Will Corbyn Take a Leaf Out of Zarah Sultana’s Book & Stand Up to the
False Anti-Semitism Smears of the BBC & the Right-wing Media?
When the far-right Times journalist, Oliver Kamm, accused
Zarah Sultana of ‘anti-Semitism’, a term that has been drained of all meaning,
she stood up and declared that anti-Zionism was not
anti-Semitism.
Kamm’s splenetic response had been on
account of Zarah’s declaration the previous day that she was a proud anti-Zionist. It is to be welcomed
that the lesson Zarah has learnt over the past decade is that the way to
defeat the Right is to stand up to them and not back down. She is right to reject the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.
Delete and apologise, otherwise you better lawyer up.
Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand seems
to have learnt nothing. Throughout his leadership he declared that he supported the so-called Two
State Solution, which was never anything other than a cover for continued
colonisation and occupation.
Whilst such a mistake might have been
understandable in the past today it is not. The Israeli government and the Knesset
made it clear when they voted by 68-9 for a resolution rejecting a
two-state solution that Zionism is not interested in anything other than the
expulsion of the Palestinians. Not one Zionist party opposed the resolution.
The problem with Corbyn is that
although he has always supported the Palestinians against Israel’s occupation
and oppression he has never asked why
Israel behaves in the way it does. He has never called himself an anti-Zionist.
Zionism is a foreign land to him.
Instead he has accepted that a
seemingly rational and sensible solution like the two state solution could be
agreed. Except that we don’t live in a reasonable and sensible world.We live in a world dominated by Western
imperialism of which Israel is its attack dog.
Israel is a settler colonial state.
What that means quite simply is that the settlers seek to replace, not live
alongside, the indigenous population. I defy Corbyn or anyone else to point to
a single example of where settler-colonials have opted to live peacefully with
the native people.
It is true that in its early days some
Labour Zionists like Kalvarisky and Chaim Arlossoroff thought they could persuade the
Palestinians to peacefully accept colonisation but Vladimir Jabotinsky, the
founder of Revisionist Zionism, which Netanyahu adheres to, wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that:
My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in
other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which
they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any
colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There
is no such precedent.
The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always
stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised
or savage.
This is also the answer to those
dishonest Labour Zionists who pretend that Zionism is some form of Jewish
national liberation movement rather than a colonisatory enterprise.
The slogan which became identified with Zionist
colonisation was that Palestine was ‘a
land without a people for a people without a land’. Lord Shaftesbury is
said to have coined the slogan. It expressed perfectly the attitude of the
colonists to the native people. They simply did not exist. In Australia it was
termed terra nullis.
The Zionists were warned that
Palestine was not empty, most famously by Ahad Ha'am, a Cultural Zionist, who wrote:
We tend to
believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a
non-cultivated wilderness… But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult
to find anywhere in the country, Arab land, which lies fallow... [The Truth From the Land of Israel, 1891. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs]
Throughout the pre-state days the
Zionist movement was obsessed with the question of how they would turn the
minority Jewish population into a majority. The solution they agreed upon was
‘transfer’ or what we would now call ethnic cleansing.
David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime
Minister of Israel and Chairman of the
Jewish Agency (the pre-State government) wrote on 5 October 1937 to his 16 year
old son Amos:
We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to
use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to
guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our
disposal.
This is one of a host of similar quotations. Zionism always had to the fore of
its mind the ‘demographic problem’, the question of how to ensure that
there was a stable Jewish majority in the state it created.
In 1948 this was achieved in the areas
i by means of the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians to the neighbouring countries.
Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled. In 1967 Israel
conquered the West Bank and Gaza but much to their regret they did not succeed
in expelling more than 300,000 Palestinians.
Over two million Palestinians remained
which today has grown to 5 million. A temporary solution was to institute
military rule over the Palestinians, depriving them of all democratic rights
whilst according those same rights to the Jewish settlers. However this Apartheid
was always envisaged as a temporary solution.
The Israeli Labor Party and Meretz
envisaged a Palestinian Bantustan dressed up as the two state solution but Netanyahu
and the settlers refused to accept any kind of Palestinian state. To them there
was only one solution – either complete subjugation and no democratic rights or
transfer/expulsion. Oslo was about a Bantustan.
