Early Monday morning thoughts

This is odd. Overnight both the Sky News and ITV News websites have Keith Vaz stepping down as an MP as their second stories. In contrast, the BBC News website doesn't have the story among their headlines at all. Wonder what the thinking is there?

This isn't odd. The rise of national conservative VOX in Spain sees the BBC going into overdrive with the term "far-right" to describe them, whereas the fall of leftist Bolivian president Evo Morales over electoral fraud allegations sees the BBC curiously avoiding terms like 'socialist', 'left-wing' or 'far-left' to describe him. 

Ah, what's in The Times this morning? Ah, here's Matt Chorley. (I do like Chorley cakes. Are they only a Northern thing?)

In addition to holding debates almost every Friday night, the BBC has gone full W1A (the sitcom that tries to spoof the unspoofable corporation). A press release announcing election plans confirms that Huw Edwards will take over from David Dimbleby, but also promises a podcast called Election and Chill, Radio 1 touring the country in the BBC’s “Travelling Living Room” (a campervan) and BBC Breakfast asking normal people what normal people think “over a morning cup of coffee from a specially converted BBC Breakfast Coffee Cart”. I think someone’s had enough coffee already.

I should probably have less coffee. I might have been asleep now.

Suspended again!

Iain Watson:

“It was Keith Vaz - a former minister who is not seen as politically close to Chris Williamson - who had the pivotal vote over whether to readmit the Derby North MP.
He is now calling the process into question and suggesting the whole thing could be re-run - an action replay that could give a different result and defuse a potentially explosive internal row.
Mr Vaz was brought into the process at the last minute and the theory being advanced by some in leadership circles is that he initially and mistakenly did what he thought Mr Corbyn wanted, the better to avoid a deselection threat.
When he saw the strength of the backlash, he suggested effectively re-running the process.
But Mr Corbyn is in a difficult position - one his internal opponents relish.”

(Was this written before the decision to re-suspend Chris Williamson?)

Vim Jaz

“There was a large backlash from Labour peers and MPs after Mr Williamson was allowed back into the party on Wednesday.
Deputy leader Tom Watson was among more than 100 of them to sign a letter calling for Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to act and remove the whip from the Derby North MP.
Seventy-one Labour politicians also wrote to the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), John Cryer, earlier, asking him to begin a process that could have lead (sic) to the whip being withdrawn from Mr Williamson if Mr Corbyn didn't act.
BBC political correspondent Iain Watson said the whip being removed again was "an attempt to defuse" the situation.
Mr Williamson said he "deeply" regretted the remarks and did not want anyone to think he was "minimising the cancer of anti-Semitism".
After his readmission, he told BBC Radio Derby: "Anybody who knows me, who knows my record, knows I'm someone who has stood up against bigotry throughout my political life and indeed beforehand.”

Does not having a single racist bone in your body include the backbone?

This earlier web post is roughly a written version of the broadcast I transcribed earlier. Maybe I needn't have bothered.

It still irks me to read that Mr Vaz's vote was the 'pivotal' one. In the broadcast, Watson explained why the Blairite member of the trio would have voted not to reinstate Williamson, but not a squeak about why the third member would have voted to reinstate him. If Williamson's suspension is for antisemitism, why isn't this lady's rather obvious antisemitism a matter of interest to the public? 

Update:

Stephen Daisley on top form.

Sticky Mess

I suspect you’ve had enough of this business, but I’m not quite done yet. I listened with interest to Iain Watson’s ‘romp’ through the Labour Party’s current turmoil on the Today Programme at about 6:32, this am, and I thought I’d share it with you. Of course, you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. It’s free. Free at the point of delivery.

The biggest obstacle I face as an unskilled manual transcriber is the breakneck speed at which Iain Watson delivered his "romp" through the goings-on "beneath the surface" of the Labour Party’s latest shenanigans as well as not necessarily the greatest vocal clarity. 

