for over 40 years I have a sentimental attachment to the Guardian of old but today you can count on the fingers of one hand, and still have some spare, the Guardian’s good journalists. I can only think of Aditya Chakrabortty and Amelia Gentleman. Even George Monbiot is little more than a Corporate Green. Owen Jones, their token leftist, reminds me of the line in Bob Dylan’s song that ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ Jones is adept at reading the political winds.

Gone are the days when you had Ian Aitken, Jonathan Steele, John Palmer, Michael Adams, David Hirst, Hugo Young, Victor Zorza to name but a few. Now we have puffed up corporate liberals such as the pretentious Rafael Behr and Marina Hyde, who wanders all over the page in search of a snide remark.

Prior to reading his current article I would have included in this list Gary Younge. His ‘interview’ with Richard Spencer, the founder of the alt-Right in the United States, was journalism at his best. Younge has been one of the few Guardian journalists to take racism seriously.

How then to explain his take on ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party? At first sight it is baffling. There is no lack of Jewish opponents of this fake anti-Semitism drivel.  Noam Chomsky spoke of how

‘The charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are without merit, an underhanded contribution to the disgraceful efforts to fend off the threat that a political party might emerge that is led by an admirable and decent human being,

Norman Finkelstein explained that

The transparent motive behind this cynical campaign is to demonize Corbyn, not because he’s a “fucking anti-Semite,” but because he’s a principled champion of Palestinian rights.

Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at St. Anthony’s Colletge summed it up in an interview with another Israeli professor:

‘Anti-Semitism is not a real phenomenon within the Labour Party ... There are anti-Semitic incidents but they are usually related to Israel’s behaviour, Israeli brutality.  So every time there is an Israeli attack on Gaza and there have been 3 in the last 7 years there is a rise in anti-Semitic episodes and incidents in Britain. Fundamentally Israel and the Israeli propaganda machine and Israel’s friends in England and the Israel lobby in Britain deliberately confuse or conflate, and I stress they do it deliberately, anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.  Anti-Semitism is hatred of the Jews as Jews.  Anti-Zionism is opposition to Israel as a colonial power and as an exclusive Jewish state.’

What is it that makes Younge ignore Jewish anti-racists in favour of Zionists like Tom Watson? Younge defines racism, not in terms of class or power relations but as prejudice. Prejudice can affect anyone, rich or poor, capitalist or worker, imperialist or colonised. By defining racism in this way Younge depoliticises it. It no longer has anything to do with society but is the product of the individual psyche. When racism is prejudice even the racist can become a victim.

Younge referenced a 2002 article Terms of abuse whose subheading was ‘If the left wants to win over the pro-Israeli lobby, it will have to start taking anti-semitism seriously’. Would Younge have written a similar article that if the left wanted to win over the pro-Apartheid lobby it must start taking anti-White racism seriously? What has anti-Semitism got to do with opposition to Zionism and Israel?

I don’t believe that this is simply ignorance. Nkosi Zwelivelile wrote only last year in the Guardian that ‘My grandfather Nelson Mandela fought apartheid. I see the parallels with Israel’ Perhaps Young missed it.  Did Younge also miss Desmond Tutu’s comments:

“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces," he said in a statement. "Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."

Perhaps Gary missed the article by Ronnie Kassrills, the Jewish founder of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe ‘I fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel’ Kassrills was recently banned from speaking by Vienna Council. Both the Green Party and the neo-Nazi Freedom Party voted to condemn his ‘anti-Semitism’. Gary would have been proud!

It takes a special kind of arrogance for Gary Younge to ignore the experiences of those who fought and suffered under Apartheid in South Africa in favour of colleagues such as Jonathan Freedland.

Factually Younge is simply wrong. Jews do not feel unwelcome in the Labour Party. Perhaps Zionists feel uncomfortable at support for the Palestinians or opposition to Zionism. Would Labour have welcomed those White South Africans who supported Apartheid?

What is most disturbing is where Younge links New Labour’s undoubted record of virulent racism with today’s accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’.  As he says

‘senior figures in the party were burqa-baiting, accusing the children of asylum seekers of “swamping” schools, celebrating the Empire and branding the Liberal Democrats as “on the side of failed asylum seekers” while Labour was on “your side” (a byelection campaign run by the deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson). The point here is not to change the subject but to contextualise it.’

