Mann combines Opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ with Virulent Racism against Gypsies, Black and Muslim People
Loudmouth Mann confronts Ken Livingstone
I have covered John Mann before
when he lied about and harassed a 90 year
old Jewish Dr Glatt.
In July 2019 John Mann
was appointed by Theresa May as her advisor on ‘anti-Semitism’.
In September Mann was made ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ and elevated to the Lords by
Boris Johnson.
As ‘Anti-Semitism Czar’
Mann saw it as his duty to try and close down
media outlets which didn’t conform to his racist Apartheid agenda. Mann is not
a man to appreciate irony because if he did he would have known that before the
advent of Hitler, Czar Nicholas II was the world’s most infamous anti-Semite
who presided over the deaths of thousands of Jews.
Having failed to close down The Canary and Skawkbox, Mann then set his sights on indoctrinating school children. Citing a report from the Henry Jackson Society, a byword in Islamaphobia, he said that he said that
"It is
not enough to teach about the Holocaust," quoting the report and urged ministers to guarantee
funding for schools to teach about contemporary anti-Jewish hatred (i.e.
anti-Zionism).
You can get a flavour of the HJS's views on racism from its Associate
Director (2011-2018) Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe’. The theme of the book is summed up in its title:
Europe is
dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in
their task by craven liberal politicians The Far Right
Is Obsessed With a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe
Murray gave an
intellectual veneer to the White Replacement Theory which
found its voice at the neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally in the United
States when anti-fascist Heather Heyer was murdered as the marchers chanted ‘The Jews Shall Not Replace Us’.
Douglas Murray
The Guardian reported that
Douglas
Murray, complained last year that London had “become a foreign country” because white Britons were a minority in 23
of 33 London boroughs.” Murray has also been pictured with Robert Spencer,
the far-right US anti-Islam campaigner banned last year from Britain by the
Home Office.
In
2012 the HJS's director William Shawcross said “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of
our future”.
The White Replacement
Theory leads inexorably to the idea that the White races are under threat
because the Jews have encouraged and helped stimulate Black and Muslim
immigration whilst keeping their own Jewish state racially pure.
Mann is fond of quoting from the HJS because the anti-Semitism he is
concerned about isn’t about hatred or hostility to Jews but about criticism of
Israel - the ‘new anti-Semitism’.
Mann is best described by the findings of the Employment
Tribunal in Fraser –v- University College Union. The case was brought by a Ronnie Fraser against his
own trade union, UCU. He alleged anti-Semitism. UCU’s offence was supporting a Boycott
of Israel. Their judgment (para. 148) stated:
Mr Mann … told us that the leaders of the
Respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates but did
not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing
differently. He did not claim ever to have witnessed any Congress or other UCU
meeting. And when it came to antisemitism in the context of debate about the
Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to
me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to
locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches.
Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not
to his liking.
As his parting shot on leaving the
Commons Mann launched an
attack on Jeremy Corbyn for having given the ‘green light’ to
anti-Semites.
He (Corbyn) has not just hijacked my political party – he has
hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.
When John Mann talks about ‘ethics’
it is like a mafia chief giving a lecture on crime prevention or Harold Shipman lecturing on
care for the elderly.
If Mann was seriously concerned
about anti-Semitism then one would assume that in his 18 year parliamentary
career that he was equally vociferous about all forms of racism. In fact no
other form of racism disturbed him. But that may be because there were no
freebies or parliamentary jaunts to be had.
Mann was one of the few Labour
supporters of Brexit in Parliament. Brexit, which was motivated by fear and
hostility to migrants and dreams of Empire past, was at one with Mann’s toxic
views.
Throughout his time in parliament, Mann was distinguished for
his pro-war record. He voted in support of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Not once did Mann speak out against New Labour’s Islamaphobia
and demonisation of refugees. When racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was ejected
from the Commons for lying about his opponent at the 2010 General Election, he
had no greater supporter than Mann.
The Guardian described Mann as Woolas’s best friend, best man
and political ally since the first day at Manchester University”. When Harriet Harman suspended Woolas from the
Labour Party after his ejection from Parliament, she faced “a
backbench revolt”
Among
those to have spoken out in support of Woolas was John Mann, a close friend of
his… (he) has been backing Woolas via telephone calls with a journalist at the
Guardian).