The next worry is that there was a bit of skirting around the matter of Keith Vaz (or, as he’s also known, ‘Jim”) Or if you like, Jim Vaz., which some absurdist commenters on Guido’s site have Spoonerized into ‘Vim Jazz'.

So according to Iain Watson, Jim (or Vim) - and let’s face it, no-one wants to impugn anyone’s character - was trying to ‘do what he thought was the right thing’ - i.e., not lose another Labour seat. 

One wonders if the general objective is to bring about a Labour government ‘at all costs’? (One of the costs being that people like Huda Elmi determine the direction of travel)

Iain Watson gave us a deep analysis of what’s just happened without even mentioning Ms Elmi by name. He didn’t elaborate on her role in this particular process, nor did he seem interested in seeking out any justification of her position on the NEC. To me, that speaks volumes about the Labour party and the BBC.  

P.S. I can see that people like Watson must feel a little 'between a rock and a hard place'. One of the Tweets that popped up prominently in a Google search for ‘Iain Watson Twitter’ was this. Vile remarks by deeply antisemitic hard-left  Corbynites point us in the direction we’re heading.  FFS.

Nick R
Jeremy Corbyn is in trouble, deep trouble. Labour’s deputy leader and more than 100 MPs and peers are demanding that he overturns the decision to readmit an MP to the party who was suspended for saying that Labour had been too apologetic about antisemitism. Our political correspondent is Ian Watson. Any sense of what the Labour leader will now do, Ian?

Iain W
I think he’ll stick to his line that these processes need to be followed, Nick, and that he has got no part in it because, what he and his supporters would say, is quite simply this, that when there’s an outrage about when emails were leaked to the Sunday Times and other publications earlier this year suggesting that the leader’s office had been involved in disciplinary cases and many people who are criticising him now said at the time that he shouldn’t be involved, and his staff shouldn’t be involved, so he’s saying actually the independence of this process is quite important, but as you point out he’s coming under pressure.
Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum saying that Chris Williamson has to go, Labour councillors now signing a statement criticising the decision to reinstate him, you mentioned the Labour Peers and MPs of course there’s also Labour Party staff speaking out as well, so the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn is growing, but I should say there’s an awful lot going on beneath the surface as well here,  time’s limited but I’m gonna romp through it.
Firstly there is genuine outrage in the parliamentary party about the Chris Williamson decision but we should also be aware of the timing, The timing is particularly toxic because the general secretary of the party just really basically had the starting gun on parliamentary selections - only last week she fired that gun, lots of people feel they could be potentially wounded, so they are saying - as one labour MP said to me privately, if they think that the threat of deselections for people who are being disloyal is going to shut us up, in fact it’s going to do the opposite, so maybe the people that signed that Tom Watson statement are also very happy to have a go at Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour leadership at this particular time.

NR
And there’s a puzzle here, isn’t there, in one of the people actually involved in doing the..in reversing the suspension and bringing Mr Williamson back into the party actually now said he wants it rethought again. 

IW
Ah yes, this is Keith Vaz, I don’t want to impugn his character in any way but this brings us back a little bit to this question of parliamentary selection actually Nick, because interestingly enough and certainly close to what sources close to the leadership think, is that in this panel of three, there’s one person who’s never going to bring Chris Williamson back, George Howarth, a big supporter of Tony Blair in the past as a constituency representative, but Keith Vaz who was fairly pivotal; he was brought into this process at the last minute and some people believed that what he was doing was trying to avoid being deselected by the left in his constituency so he did what he thought the Labour leader’s office would have wanted.
The irony is that partly they didn’t want this at all, that privately their relations with Chris Williamson have completely broken down and they thought the NEC, the National Executive Committee, the officers, would take a tougher line on Chris Williamson than they did.
But they’re now in this difficult situation where they’ve given the deputy leader Tom Watson a stick with which to beat them and they have to hide behind also the defence of these existing processes and therefore Jeremy Corbyn is not coming in and, as his critics would say, leading from the front, and himself taking the whip away from Chris Williamson, so a bit of a sticky mess.

Let he who is without sin...

