The new leaf is just like the old one

Luckily for Sir Keir Starmer, Boris’s activities misfortunes and a happy event have overshadowed the tribulations of the Labour Party. At the moment, the main criticisms of Sir Keir are directed at his wooden, charisma-free personality. However, it’s Sir Keir’s deeds (or lack of) rather than his words that people are beginning to notice.

Starmer under pressure from Jewish Groups! The BBC reports his failure to act after Diane Abbott and another weirdly-named Labour woman, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, were caught hosting a Zoom meeting in which two activists who had been expelled for antisemitism were allowed to participate. 

As if to distance itself from accidentally making a ‘value-judgement’ the BBC was careful to point out that ‘Jewish Groups’ are the ones who happen to be concerned.  The bold is actually the BBC’s 'allegedly.'

“The Jewish Chronicle reported that Tony Greenstein, who was thrown out of Labour in 2018 for offensive comments, and Jackie Walker, who was expelled over allegedly anti-Semitic comments, had attended the meeting.”

Gideon Falter, the Chief Executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: 

“The participation of Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy in an online conference with Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, is a brazen challenge to Sir Keir Starmer. During his leadership campaign, Sir Keir pledged that any MP who provides a platform for Labour members expelled in connection with antisemitism will themselves be suspended from Labour. Instead of keeping his promise and immediately suspending both Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy from the Party, Labour has merely ‘reminded them of their responsibilities’. 

“After half a decade of the Labour antisemitism crisis, no MP should need ‘reminding’ not to engage with those expelled from the Party over antisemitism. Instead of ‘tearing antisemitism out by its roots’, Sir Keir has welched. Through his inaction he is telling Britain’s Jews loud and clear that his apologies are meaningless, his promises will be broken, and MPs who consort with even the most notorious expelled activists still have a place on the Labour benches.” 

On 27th November 2019 while Corbyn was still Labour leader Allister Heath wrote in the Telegraph:

“If one studies the litany of disgusting anti-Semitic incidents involving Labour members and far-Left activists these past few years, they span almost every possible strand of Jew-hate, virtually every demented conspiracy theory. It would take an immense effort for any party to cure itself of an infection of such virulence, even were it truly committed to doing so (and Labour isn’t): no wonder the Chief Rabbi felt compelled to speak out, warning of Corbyn’s unfitness for high office and that the “very soul of our country is at stake”[…]

"All of which takes us to Israel, a country with which Britain’s Jews are more culturally and personally connected than ever before. Many Corbynites see it as a “white” colonial state, an oppressor nation: in their deranged loathing, they don’t criticise or seek to boycott any other country. They refuse to accept that most Israeli Jews are descended from refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and the rest escaped the Holocaust.

The only baddies are Israel and the US, the two nations with the biggest Jewish populations. Israel is the only country they want to abolish; the Jews the only people they don’t believe deserve a national homeland." 

Also in the Telegraph, but just the other day, Tom Harwood wrote about the recent Panorama Programme that was stuffed with aggrieved persons who turned out to be Labour party activists in the guise of NHS workers. No label. No mention of any affiliation. Even worse -

‘Nor were BBC viewers informed about the political background of the ‘A&E Nurse’ who turned out to be a Unite activist who “fights the Tories hard”, or Professor John Ashton (also featured in the Panorama disaster), who proudly described himself as a Labour Party member “for 53 years” 

- and Guido has unearthed more on John Ashton, a regular BBC ‘go-to’ expert who happens to be a pretty rabid antisemite. We used to say these people were ‘on the BBC's speed dial’.

The Jewish Chronicle says:

“But aside from offering his advice over health issues, Professor Ashton, who has been a long-time member of the Labour Party, regularly posts on social media on issues involving Israel and Zionism. In one tweet he suggested it was, "Time to isolate Zionists and all religious fundamentalists whatever colour of black." 

An analysis of social media posts made by the former President of the Faculty of Public Health from 2012 until 2018 shows that he has frequently equated Zionism with Nazism.
Writing in November 2012 in response to Israeli military actions in Gaza, he stated: "Sickening to see Zionists behave like Nazis.”

Melanie Phillips highlights the spat between Robert Halfon MP, whom I rather like, and the Jewish community’s left-wing officials and spokespersons who don’t appear able to see past some of Sir Keir’s new appointments, at least not enough to realise that they belie his vow to turn over a new leaf and eradicate antisemitism in the Labour Party.