Today in Gaza we are seeing these
plans coming to fruition. Ethnic cleansing coupled with genocide. Just as in
Nazi Germany where Hitler first sought to expel the Jews before turning to
genocide.
Israel is a settler-colonial state. It
will never agree to a Palestinian state and those who foster such illusions are
helping to maintain Israel as a Jewish Supremacist state. Israel is an
expansionist state and that is why, alone in the world, it has never defined
its borders. Today it is in occupation of parts of Lebanon, Syria and well as
Palestine.
The original aim of the Zionists was
to achieve Eretz Yisrael, the Biblical
Land of Israel. The borders of the Land of Israel stretch from the River Litani
in Lebanon to the Euphrates in Iraq and the Nile in Egypt. In other words there
is plenty more room for expansion.
Of course Israel, the attack dog of
the West, can only conquer more territory with the permission of its
imperialist sponsors but as we know they are reluctant to hold their rottweiler
back.
There are some things that Corbyn
should understand. A Jewish state, like any ethno-religious state is a racist
state. This was true of the Christian ethnic states in Eastern Europe –
Romania, Slovakia, Croatia - which were the most enthusiastic partners of
Hitler in the Holocaust. It is also true of Israel. Israel cannot be reformed.
It must be replaced by a unitary democratic secular state.
That is what anti-Zionism means.
Anyone who supports a two state solution is not an anti-Zionist. Objectively
they are doing the work of the Zionists. Anyone who is sincere about putting an
end to ethnic cleansing and genocide must be clear. Israel is a failed state.
Israel has no more ‘right to exist’ than Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi
state.
Corbyn must abandon his support for
the two state solution . It is a neo-colonial solution. The reason that Labour
Friends of Israel pretends to support it is because they know it will never
happen. It is a slogan designed to confuse the Palestine solidarity movement. When
you are faced with a genocidal apartheid state, a Zionist state, then you cannot be neutral as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in
the face of injustice. That is to take the side of the oppressor. It is long
past time when Corbyn declared he was an an anti-Zionist.
Your Party will face many difficulties
in the years ahead. If it is to succeed it must have a united leadership agreed
upon common principles. One of those must be its attitude to Apartheid Israel.
It has to be an anti-Zionist party. Yes we will be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’
but it will be easier to rebut if we are clear about our principles.
If the McCarthyists and racists accuse
us of anti-Semitism let them. We can tell them that the original Zionists were
Christians not Jews. That Zionism is a Christian invention. That when Zionism
first came on the scene most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. It
was Hitler who did more than most to create the Israeli state. We are clear
when we say that it is not anti-Semitic to support equality between Jews and
Palestinians in Palestine just as we supported equality between Black and White
in South Africa.
If Jeremy Corbyn is not prepared to
abandon Zionism and the Israeli state then it is best that the leadership of
Your Party passes to the young and dynamic Zara Sultana.
Those of Corbyn’s advisors who failed
to stand up to the anti-Semitism smear merchants – Karie Murphy and James
Schneider in particular – should also not be in the leadership unless they are
prepared to come clean about their own past role.
Schneider is married to Sophie Nazemi, Starmer’s press secretary.
Are we seriously to believe that the married couple don’t discuss politics
together? Schneider should be kept as far away as possible from the leadership
team.
We need clear red water between the
future and the disastrous period 2015-19 when Corbyn supported Jon Lansman
turning Momentum from a campaigning organisation into a one-man dictatorship
that ended up echoing the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement’s ‘anti-Semitism’
smears. It was no surprise when Lansman joined them.
If we don’t get things right now then
the present honeymoon period will not last.
Rosen was Blamed for the
Death of his Defamer Just as I Was Blamed for the Death of Jason
Silver
Michael Rosen & Machievelli
Michael
Rosen is a much loved and much read children’s author and poet, the recipient
of numerous awards. He is also Professor of children's literature at
Goldsmith’s College, London University and has received a clutch of honorary
doctorates. Rosen is also a Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist. He was also a vociferous
supporter of Jeremy Corbyn when leader of the Labour Party.