It might confound the expectations of a few old hand at blogs hereabouts that Newsnight's Chris Cook is still going after John Bercow and Keith Vaz: 

But I think BBC Waste has a point here:

Peerage for whitewash fiasco

I don’t know if the Chakrabarti peerage debacle has dropped off the front pages for good, but the odour lingers on. 

Being offered a peerage just after concluding that there is no institutional antisemitism in the Labour Party doesn’t look good, whichever way you look at it. 

The BBC has been reporting that ‘Jewish leaders” or “the Jewish community” have been making a fuss about Shami Chakrabarti’s peerage, as though Jews are the only ones troubled by this ‘cash-for-questions’ type scandal.  Continually quoting Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, who said that the “credibility of her report lies in tatters” has a Mandy Rice Davies ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’ ring to it. 

However, others are criticising Corbyn for slightly different reasons. They point only to the clumsy and untimely nature of his nomination. They feel it’s hypocritical to participate in a system he abhors. Claiming that Ms. Chakrabarti will work tirelessly against that abhorrent institution from within is a weak as Corbyn’s explanation for befriending Hamas and Hezbollah. 

The BBC published an article yesterday about Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson declaring it a “mistake”, and saying “The timing is not great for the Labour Party”.

This piece in the Telegraph says that Keith Vaz has written to Ms Chakrabarti to ask whether she was offered the peerage before she published the report.

I’m not sure that makes a lot of difference. Here’s an excerpt from a comment on Harry’s Place:

People such as Keith Vaz and Wes Streeting who are focusing on *when* the peerage was offered may be giving Corbyn a way out. Their view seems to be that the peerage is questionable if it was offered before or during the inquiry, but not if it was offered after. But it's actually questionable in all three cases.
We don't see people going around saying it matters exactly when Cameron offered his "cronies" honours, do we? No. It's seen as questionably rewarding them for whatever they did regardless of when it was first discussed.

The fact that the inquiry is largely considered to be a whitewash makes all the difference. There is no ‘way out’ for Corbyn. Whether it was a whitewash because Chakrabarti was afraid of jeopardising a promised peerage, or whether the peerage was a gratuitous bonus for doing the laundry, it hardly matters. 

Either case looks bad. Accepting the peerage demolishes Ms. Chakrabarti’s integrity (for what that’s worth)  and unnecessarily shoves a motive into the full glare of the headlights. It undermines any semblance of objectivity that she might otherwise have claimed for her inquiry and its dubious conclusion. 

Although some surprising names were amongst those who endorsed her appointment, her impartiality was compromised from the get-go.  She was well-known for her support of Moazzam Begg who has stated that Israel’s crimes are worse than the Taliban’s, she even described Begg as 'a wonderful advocate for human rights and in particular for human liberty'.

“Ms. Chakrabarti can claim no particular expertise on the subject of anti-Semitism.  She formerly headed the campaigning organisation ‘Liberty’, a body that militates – among other things – for unrestricted freedom of speech, including the freedom to publish vile racist rants.”

We haven’t seen quite so much of Ms. Charkabarti on the BBC recently, but once upon a time she was on our screens all the time. She earned the title ‘universal Shami’ for her numerous appearances on QT and at least one awkward episode of HIGNFY. Not naturally quick witted, she struggled to keep up.

Having avoided answering a direct question about the offer of a peerage put to her by Kirsty Wark on a recent edition of Newsnight, she did much the same thing, aided by a glass of water, during this cringe-making performance on J-TV. 

Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott believe that Ms Chakrabarti is top-notch lawyer, highly intelligent and with a brilliant mind, and as such will be a great asset to the House of Lords. 

Mind you, judging by the recent HoL debate on ‘Palestine: Children’ I watched recently, it wouldn’t take much brilliance to be an asset to that institution. The ability to read out loud would do.

Someone else who is enthusiastic at the prospect of Shami joining her on the benches of the upper house is Baroness Butler-Sloss.

Yes, that Baroness. The one who was forced to step down from another shambolic inquiry not so long ago. Keith Vaz had something to say about that, too.