There’s Naz Shah. When outed for antisemitism Shah made a suitably grovelling apology and promised to learn from the incontinent and ‘inadvertently’ racist Tweets and remarks she’d accidentally made; then promptly forgot the apology and made a few more.  

More troubling is Sir Keir's choice for Labour’s foreign-affairs spokesman, Lisa Nandy. Why on earth did he give Nandy ‘foreign affairs', when the one foreign affair she’s been deeply involved in is Labour Friends of Palestine? While 'chair' (is she still or not?) she actually pledged to campaign for the Palestinians' Right of Return.

“This places her among the opponents of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. For the “Palestinians” have no such legal, moral or historical right; the so-called “right of return,” which would flood Israel with Arab immigrants, is merely a device to destroy the State of Israel.”

How she reconciles that with her support of ‘Zionism’ is a mystery, but perhaps the good residents of “my constituency" Wigan, are as obsessed with Palestine as she is. For some reason.

The Board of Deputies are a shocking lot. Like Andrew Doyle said (of lefty Remainers) "they’re not just like turkeys who voted for Christmas, they’re like turkeys who’ve plucked themselves and climbed into the oven as well."  Not to mention the stuffing.

"Scrutiny is important"

"You can see that when the difficult questions were asked on testing, things began to move"

New Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says "scrutiny is important" to point out mistakes by the government "if they can then be put right"https://t.co/oZXAvYsmbG #Marr pic.twitter.com/WBs5BMRXlm

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) April 5, 2020

Now that he has replaced Jeremy Corbyn,  various skeletons are emerging from Keir Starmer’s cupboard.

On Harry’s Place, there’s what appears to be a (slightly dodgy) anonymous text message alluding to his role in the Jimmy Savile ‘cover-up’ (Yes, they have misspelt “Kier”)

We might take that with a pinch of salt, but in the Evening Standard of January 2013, Starmer blames the police for the cock-up.

“Britain’s chief prosecutor apologised for the failure to pursue four separate allegations against the BBC star, one made as recently as four years ago. 

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said there were failures by police in Sussex and Surrey and by the principal lawyer in dealing with the allegations. He issued a personal apology for the mistakes by the Crown Prosecution Service and announced a series of changes to improve the investigation of allegations by child victims.

As Director of Public prosecutions, a few other regrettable decisions of the ‘uman rights kind have also been mentioned.

When Jeremy Corbyn was appointed Labour leader, admittedly it took them some time, but he was eventually held to account by the media for his past unsavoury indiscretions and associations.  

When they’ve finished fawning over him, will the media be interested in the new leader’s track record?

Keir Starmer has apologised to the Jewish community and promised to root out antisemitism in the Labour Party.

As chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy has pledged to recognise Palestine as a State and advocate for the Right of Return for Palestinians (and their descendants) who were displaced or fled from the1948 ‘intended war of annihilation.’

Can someone explain how Starmer intends to root out antisemitism when he has just appointed Lisa Nandy as the new Shadow Foreign Secretary? 

Bringing people together

Times columnist Melanie Phillips on Labour leadership contenders handling anti-Semitism

She says Keir Starmer will try, but won't succeed: "This is a problem that goes very deep, not just in Labour, but throughout progressive politics"#PoliticsLive https://t.co/AayV7Cu01B pic.twitter.com/eRuoFKjK99

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) March 5, 2020

If you saw this on Politics Live a few days ago, you might not have seen the comments that appeared below the Tweet featuring it on the BBC News politics Twitter feed.

Sadly, vitriolic commentary is not unusual nowadays, but the comment: 

“Horrible woman.i (sic) don't want to see her on our tv screens.” 

kind of epitomises the noxious nature of some of the discourse on social media.  Firstly, demanding the ‘no-platforming’ of people with whom one disagrees is intolerant enough, but the trend for scatter-gunning vile insults without feeling any need to explain, or offer any reasoning at all is nothing more than reverse virtue-signalling. Call it ‘iniquity-signalling’.

If there was an actual reason behind that Tweet, what could it be? Bile-spouting Tweeters displaying smiling selfies on their timelines seem absurdly oxymoronic to me. I bet a grinning selfie adorns the timeline of whoever wrote “the genocide in Gaza” on some godforsaken thread somewhere.

As Melanie Phillips said, the rise in antisemitism in Europe, the US and the UK is not something to ignore or take lightly.