When Harman cast
Woolas adrift Mann said
that ‘A period of silence from Harriet Harman
would now be very welcome.’ Clearly Mann did not understand the
irony of him telling anyone to be quiet.
Mann was quoted as saying that Woolas’s ejection had
profound implications for British democracy...
Woolas is the first case of an MP being disbarred by the courts for malpractice
since 1911.
Woolas did not just lie when he alleged that his Lib Dem opponent
supported violent Muslim Jihadists, he deliberately sought a white working
class vote by portraying all Muslims as terrorists and violent jihadists. A decision
was taken by his campaign team:
to 'make the white folk angry' by depicting an alleged
campaign by those who they described generically as Asians to 'take Phil out'
and then present Mr Watkins as in league with them.
When it came to the 2014 Immigration Act, which led directly to
the Windrush Scandal, Mann abstained. Being an Opposition member it was the
equivalent of supporting the government. It was the ‘anti-Semitic’ Corbyn who
was one of only 6 Labour MPs who voted against the Act.
In 2007 Mann produced ‘the Bassetlaw Anti Social Behaviour Handbook. It described
Gypsies and Travellers as “anti-social elements” in terms similar to the Nazi depiction of
Gypsies.
This handbook
is designed to help you deal with problems you may face in your street or in
your community. There are lots of different types of anti-social behaviour…
Amongst these problems
were Travellers. Mann’s advice was
The police
have powers to remove any gypsies or travellers, and have powers to direct
people to leave the land…
In 2016 Mann was interviewed
by Police in connection with his pamphlet.
Gypsies are protected
by the Equality Act 2010.
Ben Bennett, a 13 year
old Traveller, who made a complaint to the Police, described how Mann’s pamphlet
made him:
‘very upset’.
I can’t understand why John Mann MP would choose to talk solely about my
community in such a derogatory manner.’
Mann claims he is
motivated by the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust but he has nothing to
say about how up to one
million Gypsies were exterminated in the Porajmos.
The Nazis considered criminal, asocial elements just like Mann.
It is no surprise that
Boris Johnson, who was notorious
for his racist and anti-Semitic
comments, made
Mann his ‘anti-Semitism Czar’, elevating him to the Lords.
Mann made
his intentions known from the start. He was going to
concentrate on the Left press. Someone who was genuinely concerned with racism
would have focused on the Daily Mail or Sun. Mann’s targets were the alternative
media - The Canary and Skwawkbox.
In
an article Corbynite sites feature far-right tropes by ‘liar’ Lee Harpin,
whose inaccuracies cost
the Jewish Chronicle a small fortune, Skwawkbox and The Canary were accused of
a “heavily negative coverage of Jewish issues” to anti-Semitic audiences.
What were these ‘Jewish issues.’ Harpin did not say but we can guess - Palestine
and Israel. The same Israeli state which has been condemned as an Apartheid state by the world’s main
human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Mann has consistently engaged in the guilt-by-association tactics favoured by Joseph McCarthy. If you want a lesson in
how to corrupt the English language, take the paragraph below which equates The
Canary and Skwawkbox with neo-Nazis on the basis of an alleged opposition to capitalism.
Fascists have never opposed capitalism. The Nazis called themselves ‘national
socialists’ yet the first thing they did when they gained power was to put trade
unionists and communists in concentration camps.
“despite the huge differences
in the beliefs that are most foundational to their ideologies, articles
published on all three sites share an opposition to capitalism, globalisation,
and liberalism, adopt similar positions on many questions of foreign policy,
and fulminate against a supposed adversary whose Jewishness is extensively
highlighted (even if in different ways).
John Mann - Supports all forms of racism except 'antisemitism'
TR News, the official website of far-right
activist… Tommy Robinson, has intentionally attempted to take the side of Jews
and Israel,
Robinson, like most
anti-Semites, openly
supports Zionism. Mann’s polemics ironically owe their
origin to Nazi propaganda techniques which sought to portray opposites as being
equal. For example they equated capitalism and communism, which they held were
controlled by Jews. John Mann is a walking conspiracy theory:
TR News has resorted to defending those Muslims who were seen
to embrace pro-Western right-wing ideology, the two left-wing websites sought
to declare allegiance with the minority of Jews who supported their own
viewpoint.