“The whole inquiry process is becoming shambolic: missing files, ministers refusing to read reports and now the chair resigning before the inquiry is has even commenced."

That isn’t the first time the good Baroness stepped down. She resigned from the Princess Diana inquest in 2007.

“BBC royal correspondent June Kelly said Lady Butler-Sloss' decision was a "bombshell". "This really is a saga now and the fact that you are now going to be on your third coroner I don't think anyone could have foreseen this," she said.The former Royal press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, told the BBC he was not surprised by Lady Butler-Sloss' resignation”

Letters to the editor Times Saturday Aug 6th.

“I have known and admired Shami Chakrabarti for many years. My daughter is chairman of Liberty and I have seen the work Shami has done for that organisation.I have felt for some time that she would be a valuable addition to the House of Lords.
As an independent peer I welcome her nomination and  am delighted that she will join us. I have no doubt that she will make many most useful contributions to our debates.”

Baroness Butler-Sloss

House of Lords.

Update:

I posted this piece at 20:52. About 40 minutes later I noticed Harry’s Place has put up a similarly illustrated piece about  Shami Chakrabarti’s (lack of) credibility. 

A link in a b.t.l. comment takes us to this article, in the Guardian no less, headed: 

“ ‘There’s nothing dodgy’: Questions over Jeremy Corbyn donation”.

Friends of Al-Aqsa gave Corbyn’s team a cheque for £10,000 in August 2015, an investigation by this newspaper has found, although the gift has never been made public. 

Corbyn’s campaign said it did not declare the donation because its bank subsequently rejected the cheque as it was made out to the wrong person. Any donation above £7,500 should be declared to the Electoral Commission. 

A spokesman for Corbyn was unable to explain on Saturday what then happened to the cash raised. A spokesman said: “I’m told a second cheque may have been sent but this was not received by the campaign.”

Yet more evidence of the Labour leader’s incompetence and duplicity. We'll have to wait and see if the BBC reports it.

Why did you think this inquiry was relevant when it really doesn’t come to any conclusions?

I wasted an inordinate amount of time transcribing bits from yesterday’s Home Affairs Committee hearing, starring Jeremy Corbyn and Shami Chakrabarti; stupid really because I knew that if I just hung on for a day or so there would be an official transcript. 

Sure enough, here it is. 

Of course, when you’re looking at print you can examine every syllable at your leisure, but in black and white you don’t get the nuances of the actual panto performance. 

The visuals and the audio add that extra something. You don’t get to hear Keith Vaz’s peculiar delivery in a transcript. He sounds as though he’s doing a half-hearted impression of Brian Sewell. I suppose it gives him an air of authority; part disdain, part superciliousness, part pomposity, and all the more oleaginous when used to pay a compliment, and in this instance to express profuse gratitude to Jeremy Corbyn for attending.

 (So he didn’t have to attend if he didn’t want to?)

There are several other media responses worth looking at if anyone’s interested. Patrick Kidd has made it the topic of his Political Sketch. Times (£)  “A masterclass in ducking the question” 

The Spectator’s Katy Balls noticed that Chuka Umunna  “Has started to make a habit of using the Home Affairs Select Committee to grandstand about his party’s woes.”

The Today programme also mentioned it: Susan Hulme. 44:10

“It’s believed to be the first time an opposition leader has been questioned by a commons committee. But-- they certainly weren’t deferential.”

She played a handful of sound clips from the hearing. I think both Sarah Montague (who had introduced the item) and the presenter, Ms Hulme, found the whole thing rather amusing. More amusing than absolutely necessary. Somehow I don’t mind anyone else finding it amusing, but I strongly object to the BBC doing so. 

Harry’s Place has it of course. 

Keith Vaz said:

Many regard this inquiry as a whitewash because it does not contain any facts and figures, and it did not take evidence from some of the principal people accused of antisemitism. Why did you think this inquiry was relevant when it really doesn’t come to any conclusions?