It
is in this last capacity that he attracted the wrath of a variety of Zionists, fake anti-racists and bad faith actors like the far-right Zionist David Hirsh. He also came to the attention of the misfits and oddballs of the misnamed Labour Against Antisemitism
[LAAS].
Rosen is not unique. It is almost a rule of thumb that the most intelligent, talented and creative Jews reject Zionism as a right-wing, pro-imperialist, racist ideology
that appeals to common and garden bigots.
Naturally
it riles the Zionists that people like Miriam Margolyes, Harold Pinter,
Geoffrey Bindman, Stephen Sedley, Avi Shlaim, Stephen Rose, Jon Stewart and Alexei Sayle, as well as most
Jewish academics of note, see little attraction in Zionism, an ideology and movement
that is now openly genocidal, specialising in the slaughter of Palestinian
children.
In
a former generation some of the most prominent and famous Jews came to reject
the claims of Zionism to represent Jews. People such as Einstein, Trotsky, Marx, Hannah
Arendt, Freud, Kafka and Primo Levi. Zionism, a form of political messianism,
was seen by many Jews as both a reflection of anti-Semitism and its triumph. The
racial nationalism of Zionism has morphed into Nazism. It primarily appeals to petit-bourgeois and and lumpen Jews.
According to
the Yorkshire
Post Newbon left his home in the village of Norton on January 15
2022 after a disagreement with his wife.
The
story of how Michael Rosen was blamed for the death of Newbon, who had targeted
him for abuse, as if he should have ignored Newbon’s attacks, has a particular
resonance with me.
Eight
years ago I had a similar experience. A group of fascist Zionists including a
member of the neo-Nazi Britain First (Paul Besser) were attacking Palestinian
and anti-Zionist meetings. I therefore published a blog
naming them. A number of them squealed about being named and identified. Amongst
these people was Jason Silver, who was being used and manipulated by Jonathan
Hoffman.
This is an example of how Zionists, having used and manipulated their more psychologically damaged followers then blame any tragedy on others
Silver
took his own life and I was accused of having murdered him! As the report of the inquest
into his death in the Jewish Chronicle
found, he had become ‘increasingly
“obsessed” with pro-Israel activism’. Silver was diagnosedwith
depression in 2013 and was suspected of being bi-polar. He was clearly
susceptible but when have facts ever got in the way of Hoffman, the link person
between Britain’s neo-Nazi groups and far-right Zionists?
Sharon
Klaff, a supporter of Tommy Robinson and from South Africa even had a blog
article published in the Times of Israel‘First BDS Victim in the UK’accusing
me of responsibility for Silver’s death before I had it taken down.
Michael
Rosen faced similar accusations for having stood up to Newbon, a bullying troll.
In May 2021 Newbon posted a photoshopped image
on Twitter of Corbyn reading Rosen's book We're Going on a Bear Hunt to a
group of children.
The book being held in Corbyn's hands was open at the page where
the dog sees the bear. Over that page was photoshopped the anti-Semitic
forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. and accompanying it was a parody of
some words from the book.
The Protocols, were
a seminal anti-Semitic tract. They were a forgery cobbled together from several
earlier sources by the Czarist secret police. They described a Jewish
conspiracy to take over the world. They were integral to Nazi ideology and
became, in the words of Norman Cohn, a warrant
for genocide.
Instead
of, "We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go
through it!", Newbon wrote, "A nasty, horrible Zionist! We
can't go over him, we can't go under him, we'll have to make an effigy..."
Rosen called
the tweet "loathsome and
anti-Semitic."
We're Going on a Bear Hunt has
won many awards and was mentioned
by Guinness World Record for the Largest
Reading Record for a children’s book with 1,500 children attending and 30,000
listening online. Naturally this attracted the attention of those who defend Israel’s
slaughter of children in Gaza.
Rosen’s first reaction was horror, that someone would try to get
at him by posting the Protocols on a
book he had co-created (the illustrator was Helen Oxenbury).
