News comes and goes. As it whizzes past, the odd fragment sticks, but most of it drains away. One begins to see news in terms of a perpetual spin-cycle; wheels on fire / rolling down the road. The antisemitism in the Labour Party keeps on rolling down the road. With each revolution of the wheel it disappears from view but it always resurfaces, a little flattened, further along.
When Jeremy Corbyn and his chums commissioned Shami Chakrabarti’s infamous report into antisemitism in the Labour party they made a canny choice. At one time Chakrabarti was vaguely admired by many, including gullible members of the beleaguered Jewish community. Everyone - ok, not everyone actually - regarded the former director of Liberty as stalwart campaigner against all evil and defender of the oppressed.
Of course back in the olden days (circa 2009 - 2012) she was regarded by ever-skeptical bloggers and Biased-BBC contributors - me too - as a virtue signalling self-promoting lightweight; the thinking person’s idea of a Stephen Fry, if you like.
That infamous JewishTV clip exposes something. No need to call in the body language experts! Everyone recognises squirming when they see it.
Chakrabarti’s report into antisemitism in Labour was going to bring about a fundamental spring clean. Zero tolerance of “all forms” of racism! Out with the old in with the new.
What we got was a hastily cobbled together, disappointing, sham investigation, which began with a predetermined agenda and ended with nothing but a whitewash. The biggest surprise of all was that hardly anybody saw it coming.
Shami, defender of human rights, spokesperson for the oppressed, high flying lawyer and independent investigator who only ‘joined the party in order to gain members' "trust and confidence” apparently ignored the submissions she’d initially invited, (requested, even) letting down and humiliating contributors who felt they had wasted time and energy compiling them. Instead, she presented an essay on the fascinating topic of her own feelings rather than the promised rigorous report. And for her trouble, a peerage and an official position of power and influence in the labour Party.
A bit of a fuss, a few uncomfortable moments in front of the media, and Baroness Chakrabarti in her ermine cloak melted into the background, and despite those mysterious ‘recommendations’ the antisemitism in the Labour Party smoulders away, embers glowing ever brighter as the Momentum builds.
Now, let’s peek at the BBC and beat our heads against a brick wall.
Laid low for the last week or so by a virus initially picked up by a family member at the health centre - not there for a flu jab exactly, which would have been hilarious (if you find that sort of thing as hilarious as I did before I caught it.)
The spy v spy incident. At first the news showed us a blurry video of a couple walking along the street. A man, Sergei Skripal, accompanied by a blonde-haired woman; also a still shot of a smiling brunette, his daughter Yulia. Oddly, no-one queried the discrepancy for days. News is often like that. Questions that seem obvious are mysteriously ignored.
The poison is now (I think) known to be a nerve agent, a material so difficult to procure that only a government agency could be responsible for deploying it.
The BBC brought in defender of Putin and arch weirdo Annie Machon to opine on the matter.
If you’re not familiar with Annie you haven’t been paying attention. You remember David Shayler? Well, Annie’s his ex. That is, before he became a transvestite. Annie, bless her, thinks the Duke of Edinburgh orchestrated Princess Diana’s assassination to dodge the embarrassment of a Royal Muslim baby. (Jo Marney flashes up in one's head) Also, Mossad. Imagine Prince Phillip in cahoots with Mossad. Mohamad al-Fayed believes it; there must be something in it. Don’t forget, Prince William is off to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, according to the BBC. And he might throw in a courtesy call to the Zionist entity, by the way.
If it’s not Putin’s nerve agent, it’s must be that of the Russian Mafia. Real life McMafia.
The adaptation of (the BBC’s) Misha Glenny’s book (adapted for TV by screenwriters *Hoss Amini and James Watkins) couldn’t have been more apposite, could it? Well, some people are saying that the actual book didn’t have such a negative - or hardly any at all - focus on those racketeering Israelis. There’s a petition that we should all sign, pleading with the BBC to be a bit less biased against Israel. It makes you weary just thinking about it.
Stop the BBC's anti Israel bias, their Royal Charter mandates impartiality not bias Dear BBC, please stop it this minute! There. That should do it.
Here’s an excerpt from a comment about McMafia by one critic of the BBC:
I read the book too - which unlike the BBC series does NOT place Jews and Israel at the center of all pan-national organized crime. Really, the BBC should have checked stats published by the CIA and FBI for accuracy.
Here’s another:
“….there’s film and drama...as long as it's anti-Israel, and depicts Jews as the 'other' or inherently violent and evil - BBC2 broadcast *Hossein Amini's anti-Semitic film 'Drive' on Erev Yom HaShoah 2018. Heaven help us. Which brings us to the BBC's glossy, glamorous £30m, anti-Semitism 101 in eight hour-long parts, otherwise known as 'McMafia'. 'McMafia''s lead protagonists are an immoral, neurotic, alcoholic, greedy, flashy, violent Jewish criminal family called….Godman?