Other people might be wondering this as well. It now transpires that Naz Shah’s suspension has been lifted.  Exquisite timing.

Jeremy Corbyn: "I think I got away with it"

I watched this rather nasty hearing on the subject of antisemitism by the Home Affairs Committee, chaired as usual by Keith Vaz, who opened proceedings with a few warm remarks about his long-standing friendship with the chief witness.

Towards the end of the hearing Jeremy Corbyn was asked if Shami Chakrabarti’s report clarified what antisemitism is. He duly obliged with the following definition:

“Antisemitism is where you use epithets to criticise people for being Jewish, you attack Jewish people for what they are, it is completely unacceptable, and I would have thought it’s very obvious what antisemitism is, just as much as would be very obvious what Islamophobia is -  if you criticise Moslem people for what they are, what they are alleged to believe, even if they believe in it or not, and I think in the report Ms Chakrabarti makes it very clear that we have to condemn both of those with great vigour equally.”

Shami Chakrabarti was sitting behind Jeremy Corbyn, and she appeared to be acting as his ‘minder’. She nodded and shook her head, scribbled away on a pad and occasionally slipped a post-it note onto the table in front of her client. 

Next to Ms Chakrabarti in the front row, directly behind Jeremy Corbyn, sat a stern-faced man in a dark suit who Keith Vaz referred to as “Mr. Rotherham.”  He and Ms. Chakkrabarti gave each other meaningful looks, and he too passed a post-it note to Mr. Corbyn. Keith Vaz spotted this and scolded them. 

tête-à-tête

Keith Vaz queried Ms Chakrabarti’s independence in the light of her last-minute decision to join the Labour Party. He suggested that people might regard her report as a whitewash.

“No no”, protested Mr. Corbyn. “Shami is completely independent”. 

There was a great deal of waffling about what Mr. Corbyn meant in his accidental comparison between Israel and “Islamic states”. He insisted that he meant it ‘lower case’  i.e., Islamic states in general, not ‘the’ Islamic State.

“Ms Chakrabarti, there is no need to nod at the back” said Mr. Vaz. 

This did not go down very well with Ms Chakrabarti and the stern-faced man. Both glared thunderously thenceforth.

Victoria Atkins, James Berry, David Burrowes, Nusrat Ghani, Tim Loughton, Stuart C McDonald, Chuka Umunna, and David Winnick were the MPs who questioned Jeremy Corbyn.

The JC.com  has published a summary. Here’s a short extract;

He said he “totally and profoundly disagreed” with the views of Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. 

Mr Corbyn reflected on his meeting with Board of Deputies president Jonathan Arkush earlier this year, which, he said had “lasted quite a long time. We got on quite well. Look if we want a strong cohesive society, we oppose antisemitism because it divides us”. 

The Labour leader said he had attended events about the Israel-Palestinian conflict where Holocaust deniers had been removed for making antisemitic comments regarding the Shoah. 

He had travelled to Ealing in west London for tea with Raed Salah because the sheikh was under house arrest, he added. 

Questioned on why he had accused Guardian journalist and JC columnist Jonathan Freedland of "subliminal nastiness", Mr Corbyn said Mr Freedland had "made comments detrimental to my character".

Mr. Corbyn spoke of his agreeable conversations with “Mr. Akrush”, mispronouncing his name repeatedly.   Nusrat Ghani’s approach was rigorous and rather fierce. When Mr. Corbyn kept including “all forms of racism” in his replies she insisted on talking specifically about antisemitism. 

Mr. Corbyn responded to her adversarial tone by becoming increasingly insouciant. 

She asked if he intended to accept the invitation to visit the leader of the Israeli Labour Party.  His evasive answer implied that he would not be accepting it, and it’s widely believed that he hasn’t actually replied at all.

Victoria Atkins was also fittingly adversarial. She raised the subjects of Stephen Sizer and that “cup of tea with Raed Salah”

“I had a discussion with him”, said Corbyn. 