Rosen
described
Newbon’s desecration of his much-loved The
Bear Hunt as a ‘loathsome and anti-semitic thing to do’ and copied
his tweet to Newbon’s employer Northumbria University. Newbon’s profile had listed his university. In total some
4,000 people made a complaint about Newbon to Northumbria University.
Given that Zionists regularly target the employers of anti-Zionists
with their lies, their complaint that his employer had been contacted is
typical Zionist hypocrisy. Especially since the decidedly non-Jewish Euan
Phillips had tried to get Rosen dismissed by BBC Radio, on account of being an
'anti-Semitism denier' and a 'racist'.
The
Labour Files – Episode 2 – The Crisis I Al Jazeera Investigations
Philips
is best known for the revelation in Al Jazeera’s Labour Files that he had adopted the pseudonym ‘David Gordstein’, (Goldstein
is a very common Jewish name so he changed one letter to give himself plausible
deniability!).
These
right-wing non-Jewish trolls must have wished that they could be Jewish just in
order that their false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ could have some
credibility. They don’t understand that for many people being Jewish and on the
left go together.
There was a twitter storm against both Newbon and Rosen. The stuff
said against Rosen argued that the tweet wasn't about him but about Corbyn. The
trolls complained that he’d tried to get Newbon sacked. Rosen said repeatedly that
he didn't want Newbon to be sacked but it was obvious that the tweet was about
both him and Corbyn.
The university arranged for mediation between Rosen and Newbon.
This progressed well. Newbon was preparing an apology which Rosen told the university
he would accept and that would be the end of the matter. Then Rosen heard that Newbon
was withdrawing the apology on legal advice. Rosen said that as far as he was
concerned that was the end of the matter.
Then Rosen heard that Newbon was suing him. Mark Lewis was representing
Newbon. Rosen was accused of libelling Newbon. After nearly a year they received
the Particulars of Claim which meant that the Claimants were preparing to go to
trial. Rosen and his lawyer responded.
The libel
claim against Rosen alleged that the reason for calling his defacing of the
image of Corbyn reading Rosen’s ‘Bear’ anti-Semitic
“was to cancel the claimant, that is to
cause him to be ostracised by telling people that he was a racist and/or had
committed a racist act.” It’s strange how those who accuse others of
anti-Semitism at the drop of a hat suddenly become fragile when they are accused
of anti-Semitism.
This is extraordinary. Pete Newbon agreed to apologise to Michael Rosen over Newbon’s ‘Bear Hunt’ tweet.
A prof at Northumbria Uni was mediating. Rosen was happy to accept an apology and that would be the end of it.
At the same time it became known that Newbon was involved in
another case, brought by a James Wilson, as well as facing a disciplinary hearing
over his social media behaviour. Simon Myerson, a Zionist lawyer who was forced
to resign as a judge, was quoted in the
Telegraph as saying that this second case was causing him 'upset'.
Simon Myerson claims it is defamatory to say he resigned as a judge because of disciplinary matters.
Piecing together the info: it seems a judicial complaint was made on 21 June 2024; the complaint was accepted and Myerson was notified of it on or immediately before 11 July; his…
Myerson had already been found
guilty of judicial misconduct for his abusive behaviour on Twitter in March
2024 and been offered ‘formal advice’ as to his conduct. However in June 2024
no less than three complaints were made about his behaviour and it is clear
that he was told either to resign or be dismissed. On 12th July he jumped.
Paul Besser with the Fuhrer of Britain First Paul Golding - an out and out neo-Nazi
Jonathan Hoffman (right) with Paul Besser (left) on the picket of Palestine Expo in 2018 - Hoffie will work with any fascist or neo-Nazi as long as they are pro-Zionist. Sharon Klaff, a Tommy Robinson supporter makes up the trio
Wilson brought a libel action against Newbon and two others.
Newbon had posted a tweet accusing Wilson of being a 'freak who takes photos of kids'. The full story is on Wilson's
substack site. He tweets under the name of @per_incuriam2 with links to his blog.