Contextualisation is important but there is no silver thread running from ‘anti-Semitism’ to New Labour’s racism. It is because Younge is not stupid that his comments are even more perplexing.

It surely cannot have passed his notice that the people who are responsible for past racism in the Labour Party, and he mentions Tom Watson, are precisely the same people who are driving the fake anti-Semitism campaign?

Or put it another way. Why is it that the racist Tory press, from the Daily Mail to the Sun are so unanimous in condemning Labour ‘anti-Semitism’? The very same press that employed Katie Hopkins.

Who is it who is driving the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ if not Tom Watson? Not only did he run the by-election Younge describes above but he openly supported the racist New Labour MP Phil Woolas who based his whole election campaign in 2010 on ‘making the white folks angry’ and when the High Court removed Woolas Watson wrote that he had ‘lost sleep’ over ‘poor Phil’ See OPEN LETTER TO TOM WATSON - the Unlikely Anti-Racist who supported May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy and the Windrush deportations

Tom Watson even hounded Labour Councillor Yvonne Davies because she had opposed a BNP style St George’s Day parade in his constituency which was openly racist.  But here is the rub:

Steve Bell's censored cartoon

How is it that someone who is so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ demonises asylum seekers and supports an openly racist Labour MP? 

I can only assume that the Guardian’s atmosphere today is so febrile that apart from Steve Bell, it is taken for granted at the Guardian offices that Labour is anti-Semitic. Steve Bell too has been a victim of the fake anti-Semitism scares when his cartoon showing the murdered Razan al-Najar was censored by Kath Viner, the Guardian’s Editor.

I have written an Open Letter to Gary Younge. I don’t expect him to respond because my victims rarely do!  However the point is a serious one.  When one of the few Black anti-racist journalists in Britain feels that anti-Semitism, a minor prejudice at worst, is more important than state racism in Britain and when he ignores where this campaign has com from then there is a problem of political cowardice at best.

Gary Younge is not a Chuka Ummuna figure. Chuka is someone who just happens to be Black. Like his Zionist heroes he is an active participant in racism. He supported the 2014 Immigration Act and Theresa May’s hostile environment policy. No one could accuse Gary Younge of that and yet, in upholding the fake claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ he has given comfort to the racists of the Israel lobby.

Open Letter to Gary Younge

Dear Gary,

I read with interest your recent article ‘If you didn’t desert Labour over the Iraq war, why give up on it over Brexit?’ In it you stated that:

when Jews do not feel welcome in the Labour party because they are Jews then that is a serious problem.

Of course this would be a problem if it were true. It is anti-Zionist Jews such as myself and Jackie Walker who have not been made welcome.  Indeed we have been expelled at the behest of Zionist groups such as the misnamed Jewish Labour Movement.

It is not, of course, just Jews who have been expelled.  Black and Muslim members have also been targeted if they have ‘misspoke’ about Israel.

Only today Pete Willsman has been suspended for stating the obvious, namely that the Israeli Embassy is behind this pernicious campaign. Chris Williamson MP has also been suspended for doubting the fake anti-Semitism allegations.

You cannot be unaware of the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth, a long-standing anti-racist activist, who was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ by Ruth Smeeth MP, who is a ‘protected’ asset of the United States. About all of this you have nothing to say.

What surprised me was you that you drew a link between the false anti-Semitism campaign and the very real racism of New Labour and its predecessors.  A racism going back to the 1968 Kenya Asian Immigration Act.

You spoke of how a ‘mass-sensitisation to and mobilisation against prejudice both within the party and without is to be welcomed.’and then wondered ‘where that sensitivity was when senior figures in the party were burqa-baiting, accusing the children of asylum seekers of “swamping” schools...’ in the course of which you mentioned the role of Tom Watson in a race baiting campaign.

In fact you were too kind. You will no doubt remember the unlamented former Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who based his whole election campaign in 2010 on ‘making the white folks angry’. Far from Tom Watson condemning him for his campaign when the High Court removed Woolas Watson wrote that he had ‘lost sleep’ over ‘poor Phil’

You seem to see a contradiction between the concern over the concern over ‘anti-Semitism’ and New Labour’s racist record. There is only a contradiction if the concern about anti-Semitism is genuine. I suggest it is anything but.