He explained his relationship with Paul Eisen: 

“Paul Eisen founded a group called Deir Yassin Rembered. Deir Yassin was a village that was destroyed during the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”

An anti-Israel version of an event, plucked from its proper historical context, unchallenged by the committee. When controversial matters appertaining to Israeli/Arab history are being distorted I do not believe members of the Home Affairs committee are capable of identifying propaganda. 

As I’ve said so many times before, Jeremy Corbyn and his ilk have always embraced the Palestinian version of events as if they were definitive, absolute and conclusive. 

Corbyn’s total lack of interest in historic events from the pro-Israeli perspective belies all his disingenuous claims about bringing people together, engaging with both sides or talking with “people you disagree with” to secure ‘peace’. He claimed to have visited Israel many times, and to have spoken to Israelis, but he did not go into detail. 

David Winnick is too doddery for his shirt I’m afraid, and his supposed support for Israel is half-hearted bordering on full-scale elusive. He appeared to be saying that Israel is guilty as charged, but blaming Jews for it is racist. 

 “Bombardment of Gaza” intoned Corbyn.

David Burrowes livened things up a bit by mentioning the Hamas Charter, and Keith Vaz obligingly read out the well-known passage, as follows:

 “The prophet, peace and prayer be upon him said: the time will not come until Muslims will fight Jews and kill them until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees which will cry ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him’ “

“It’s unacceptable but you have to talk to extremes on both sides.” said the witness.

Chuka Umunna wondered why Corbyn didn’t “call out” Mark Wadsworth, the individual from Momentum who had offended the Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth at the infamous launch of the Chakrabarti report. He said he’d seen the video. In fact we’ve all seen the videos of what happened. From every conceivable angle.  He also brought up Jackie Walker’s offensive comment about Jews financing the slave trade.

Tim Laughton enquired about the role of Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s right-hand man and director of communications. 

“Is he a friend of Hamas and Hezbollah?”  

“You’d better ask him. He’s a man of immense intellect and a scholar. He’s written many books (so has Ernie Wise) and he works extremely hard...”

There is a video, said Mr Laughton, showing Milne praising Hamas for their spirit of resistance and declaring that they would not “be broken” 

He was not allowed to show the video to the committee, but Mr. Vaz promised to write to Mr. Corbyn about it at a later date. 

Stuart C McDonald wasn’t sure if the report defined what antisemitism is. Corbyn duly obliged:(forgive the repetition.)

“Antisemitism is where you use epithets to criticise people for being Jewish, you attack Jewish people for what they are. It is completely unacceptable and I would have thought it’s very obvious what antisemitism is, just as much as would be very obvious what Islamophobia is. If you cri’icise Moslem people for what they are - what they are alleged to believe - even if they believe in it or not, and I think in the report Ms Chakrabarti makes it very clear that we have to condemn both of those with great vigour equally.”

Is everyone expected to swallow that?  Yes, he really did use a glottal stop, and yes, I think he really does believe the above. It seems he doesn’t actually think Muslims believe what they profess to believe, namely Islam. He evidently doesn’t believe that the more devout they are the more antisemitic and homophobic they’re likely to be. He equates antisemitism (hatred of Jews) with Islamophobia, (criticism of Islam) both of which he regards as racist. 

James Berry: 

“Mr Corbyn, do you agree that Israel has the right to exist? " 

“Sorry?” 

“Do you agree that Israel has the right to exist?” 

“The State of Israel exists of course” 

“Then you agree that it has the right to exist?” 

“Yes, and all proposals that are put forward are actually -- that our party’s policy is for a two state solution.” 

“Do you understand why Jewish people find it at best offensive and at worst downright antisemitic to have to continually justify Israel’s right to exist?” 

“I’m sure they do. There are issues about Israel and its treatment of Palestinian people and occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza, and all proposals for a peace process are based around the removal of the settlements and of course an end of the siege of Gaza. Listen! I’be been there many times, and what’s happening is wrong. The killing is wrong..” 

“On both sides, presumably” 

“Absolutely, but there isn’t a way forward that doesn’t involve dialogue, that doesn’t involve acceptance of the rights of Palestinian people  and recognition of a Palestinian state, that surely has to be the right way forward.”