……..with the BBC's blessing and £30m of our money McMafia the tv series allowed Glenny to publicly vent his anti-Semitic, anti-Israel spleen (read it for yourself via his Twitter feed). […]
Glenny, together with Iranian-born scriptwriter/creator/Exec Producer *Hossein Amini (of 'Drive' fame) were allowed to concoct a storyline that puts Israel, Israelis and Jews at the snakehead of ALL global criminal activity....good grief, the BBC even signed off on an advertising/social media campaign that uses blood libel images straight out of Der Sturmer - Alex Godman's hands dripping with blood (aka the Jew has the blood of Jesus on his hands), the Jew controls the money at your local ATM, the Jew comprises 90% of the piechart of all pan-national criminal activity. These campaigns are also being used by the BBC's distribution partner Amazon Prime which last September signed a $multi-million deal with the Corporation and with the show's production company Cuba Pictures (part-owned by BBC Worldwide) to broadcast Glenny & Amini's McAnti-Semitism to every country around the world, except the US and Canada (all BBC/AMC territory so no need) and China, where Amazon is banned. Strangely, Jews in the UK are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh, it's such a terrible drama no-one will watch it."
Whether or not these comments are accurate, they are worth considering. Even if the series’s many critics found the drama unconvincing and badly acted, it did a jolly good job of reinforcing the Beeb’s general message, which is that Israelis are corrupt and inherently evil.
Nothing about antisemitism seems to shock anyone out of their collective stupor these days. No matter how extreme, explicit and stark raving bonkers, the BBC, the Labour Party or the press barely acknowledge the problem. It kind of washes over their heads, flows straight towards the plug-hole and goes down with but a faint gurgle.
Back to the perplexing matter of Alexa’s sinister cackle, not to mention footage of those amusing, nerve-agent detectorists grappling with the tricky problem of tying ends of string together to secure the scene-of-the-crime tent, a task made nigh impossible by those luminous green protective space-suits, backs bulked out by breathing apparatus like lumpy poisonous frogs. Did you see the one nearest the camera doing a little boogie? What? It amused me, anyway.
David Collier’s detailed and deeply worrying investigation into left-wing antisemitism and of course in the Labour Party, made a slight ripple. It's in two parts: one here and two here.
If you haven’t heard of this study, you might at least have heard something about the closed Facebook group called Palestine Live, which brims with the kind of antisemitic hate-speech that ought to send shivers down the spine of anyone who still wonders how Hitler managed to get away with what he eventually got away with. (Which group members believe to be not very much, or nothing at all - but nevertheless cynically exploited by the Zionists)
The kind of language you can see here could only be unleashed in a protected group, where antisemites can let it all hang out. “Is this group safe?” asked Jackie Walker suspiciously. As hindsight shows, obviously not safe enough.
The group comprises many unsurprising members, including Jenny Tonge, David Ward and - you know - Ken O’Keefe (remember him? ) Even O’Keefe, the unhinged 9/11 'trufer' and arch antisemite has been brought in by the BBC, and implicitly lauded as a hero by Sarah Montague in not one but two episodes of HARDTalk, following the BBC’s dreadfully poor reporting of the Mavi Marmara affair.
O’Keefe is plainly so rabid, so extreme, so hate-filled that he has even antagonised other members of Palestine Live. As with Annie Machon, I’m not advocating out-and-out ‘no-platforming’, only that undue credibility must never be given to unhinged individuals, whether knowingly, for the ratings, or through ignorance and shoddy research.
Now we learn that Jeremy Corbyn was a one-time member. Not “was” a member, he claims. He merely “found himself” a member. He found himself a member through no fault of his own, as you do.
Of course Jeremy did step away from this group on being elected Leader of the Labour Party, which, as a defence, plainly works both ways. He must have realised membership of that group would prove unhelpful, so the “innocent face” ploy might not wash.
Oh, and guess who else was on the list? Well, you already know. The BBC”s very own ‘gone native’ impartial reporter, based in Ramul-lah, Yolande Knell. As Craig says, she was a passive member rather than an ‘active’ participant, but at least one of her FOOCs was very much to the group’s liking. And another beauty, Paul Mason.The mind boggles, bigly.
People are still wondering whether the BBC is ignorant or malevolent. Not mutually exclusive.
The media has, rather remarkably, picked up on David Collier’s study, by the way; even the BBC, but as the news rolls down the road and is subsumed by the ongoing antics of Trump v Kim Jong Un and Spy v Spy, one doughty Twitterer has taken the matter up and is still shaking it all about. Yes, ((Dan Hodges))), like a terrier, is tweeting away about it for all he’s worth. Good for him. He has influence, so let’s hope he can make something stick.
I was waiting to see something about it on one of Rob Burley’s new babies. The Daily Politics for example. Get Dan Hodges on, or even David Collier. Get one of the Labour Party’s non-Corbynista members on and make them squirm. Get Paul Mason. Let’s see what Elleanne Green has to say for herself. Get them on. Make a fuss. Let’s see Evan Davis or Emily Maitlis interrogate someone from Momentum about the matter. Ask them if they know much about the history of Nazi Germany. It might not seem all that important to inhabitants of the media/ London-centric bubble, but the atmosphere is becoming eerily Hitlerian.