In other words fascist
Muslims and Hindus, such as supporters of India’s BJP government are no
different from anti-Zionist Jews who oppose all forms of racism. This is the
kind of intellectual sleight of hand that Mann has made into a fine art.
The ‘research’ for
Mann’s Report was carried out by Daniel
Allington, a King’s College lecturer. Allington selected 20 articles on each
site that featured the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Zionist’ for analysis. It clearly did not
occur to Mann that what fascists mean by ‘Zionist’ differs from what socialists
mean. The report is based on the assumption that ‘Jew’ = ‘Zionist’.
Allington is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s go to academic. His ‘research’ is starts off
with the conclusions and then looks for evidence. In other words he reverse
engineers his research!
Together with Zionist ‘academic’ David Hirsh, Allington devised
a Generalised Anti-Semitism Barometer for the CAA which found that anti-Semitism was
more prevalent on the Left than the Right. The Zionist
and Tory press lapped it up.
If true this was a staggering finding. Why then had all
previous surveys found that anti-Semitism was the property of the Right? What
the CAA didn’t advertise was that they had added 6 questions to the original 6 questions
(which were themselves debatable).
That the CAA is a dishonest McCarthyist organisation is one
thing. That Allington and Hirsh should allow their support for Zionism to fix
the results of ostensibly neutral academic research raises questions as to
their academic integrity. The questions they devised to ‘prove’ that the left
is more anti-Semitic than the Right were:
1. “I am comfortable
spending time with people who openly support Israel.”
2. “Israel has a
right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”
3. “Israel is right
to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.”
4. “Israel and its
supporters are a bad influence on our democracy.”
5. “Israel can get
away with anything because its supporters control the media.”
6. “Israel treats
the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.”
None of these statements are anti-Semitic. According to the OED anti-Semitism is ‘hostility
to or prejudice against Jews.’
The dishonesty of Allington’s
‘research’ is staggering. I wouldn’t be comfortable spending time with
supporters of Franco. Does that make me anti-Spanish? Israel’s right to exist
as a homeland for Jews assumes that Jews aren’t at home where they live. Israel
having the right to defend itself assumes that it is under attack. Obviously Israel’s
supporters are anti-democratic, as the IHRA
misdefinition of anti-Semitism proves. Supporters of Israel do
control the media but who says Rupert Murdoch is Jewish? It’s only anti-Semitic
if you assume that supporters of Israel and Jews are the same.
The most popular ‘anti-Semitic’ statement was comparisons
between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews. But this
is a political statement. Were holocaust survivors Ze’ev Sternhell and Yehuda
Elkana anti-Semitic for writing ‘In
Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’? and The
Need to Forget? Is it anti-Semitic to point out that Nazi mobs chanted ‘death to the Jews’ and Israeli mobs
chant ‘death to the Arabs’.
One example of Skawkbox’s ‘racism’
was
“making throwaway references to ‘a former Chief Rabbi with a history of supporting racism’ could
contribute to the creation of an impression of Jewishness as inherently
suspect.”
So accusing Chief
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of being a racist is anti-Semitic because he was Jewish! Is
accusing someone Jewish of fraud, even if they’re guilty, also anti-Semitic because
it might imply that all Jews are frauds. This is the infantile level of
analysis of John Mann.
When Sacks died, I wrote
that he was ‘An establishment bigot’. Sacks, who compared
Corbyn with Enoch Powell endorsed the Strange
Death of Europe.
Dishonesty permeates the Report.
Because Jewish conspiracy theories permeate the far-Right, the support of Skwawkbox and The Canary for the undercover Al Jazeera programme The Lobby about the
influence and activity of the Zionist lobby was anti-Semitic!
But the latter was true. What these
allegations have in common is a deliberate confusion of ‘Jew’ and
‘Zionist’. And who does this? The same
anti-Semites and fascists that Mann purports to oppose.
Liar Lee’s article concludes
with a quote from Allington:
“Government and civil society must encourage
use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of
low-quality fringe sources,” it said. “We need not
be helpless in the face of hatred.”
What Mann and Allington are advocating is state
censorship. The reference to ‘high
quality reputable sources of information’ is police state stuff. Who
decides what’s ‘high quality’? Turkey’s Erdogan would agree with this. Is it the Mail and Sun?
Britain’s racist tabloids escapes unscathed. Mann’s concerns are not Jews and
anti-Semitism but Zionism and Israel.