The siege of Gaza!

The settlements!!

The ‘treatment’ of the Palestinian people!!!

The occupation!!!! 

No-one challenged him on any of that, so I think Jeremy Corbyn could safely say “I was antisemitic a couple of times, but I think I got away with it.”

Home affairs enquiry

Sorry for the tardiness and belatedness of this post. Others have tackled it before me but  let’s go ahead anyway. The other parliamentary event that took place this week was the Home Affairs Select Committee enquiry about the rise of antisemitism. 

transcript

 video

This was chaired by Keith Vaz, who pronounces antisemitism with an ‘’e’, as in “antisemetic” .

Watching Keith Vaz being forensic and painstaking in that laboured manner of his is very annoying, and it makes him look a bit thick. He began by making Jonathan Arkush define antisemitism, dragging it out as though he’d never heard of such a thing in his life. It was quite an emetic, in fact. He used attitudes to ‘the right to self-determination’ as a kind of litmus test.

For all the laborious, misdirected unpickings of what is and what isn’t antisemitism, those familiar, lazy, defamatory generalizations were left hanging in the air.

This enquiry left an overriding impression of unchallenged falsehoods and inaccuracies, ranging from the ubiquitous “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians” to Ken Livingstone’s “700,000 Palestinians who were driven out of their homes illegally at gunpoint”  - not to mention the fact that Hitler supported Zionism because he was keen to rid Germany of all its Jews by deporting them to Palestine (before he went mad and killed 6,000,000.)

What was the point of it all?  Does it relate to Shami Chakrabarti’s ill-conceived chairmanship of the inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour Party, which is morphing into an enquiry into all kinds of racism including Islamophobia? It happened; therefore it was.

MPs who were sympathetic to Jonathan Arkush and hostile to Ken Livingstone still appeared to be in agreement that condemnation of Israel was understandable because of “What it is doing to the Palestinians”, but they seemed to think that the elusive affliction known as antisemitism was shameful and a real menace. Nobody seemed to wonder why Israel kept on  “doing” stuff to the Palestinians.  It was unanimous. Everyone, including forensic examiner Keith Vaz agreed that criticism of Israel was not antisemitic.

Mr Winnick: 

The last question I want to ask is arising from what the Chair asked you about Israel. You accept entirely that criticism of Israel is perfectly compatible with non-racism, and that it is not connected automatically in any way with antisemitism. The criticism of Israel, which could be very strong indeed—some, indeed myself would say that it is often very much justified—is not antisemitic.

The most interesting sound-bite and quotable performance arose from Chuka Imunna’s dramatic speech, somewhat marred by his consciousness of the need to preempt the inevitable trolling. That says a lot about the atmosphere in Corbyn’s current Labour Party, and is a tacit admission that antisemitism is the very thing that is motivating the predicted trolls.

“You know what? I will get trolled incessantly after this exchange. I don’t care—” 

He still let Livingstone get away with his appalling lies, if indeed he recognised them as lies. 

The speech, for which the Chairman admonished him -  “This is not an opportunity to make statements” - began:

“I just say this to Mr Livingstone. You were born in my constituency and you went to school in it. I and many other Labour colleagues of all backgrounds and faiths campaigned not just once but twice for you to be Mayor, and I think you campaigned for me. You did help reduce poverty, you did help reduce inequality and you did improve the housing situation in our capital city.”

 It’s all very well to set out a couple of carefully selected examples of Mayor Livingstone implementing Labour values, thereby excusing his party’s support for Livingstone’s mayoralty. An aspiring Labour rising star could do no other. But it does look hypocritical to have overlooked, as Umunna seems to have done,  Livingstone’s record of ( amongst other things)   courting such disreputable people as Qaradawi and the disgraced Lee Jasper. 