I find it difficult to believe that you are so naive.  It is completely consistent that those who are using ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon against Corbyn and the Left are the same people who demonised, pauperised and removed legal aid from asylum seekers.

Tom Watson, Ian Austin and the Labour Right aren’t in the slightest concerned about genuine racism or anti-Semitism. What concerns them is opposition to Israel. That is why they campaigned so vociferously for the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Has it never occurred to you to ask why it is that the same papers who employed Katie Hopkins have been the ones alleging ‘anti-Semitism’? It was the Daily Mail which kicked this all off in 2015 when it alleged that Corbyn was associated with holocaust deniers.

Let me help you. In the words of Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua, ‘even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’ That is why Israel’s best friends are Viktor Orban and the anti-Semitic Polish regime.  It is why the main supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa was also Israel.

You referred in your article to Terms of abuse where, quite shockingly you stated, ‘If the left wants to win over the pro-Israeli lobby, it will have to start taking anti-semitism seriously’.  Would you have said the same with respect to the Apartheid regime in South Africa?  That we shouldn’t be anti-White?

You may respond that Zionism and the State of Israel is not like Apartheid South Africa. Presumably the fact that Israel has maintained a military occupation over 5 million Palestinians for 52 years, because to give them civil and political rights would mean an end to a Jewish ethnic state, is not apartheid? Even within Israel does not segregated education and land not remind you of something?  93% of Israeli land is Jewish national land. Half the Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’ i.e. are liable for demolition and where, as in Afula last year, hundreds of Israeli Jews demonstrated against the sale of a house to an Arab.

When Israeli actress, Rotem Sala, at the last General Election asked ‘When the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens... and that even the Arabs and the Druze ... are human." Prime Minister Netanyahu responded that ‘Israel is not a country of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish nation,”

Netanyahu was right. As a Jew I have the right to Israeli citizenship anytime I want unlike a Palestinian who was born there.  What has opposition to this got to do with anti-Semitism?

It isn’t me but Anti-Apartheid veterans in South Africa who see the parallels between Israel and South Africa. I’m surprised that you are so blind.

Nkosi Zwelivelile wrote only last year in the Guardian that ‘My grandfather Nelson Mandela fought apartheid. I see the parallels with Israel’ Perhaps you missed it?  Did you also miss Desmond Tutu’s comments that:

“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."

Perhaps you missed the article by Ronnie Kassrills, the Jewish founder of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe in April’s Guardian: ‘I fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel’

My question to you Gary is when you are going to stop being an apologist for Israeli Apartheid? Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews not hatred of Jewish racism.

Regards

Tony Greenstein

The Talk about a famous Black journalist that the Guardian and Nick Cohen Tried to Ban

Kerry Ann-Mendoza of the Canary Defies the NUJ to Give the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2018

Kerry and Tony G!

Last Tuesday I attended the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture at the Sands Film Studios in Rotherhithe, London. This was the 11^th annual lecture  and the most controversial. Claudia Jones, who died at the early age of 49, was a Black journalist, communist and activist who was deported in December 1955 from the United States as part of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, having been gaoled four times for ‘UnAmerican activities’.

Claudia Jones

The audience at the Sands Film Studios to hear Kerry Ann Mendoza

Claudia was one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival and when she died she was buried to the left of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

The lecture was due to have been given at the Guardian/Observer offices on October 11^th by Kerry Ann-Mendoza, editor of the Canary, but a campaign by White journalists, led by Islamaphobe-in-chief Nick Cohen, led to the National Union of Journalists and its General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet overriding the decision of their own Black members group and cancelling it.  Surprisingly both Gary Younge and Aditya Chakrbarti  signed the Guardian petition which was circulated, no doubt under peer pressure to back up their White colleagues.

Hadley Freeman and the Guardian's empty headed Marina Hyde celebrate the cancellation of the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 

The reasons or pretext given for the cancellation was that Canary had endangered the safety of a Guardian journalist Carl David Goette-Luciak who was deported from Nicaragua earlier this year after having become embedded with and an ardent supporter of the right-wing American backed opposition to the Sandanistas.