Simon
Myerson, who was acting for Newbon in the Wilson case, which was reportedly
causing him deep upset, posted on Twitter:
“Pete Newbon
is dead. It’s devastating. Those who remorselessly bullied him on here neither
represent, nor I suspect understand, the love and friendship he inspired.”
The
judge dismissed
an attempt to quash Wilson’s case stating
that:
It is not very attractive for the defendants, who put
the claimant in this position, to say that he should have exercised their
suggested form of self-help or that he has been insufficiently robust and
resilient. The first defendant and Dr Newbon themselves acknowledged in private
conversation on Twitter that to allege publicly that the claimant “took photos
of other people’s children” was not something they would wish on themselves:
(“Tbf to him, I wouldn’t love it”). For these reasons I consider that the
claimant has a harassment claim against the first defendant which has a real
prospect of success.
So at the time of his death, Newbon was
running two cases, neither of which stood much chance of success. He also kept
news of both cases from his wife, who only found out about them, after he died.
The lawyer in both cases (Wilson's and
Rosen’s) was Mark Lewis, an arch-Zionist and founder of Likud-Herut in Britain.
It was Lewis who persuaded Newbon to embark on his legal adventures knowing
full well that if they failed it was Newbon, not him, who would bear the cost.
Newbon's widow settled the claim of Wilson. Wilson won his case against the two
surviving people involved, James Mendelsohn and Eddie Cantor. Wilson won damages and costs. Expert witnesses called by the
defence were dismissed by the judge, including Myerson who was told that he had
used dehumanising language reminiscent of the Nazis. Newbon was described as
abusive and bullying.
On 15 January 2022, Newbon committed suicide falling from a road bridge and being
struck by four cars on the road below. His inquest was conducted by the Assistant
Coroner for North Yorkshire and York, Jonathan Leach on 4 April 2023.
Rosen’s
interaction with Newbon took place eight months before his death but
this has not stopped right-wing media levering a mention of Rosen’s complaint
into articles covering the coroner’s verdict.
Rosen
was not even mentioned during the inquest let alone listed as a factor in his
suicide. The Coroner made no mention of the two legal
cases. All that was mentioned was that Newbon had had a 'disagreement' with
his wife and was described by the coroner as being in a ‘fragile state’.
This made no difference to those around LAAS who accused Rosen of having killed Newbon. David Hirsh, a far-right
Zionist lecturer at Goldsmiths University set up the Pete Newbon Award in order
to honour people who fight ‘antisemitism’. The launch document of Hirsh's
London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism wrote at great length
about Rosen, while writing disclaimers that he wasn't seeking the cause of
suicide and anyway, the causes of suicide are 'multiple, complex and unknowable'.
Some idea of the nature of the Pete Newbon Award can be gauged by
the calibre of those nominated for the award and those who have won it. The
winner of the 2023 award was Tracy-Ann Oberman, best known for
making false
allegations of anti-Semitism against Philip Proudfoot, a Sussex University
academic. The 2024 award was to Heidi Bachram who is also an expert when it
comes to anti-Semitism smears as well as a police informer. Both of them are
Zionists, i.e. racists who specialise in accusing anti-racists of anti-Semitism.
Shortlisted
candidates were Alex
Hearn, Elica
Le Bon and Jewish News
‘journalist’ Nicola
Lampert, Other nominees
included David Collier, Alan Johnson, Richard Kemp, Lesley Klaff, Douglas
Murray, Melanie Philips and Jonathan Turner of the McCarthist UK Lawyers for Israel.
Collier is a Jewish Nazi who justified starving
Palestinian children because they had underlying health issues. Kemp is a
fanatical Christian Zionist, war monger and anti-Palestinian racist. Douglas
Murray is an Islamaphobe and advocate of the White Replacement Theory. Any
award that has Melanie Philips near it, she denies the existence of Islamaphobia,
is an award for racism not anti-racism. It is noticeable that Newbon’s widow, Rachel Hewitt, has nothing to do with Hirsh's Newbon Award.
It also emerged that at Newbon's hearing at Northumbria he was
given a Final Warning for being in breach of the university's social media
policy and given a one year caution not to post anything defamatory on Twitter.
It also emerged that this was his third offence. It's not clear what the other
two offences were.