“But you are not a historian. You are a politician. And by needlessly and repeatedly offending Jewish people in this way you have not only betrayed our Labour values but betrayed your legacy as Mayor because all you are now going to be remembered for is becoming a pin-up for the kind of prejudice that our party was built to fight against. That is a huge shame and it is an embarrassment. “

That is if one overlooks the other (aforementioned) memorable contributions to the legacy of this particular pin-up boy.

Ken Livingstone is not alone in his attitude to Israel, Jews and his malignant version of history. Why do they so readily believe (and I’ve heard it from others) that (in 1948) 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes at gunpoint? 

Chuka Umunna could offer no substantive challenge to this falsehood, thus considerably weakening the whole enquiry.

Ken Livingstone: No, no. It is a catastrophe in the sense that the deal done was for two states and a division. The tragedy is—and it is the legacy that still leads to violence today—that 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes illegally at gun point. The Prime Minister of Israel said, “The old will d 

Mr Umunna: Sorry, we only get a small amount of time to ask you questions. Either you thought it was wrong, and it was a great catastrophe, or not. Yes or no?  

Ken Livingstone: It was right to say that we will create a haven for those Jews who wish to go there. It was not right for the Israeli Government to expel— Mr Umunna: Ken, was it a catastrophe and was it wrong or not?  

Ken Livingstone: It was not wrong to create it. It was a catastrophe to expel at gun point 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. 

Mr Umunna: Sorry—that was not the question I asked.

Over the page: Transcript. Umunna and Livingstone.

Swift self-selected non-select-committee summary

So much to blog /  so little time. 

The Islamophobia awards. The notion of giving the prize to Charlie Hebdo. 

For Islamophobia. 

A clumsier blunder you’d be hard pressed to find. 

Muslims already awarded Charie Hebdo the ultimate sanction - murder - as a prize for its alleged Islamophobia, so giving it a supposedly ironic ‘award’ should have been a gross embarrassment to all, especially the IHRC.

All those foolish supporters like Rowan Williams seem to have overlooked the fact that Charlie Hebdo wasn’t any more “Islamophobic" than other types of 'phobic' in the first place.  

At least Peter Oborne has come out and cemented his position as honorary Islamist, which I suppose is a good thing in the spirit of transparency. 

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This new report has the military and legal expertise that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and  Navi Pillay ( former  United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) lack. 

However, many people are expected to fall back on the Mandy Rice Davis manoeuvre to dismiss the 2014 Gaza War Assessment. That’s because the organisation that commissioned the report is called JINSA. The “J” stands for Jewish. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. They may be Jewish, but “The authors know the Laws of Armed Conflict far better than the NGOs do.” H/T EoZ)

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I don’t know if the dumbed down BBC is interested in that kind of thing and I can’t be arsed to try and search their new-fangled website these days. 

On our sidebar, the small handful of websites we thought relevant when we set up this blog constantly jostle with each other for top billing as soon as new articles appear. Recently I’ve noticed that while Sky, Google and the Guardian usually feature serious news, the BBC increasingly seems to focus on trivia and sport. 

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Talking of which, I’m quite amused and entertained by the Clarkson debacle, particularly the way certain people pronounce the word ‘fracas’. Michael Grade said “Frackarse” for instance. (I thought the ‘s‘ was  silent but what do I know?)

The fracas business is more entertaining than Top Gear so let’s hope it drags on as long as possible.

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Last and arguably not least I have to just mention the abuse of the house-room we give (i.e. purchase) to the garbage beamed into our houses in the shape of yesterday’s wall-to-wall coverage of yet another of those laughable select committees chaired by very important pompous master of ceremonies Keith Vaz. I understand other channels gave that panto similarly extensive coverage, but somehow it was all the more offensive from the BBC. I can’t really explain that.

There they were, three self righteous victims and one smug legal advisor sitting in a row, being encouraged  by their inquisitors to  think up ever more far-fetched grievances against the police and justify blaming everyone but themselves. 

Who was the elderly gent on the committee that sounded like Joe Pasquale who assured the family that clearly I.S. is nothing to do with Islam? 

What exactly is a select committee, who selects it and what good does it do?