Lies from di Stefano

Buzzfeed retracted the allegation of di Stefano that Max Blumenthall had 'doxxed' the Guardian's journalist - however di Stefano pretended to be unaware of this

di Stefano boasts about the consequences of the lies that Buzzfeed had to disown, courtesy of the NUJ's political cowardice

This allegation or rather lie, was first made by Buzzfeed’s Mark di Stefano. Buzzfeed later retracted it. The Canary article that the Guardian journalists objected to Investigation slams Guardian cooperation with novice reporter linked to US regime-change machine referenced an article by American journalist Max Blumenthall on Mintpress News How an American Anthropologist Tied to US Regime-Change Proxies Became the MSM’s Man in Nicaragua. The article in fact had nothing to do with the deportation.

The Blue Plaque erected in honour of Claudia Jones

I will blog at a later date in more depth on the Guardian’s role in all of this and in particular its support for the right-wing opposition in Nicaragua.  It is of a piece with it running with the neo-liberal theme tune called ‘anti-Semitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Chris Williamson MP extends his solidarity to a Black journalist under attack

It was a great lecture by Kerry and I learnt a lot about someone whom I had barely heard of before. It was an honour and a pleasure to meet and chat with Kerry, who is a highly articulate and media savvy Black journalist in the pub afterwards. Canary which Kerry edits is an important part of the alternative media in this country and I wish them success.  However let Kerry Ann explain the affair in her own words:

How many privileged columnists does it take to silence one Black woman?

 “I was meant to give the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture this evening. But instead, a group of privileged columnists at the Guardian and other establishment outlets bottled it. They circled the wagons to ensure that a Black woman didn’t get a platform to speak about another Black woman. But it could not have backfired more spectacularly. Because now, they’ve accidentally created a much bigger platform for the speech they were too afraid to hear.

Remembering Claudia Jones

Early this year, the Black Members Council of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) invited me to give the annual Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture. I was thrilled. Claudia Jones was a radical; Black, feminist, communist, and a journalist. She helped launch the Notting Hill Carnival and founded the West Indian Gazette. To the establishment of 1950s England, everything about her was wrong. Her colour, her gender, her politics.

Faced with this closed network of privilege, Claudia built her own platform. And she used it to tell the stories and present the views which Britain’s establishment press would not. Not a million miles from the work that independent outlets like The Canary, the Ferret, Media Diversified and others do today.

But before the lecture could take place, an email went out to Guardian/Observer journalists. The event was being hosted in their building, and when they discovered the Black Members Council’s choice of speaker, they went ballistic. BuzzFeed‘s Mark Di Stefano published a leaked email about the reaction:

Excuses, excuses

First, the (mostly) white Guardian columnists and their friends threw a public tantrum. Columnists from across the establishment media took to Twitter with a communal shriek of outrage. How dare this women be allowed to lecture *us*? They recycled the normal accusations:

This was what the cancellation of Kerry Ann Mendoza's lecture was really about - the call to Boycott the Guardian

1.  They don’t pay their journalists! As everyone knows (because we publish it on our website), we actively encourage all of our writers to join and be active in the NUJ. Our team also voted on its own pay deal. The absurd argument that we pay per click only works in the sense that every journalist is paid per click/paper sold, because that’s how every publisher makes their money. Our writers get a flat fee per article based on subscription fees, and a top-up from advertising revenue. As an organisation that started without any outside investment, we have had to earn every penny we pay out to ourselves. Whether we have a great month or an awful month, we share what we earn fairly. This is a very different story to the establishment media, an industry whose bosses routinely bust unions and employ unpaid interns to do the bulk of their work.

2.  They employ an antisemite! We don’t. Canary writer Steve Topple publicly recanted his antisemitic views more than a year before working for us. He didn’t delete his tweets or try to pretend it didn’t happen. He owned it. And he continues to do so. The whole point of the antiracism movement is to end up with fewer racists. Steve is a success story, and I’m proud of him for changing.

3.  They are fake news! This is my personal favourite. The Canary has grown to a team of over 30 journalists and editors, publishing more than 8,000 articles in the past three years. We volunteered to be regulated independently, unlike the establishment outlets who self-regulate. When we were found to have published an inaccurate story (the sole claim upheld against us since becoming regulated), we made the correction on our front page:

This is routine for us. Whenever we make a significant update or correction to a story, we announce it across all our social media channels with greater prominence than the original. This doesn’t happen in the establishment media.