From the Particulars of Claim and an SAR, Rosen learnt that Newbon
thought that his tweet was a 'parody'
and a 'corruption' of what Rosen had
written in his book. So, despite claims to the contrary, it was admitted that The
'Bear Hunt' tweet was an attack on Rosen.
It is highly unlikely that Newbon would have won at trial given
that he had already written an apology and had accepted that he had indeed
parodied Rosen in the tweet. Rosen’s defence would probably have been honest
opinion. It would have been difficult for Newbon to prove 'serious harm' given that
he had a problem over whether he was even Jewish, as was claimed in the
Particulars. Even by the lax standards of Reform Judaism, it is clear that he
wasn’t Jewish. There's no evidence for example that he had had a brit milah (circumcision
ceremony) or a bar mitzvah.
At first his wife Rachel Hewitt tweeted:
Pete Newbon
was my best friend, my partner-in-crime, my beautiful kind husband, a brilliant
reader & scholar, the best daddy in the world to our three beautiful
daughters, and I just don’t know how we’re going to bear his loss. I’m broken
into a million unbearably painful pieces.
When the dust had settled however Rachel was to tell a very different story about the abuse she had suffered at Newbon’s hands, writing in September 2024 that
It’s common
knowledge that my late husband was secretly pursuing multiple court cases
entirely unbeknownst to me, risking me and my children’s financial security and
home.
The attacks on Michael Rosen have a strong whiff of "methinks they do protest too much". There are some seriously guilty consciences lashing out, trying to lay the blame of a man having the worst kind of breakdown imaginable at the door of one of their defined enemies 1/
On May 19, 2025 she explained that after Newbon’s death
I discovered he had been keeping secrets and living a double life,
which demolished my perception of our relationship and made me realise how it
had been, in many ways, abusive. This made the grieving process extremely
complicated and I had to deal with the shocking loss, not just of him and of my
day-to-day life as I knew it, but of the version of our fourteen years together
that I had believed to be true. I also had to unpick the ways in which I had
lost myself during our marriage, and how a difficult childhood had made me
vulnerable to abuse later in life.
It comes as no surprise that David Hirsh and his fellow racists
should create an award in honour of a serial abuser. That is Zionism.
In a further post on May 23,
Hewitt wrote about Newbon’s obsessive behaviour. Far from being a fighter
against anti-Semitism he was developing an obsession fed by the false
allegations he was making against anti-racists. His fixation with Rosen was
itself anti-Semitic. Hewitt wrote that even before he committed suicide she had
‘grown increasingly worried about his social media use’
and
he
‘became involved in campaign groups
seeking to identify, expose and oppose examples of anti-Semitism on the left in
Britain... this led to him spending escalating hours alone on his laptop, or on
his phone, zoned out of family life. He developed an aggressive, angry,
sarcastic tone of voice online; ... I worried about how he was reorienting
almost every discussion at home around anti-Semitism. I worried about how he
was spending the nights drafting long, repetitive monologues to post on
Facebook, each one extending over five pages or more on Word. I worried about
an increasing distraction, recklessness and lack of care in his behaviour both
on- and offline, such as forgetting to turn the gas off on the oven, or to
strap the children into their car seats. I worried about his need to be right
in every discussion or argument, and about his explosions of anger, around
which I and my daughters tiptoed, so as not to ignite another one.
Then came the tweet
involving Rosen and Corbyn which
‘had a disastrous
fallout... , in the sheer quantity and nature of the public attention it
attracted. Actions he took and events that occurred in the aftermath, along
with other things that were going on in his life, combined to make him decide,
in January 2022, to take his own life: a violent, traumatic act that decimated
the lives of myself, my children, and his family and friends....
What is
interesting about Newbon’s fateful tweet was that he had to manufacture the
evidence in order to portray Corbyn as an anti-Semite. It must have been
frustrating when trying to prove ‘anti-Semitism’ against your political enemies
that you have no actual evidence that they are anti-Semitic. This is why in
cases like Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker or myself, words had to be taken out
of context, twisted and distorted. This is what the fake anti-Semitism campaign
was really about.