The only good thing about Mann’s Report is that
it reflects his own intellectual deficit. It was so poorly argued in its deviously
dishonest analogies that only a rogue like Boris Johnson could fall for it.
Before becoming a Czar, Mann was
Chair of the All-Party
Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. The Committee played
an important part in the lead up to Labour’s anti-Semitism smears. The APPGAA
was stuffed with members of the Friends of Israel groups such as Luciana
Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and Bob Blackman. None of them had ever criticised
Israeli racism. Bob
Blackman was a racist in his own right.
See Tory
MP accused of Islamophobia after posting anti-Muslim article on Facebook
The Committee, chaired
by Labour MP Dennis McShane, gaoled for his part in the expenses scandal,
produced a Report
into Anti-Semitism in September 2006. Its ludicrous observations included:
The Israeli government itself
may, at times, have mistakenly perceived criticism of its policies and actions
to be motivated by antisemitism, but we received no evidence of the accusation
of antisemitism being misused by mainstream British Jewish community
organisations and leaders.
Ten years later the President of
the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, attacked Corbyn as
an anti-Semite and stated that a Jewish group, Jewdas were ‘the source of virulent anti-Semitism’
The Report stated that ‘anti-Zionist discourse can be polluted with
antisemitic themes’ but ignored the far more widespread incidence of Zionist
anti-Semites. E.g. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right and organiser
of the demonstration in Charlottesville, declared himself a White
Zionist. As Ha’aretz noted:
‘In a
series of tweets, Spencer writes of his admiration for the law, which confers
the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people alone,
and says Jews are 'showing a path forward
for Europeans'
Israel provides a model for White supremacists. The Jewish Nation State Law excluded Arab Israelis from any claim to the land they live in. It was a blueprint for Jewish supremacy. Yet Mann and the APPGAA never once mentioned that the incidence of Palestinian supporters using anti-Semitic rhetoric is far outweighed by Zionist anti-Semites like Spencer and Steve Bannon who combined anti-Semitism with Zionism (see his description of Jewish children, whom he didn’t want his children to go to school with, as ‘whiny brats.’).
There was no understanding
that criticism of Israel was motivated by opposition to Israeli racism. In
December 2018 the Knesset rejected
by 71-38 a Bill which affirmed
a citizens' right to equality and it refused
even to debate a bill ‘calling
for Israel to treat its Arab and Jewish citizens equally.’
Speaker Yuli Yoel
Edelstein denounced the bill saying that:
“This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately. A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset,”
John Mann was one of the main Labour witchunters. In April 2016 Mann staged
a confrontation with Ken
Livingstone for saying that Adolf Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad
and ended up killing six million Jews” calling him a ‘Nazi apologist’ for
saying that the Nazis had supported Zionism.
The only problem was that
the Nazis did support the Zionists, who were 2% of the German Jewish
community. In Zionism During the
Holocaust I quote Alfred Rosenberg, the
Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who wrote
in 1919 that
Zionism
must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of
German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.
Mann called for my expulsion, calling my
membership of the Labour Party ‘hugely inappropriate’.
Presumably only racists like himself were entitled to be members.
In January 2018
Mann wrote an article attacking Jackie
Walker, suggesting that her claim of a witch hunt was a conspiracy theory. He
accused Jackie, a Jewish woman, of promoting anti-Semitic tropes. Jackie
responded by saying that it was obvious that she was targeted for being a
Corbyn supporter and that she had been fighting fascists and anti-Semites on
the streets for years and was never accused of promoting anti-Semitic tropes
before Corbyn became leader.
Other
examples of Mann’s false and dishonest allegations of anti-Semitism were when,
in 2012, Mann’s wife was sent a dead bird by a disgruntled local (Roger
Dyas-Elliott). Mann later reported this as an incident of anti-Semitism
and attributed it to Momentum activists. But Momentum wasn’t set up until 2015
(3yrs after the incident) and was established by Jewish members of the Labour
Party!
In August 2018
Mann called for special privileges for Jewish
Labour MPs, calling for them to be “automatically
reselected at elections”.
In October 2018
the BBC reported that Mann had registered more
trips than any other MP, with eight overseas visits on the Register of
Interests. Mann claimed the trips were "part of the job". Most were related to his role as UK chair of
the Inter-Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism. Opposing ‘anti-Semitism’
has been very profitable for John Mann.
Tony
Greenstein
