The soft bigotry of low expectations

A joint @AJEnglish @guardian #SpyCables team meet w @ewenmacaskill @SeumasMilne @willjordan @JPGREES #coffee #laptop pic.twitter.com/dqaaToBt2S

— Clayton Swisher (@claytonswisher) February 25, 2015

As if it wasn’t dispiriting enough to witness the ease with which Al Jazeera persuaded the British media that there was a dreadful Israeli plot to bring down the UK government, we now learn that it wasn’t just the Qatari channel that orchestrated the whole thing.

 H/T to ‘Lucy Lips’ on Harry’s Place for spotting this group photo on Clayton Swisher’s Twitter feed. (Clayton Swisher was the presenter of Al Jazeera’s much hyped series  “The Lobby”.) 

It would be no understatement to say that Swisher’s Twitter feed, or timeline or whatever it’s called, is a lobby all by itself. The whole thing practically consists of anti-Zionist tittle-tattle. All the usual characters are in there. Jeremy Corbyn features prominently. 

Corbyn is either being pressured by Seumas, (or perhaps he doesn’t need much persuasion) to get an inquiry going. An inquiry into the Israeli plot to undermine our parliament, no less.  Bit ironic that poor Jeremy has to fend off accusations of antisemitism in his party by instigating a sham inquiry at almost the same time as attempting to initiate another inquiry in the opposite direction. Hopefully it will fizzle out, or perhaps Shami will see to it.

What’s surprising really is the gullibility of the entire British media. How could they not tell that the revelations in the documentary were nothing more than a damp squib? All it amounted to was - wait for it -  ‘the existence of a pro-Israel lobby’ . 

Much worse, apart from missing the fact  that this hyped-up firestorm was nothing but a spark, they failed to grasp that the whole thing was orchestrated by a much more sinister and pernicious lobby, the anti-Zionist lobby if you like.  This is the lobby we should be far more concerned about because it  has direct connections to the UK parliament through the Labour Party, and in particular its director of strategy and communications and as you'll see, Jeremy Corbyn features in Swisher’s tweets and reTweets. Bigly.

The Guardian’s Ewan MacAskill, that’s another beauty. See him on YouTube with The Donald, who realised at once that he is “A very nasty man.”  

So, when we assumed “The Lobby” was just another example of the same old same old tiresome propaganda from the usual Islamists and Jew-bashers, we were expressing  ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ 

Yep. We take it as a given that they will lie, invent and manipulate. A bit racist, maybe, but there you are. Now, we must sit up and take notice. It’s in the Labour Party, it’s in our education system, it’s in the media. Watch out.