Newbon
pressurised his wife to move north in order that he no longer had to commute,
but that led to her becoming isolated from her own friends and community. She concluded that
Isolating
women is a well-known tactic of abusers... Every time I raised my
worries about my husband’s compulsive behaviour and patent unhappiness with
him, he batted me away: ‘there’s nothing wrong with me’, ‘don’t be ridiculous’,
‘you don’t understand because you’re not Jewish’ and of course ‘you don’t love
me: if you loved me, you’d support me.
The irony
is that someone who wasn’t Jewish was now playing the Jewish card against his
own wife. Newbon had never told Hewitt about the two
legal cases that were risking their home.
Behind all this is the very serious matter of how Mark Lewis treated
his clients. James Wilson has analysed Lewis behaviour towards vulnerable
people facing being sued and how he encouraged them to sue assuring them that
they’d win. Lewis, instead of warning against the perils of an action for libel
and questioning whether it was appropriate to sue, seems to have done the
opposite. He encouraged risky litigation. Hewitt thinks that Lewis’s advice was
disastrous, given that they didn't have the resources to fight these cases.
Both cases could have been settled at virtually no cost. Rosen would
have accepted an apology and when he didn't get one he simply walked away. In
Wilson's case, there were proposals on the table to resolve the matter at
virtually no costs. Wilson has suggested that Lewis was driving these cases for
the benefit of him and his law firm.
Some of the LAAS trolls have fastened on to the fact that 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' is an
adaptation by Rosen and not a straightforward piece of writing by him. Because Rosen
has been harassed about this he has written a blog about it.
Rosen has been targeted by at least two other
directors of LAAS. One was Jonathan
Glass who suggested that he might have attacked Rosen when he saw him in the
street ‘If my wife hadn’t been with me’:
The sick, sad Emma Picken has nothing to say about actual racism
LAAS director Emma Feltham (Picken) repeatedly
attacked Rosen from well before Newbon’s death, especially for his support for
Jeremy Corbyn:
Newbon’s
decision to target Rosen was no ‘joke’ and cannot be properly understood in
isolation. Instead, it forms part of a pattern associated with a particular
anti-Corbyn group to whom Rosen was a considerable inconvenience because –
though not a Labour member – he was not only a Jew who spoke out for Corbyn
against the antisemitism smears, but a popular and highly-regarded public
figure.
Newbon
was a director of LAAS, a group of
mainly non-Jewish trolls whose main purpose was making false accusations of
anti-Semitism against Jewish members of the Labour Party. Newbon made it clear in his Particulars of Claim that he objected
to Rosen’s support for Corbyn and that was why he had ‘echoed’ Rosen’s remarks
in support of Corbyn.
The
political nature of the libel claim against Rosen was made crystal clear both
in the Letter Before Action and then the Particulars when he was accused
of being a Corbyn supporter (horror of horrors!).
The Board of Deputies of British Jews opened a condolence
book in his honour. Fiona Sharpe of LAAS,
who perjured
herself in Brighton magistrates court when giving false evidence against a
Palestinian, described
him in The Jewish Chronicle as “the
anti-racism warrior with a radiant soul”. She also described him as a ‘Jewish academic’.
Zionists have a habit of making racist non-Jews into Jews and
conversely denying that anti-racist Jews are Jewish. It is as if being a racist
has now become a qualification for being a Jew!
Newbon’s sole claim to being Jewish was that his father's mother
was born Jewish. However, according to the Jewish
Chronicle she left the community when she 'married out'. She knew her traditional family
wouldn’t approve of her marrying someone outside the faith. She didn't bring up her son (Newbon's father) as a Jew. Newbon
himself admitted that his father ‘didn’t
really see himself as properly Jewish’.
Newbon declared that he was an atheist, and admitted that he grew
up with ‘next to no Yiddishkeit'. The
only bit of Jewishness that he'd done was read his daughters Genesis and Exodus
and tell them that there's a lovely hot country where he hopes they'll go one
day. Nor was his wife Jewish.
For further reading about the affair of the fake anti-racist, Skwawkbox
in particular has covered it in depth. See below.