Unfortunately for the Westminster commentators, people got this. Many have supported us from the start; they’ve followed the growth of The Canary over the last three years and know it’s a very different beast today. We are independently regulated, we have an editorial team of six, a five-stage editorial process, and our articles are written and edited by press-carded, unionised journalists. We are a professional outlet that reached more people online in the run-up to the 2017 general election than Reuters, New Statesman, the Economist, the Spectator, the Times and other wealthy, long-established outlets.

Plan B

Next, they tried to force me to step down. They targeted me on social media, like a little gang.

The lecture was no longer about Claudia Jones or the Black Members Council that founded the lecture in her name. Now, it was the Guardian‘s event. This is what tokenism looks like. Wealthy liberals hijacking the history of radical leftists while demonising radical, left voices in their own time.

They held a vote to reject me as speaker. Unfortunately for them, NUJ officers pointed out this wasn’t within their jurisdiction. The NUJ Black Members Council chooses the speaker for the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture, not Guardian writers. Faced with the lone option to reject the event altogether, they voted in favour of hosting the event.

Carl David Goette-Luciak, the Guardian's man in Nicaragua who his colleague and friend admitted was doing the work of the CIA

When that didn’t work, they threw up a bunch of bogus headlines that I was ‘breaking the Guardian boycott’.

But we knew from reactions in the meeting that it wouldn’t stop there. And it didn’t.

Next, they concocted a fresh smear in order to put pressure on the NUJ to pull the event.

A straight smear

Suddenly, The Canary was apparently responsible for ‘endangering a journalist’. Criticism centred on a report by award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal which pointed to a number of issues with reporting by the Guardian‘s Carl David Goette-Luciak in Nicaragua. Interestingly, this charge was led once more by Mark Di Stefano of BuzzFeed. His story connected our one article on Goette-Luciak with an online doxxing of him. No evidence of the link was made, and there was no effort to challenge the factual basis of Blumenthal’s report. It was a straight smear. One thing reported on top of the other as if the link was obvious.

More fake headlines - the Boycott of the Guardian doesn't extend to contact with their journalists or their offices! Desperate times for Nick Cohen's mob

By 7am the next morning, BuzzFeed was forced to retract the accusation. But it didn’t have the integrity to pull the story or post a prominent correction. Instead, it added this ‘update’ at the bottom.

It considers it an ‘update’ to say ‘although we spend this entire article insinuating a link between these two things, there is actually no link between the two things’. Whatever that is, it’s not journalism.

Witch hunt

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet then pulled the lecture from the Guardian building. Di Stefano tweeted a quote from her which indirectly condemned us for the false allegations BuzzFeed had already retracted.

Di Stefano then announced the cancellation on Twitter, before any of us had been informed.

He failed to mention, however, that his own site had been forced to row back on the smear that triggered the cancellation.

But the story had served its purpose. It created a face-saving ‘out’ for the NUJ and the Guardian. They needed to be able to say ‘we aren’t no-platforming one of the handful of BAME editors-in-chief in UK media – we’re defending journalism!’

The irony here is that these columnists are guilty of their own charge. They began a campaign of harassment against a fellow journalist. They knowingly promoted the smear which had already been rowed back on by the outlet that had made it. And they did so in a cynical attempt to no-platform a Black woman journalist. It also fills me with a peculiar kind of horror that this was enabled by the general secretary of my own union.

So what now?

On Friday 12 October, the NUJ is meeting to discuss the allegations against The Canary; allegations which have already been publicly retracted by the outlet that made them. Stanistreet has overruled the will of the Black Members Council. And she did so on the word of BuzzFeed; an organisation that worked hard to ensure its own workers remain un-unionised.

And so my lecture will happen at another location, on a different day, and it will be streamed around the world. Instead of a small tribute to Claudia Jones, it will be a rallying cry for everyone who is tired of the morally bankrupt establishment media.

For the columnist class, this was never about Claudia Jones, or me, or The Canary. It was about a handful of obscenely privileged Westminster columnists ganging up to avoid being embarrassed. They didn’t want to have to sit and grimace while their industry was criticised from the outside. And they resorted to lies, smears and confected outrage to avoid it.

But they still lost.

They placed themselves on the wrong side of history and exposed their paternalistic, classist, racist attitudes to the world. So I’d like to thank each of them for screwing this up so badly. Because this speech is made all the more important and poignant by the attempts to shut it down.

How many privileged columnists does it take to silence one Black woman? Trick question. They never have, and they never will.

Featured image via Bristol Post, Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay

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