I thought it was quite remarkable that Rachel Sylvester’s in-depth article about Lisa Nandy in The Times and Nandy’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg on the Beeb glossed over both irreconcilable anomalies in Nandy’s campaign for leadership of the Labour Party concerning two pledges she was, let’s be kind and call it ‘dragooned into’ signing her name to. The first was the issue of trans rights versus women’s right to privacy and single-sex spaces. Two incompatible positions.

The second was about her support for the Palestinians’ “Right of Return” (She’s chair of Labour Friends of Palestine)  - that’s the ‘rights’ of about five million people, refugees and their descendants from the1948 war (of the intended annihilation of Israel) to return to their former ‘homes,’ while at the same time insisting she supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Computer says no.

"When an irresistible force such as you/Meets an old immovable object like me/You can bet just as sure as you live/Something's gotta give/Something’s gotta give/Something's gotta give."

Neither Sylvester nor Kuenssberg showed any interest in what happens when an immovable force meets an intractable problem, and despite Nandy’s (very possibly sincerely meant) promises of ‘bringing people together’ , the fact is, sometimes there’s just no room for mister in-between.

The Honesty Party

Warning. This may seem slightly off-topic but it's not entirely unrelated to BBC bias and I'm going to say it. Each time we see the last-trio-standing in the Labour leadership cabaret another massive haemorrhage of credibility squirts out; the last vestiges finally oozed out during C 4’s ‘hustings’. 

“It was devastating in the election campaign to knock on doors and find that many within the Jewish community just didn’t trust us any more.” - @RLong_Bailey

Labour leadership candidates are asked to commit to tackling anti-Semitism by a former Labour voter. #C4Debate pic.twitter.com/VX7pBOPQkj

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) February 17, 2020

We have some irreconcilable, antithetical positions. Number one, the so-called support for the “Right of Israel to Exist” as proclaimed earnestly by Lisa Nandy and through gritted teeth by Rebecca Long-Bailey (and not at all by Keir Starmer (?)) against the diametrically opposed and equally enthusiastic support for the Palestinian cause with its inherent desire for the non-existence of Israel.

Number two, the right of people with a penis to self-identify (as women) against the right of biological women to exclude them from the few remaining women-only spaces. 

Cases of rape or sexual assault may be rare in such circumstances, but even on the grounds of modesty alone (which apparently is a big thing in a community that traditionally encourages segregation of the sexes and regards venturing out without your burka as ‘asking for it’) if you sign a pledge to the effect that everyone else is expected to welcome the presence of women-with-penises in the few remaining intimate female situations, you must at least have the intelligence to acknowledge that these positions are irreconcilable and contradictory.

Incidentally, has no-one in the Labour Party noticed that ‘no place in our party for antisemitism’ discriminates against, nay, disqualifies a substantial section of their culturally antisemitic fan-base from having a place in their precious party, while their new-fangled advocacy of aggressive trans-rights discriminates against and alienates feminists. Or just women. 

This craze for legitimising self-identification changes everything. When applied to competitive sport we already have a huge, masculine trans-man-to-woman competing against biological women in ‘women’s’ cycling events, so let’s allow able-bodied sportspersons to identify as disabled and make the Paralympics implode. 

Lisa Nandy has all but spontaneously combusted by snatching potential defeat from the jaws of unexpectedly coming-from-behind. And she looked so promising before we saw that she has signed these ill-conceived, bordering on antisemitic, pledges. 

Labour’s policy on Israel and the Palestinians should not be dictated by PSC. Luke Akehurst’s blog.

The pledges:

1. “To oppose any proposed solution for Palestinians, including Trump’s ‘deal’, not based on international law and UN resolutions recognising their collective rights to self-determination and to return to their homes. 
2. "To adhere to a consistent ethical UK trade policy, including in relation to Israel, in particular by applying international law on settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and stopping any arms trade with Israel that is used in violation of the human rights of Palestinians.
3. "To oppose the government’s proposed restrictive legislation regarding procurement and investment and, if that is passed, to promise that a future Labour government would make it a priority to rescind laws which restrict the globally recognised rights to freedom of expression and association to campaign for ethical trade policies.”

What’s the problem? 

"Prospective leaders of any major party shouldn’t be having their stance on Israel and the Palestinians dictated by the PSC, an organisation that has never committed to a two state solution, never accepted Israel’s right to exist, leads the BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) campaign in the UK, and has failed to deal with antisemitism in its own ranks.
The pledges say nothing at all about Israel or two states. 

In fact, the first one undermines the concept of two states with a reference to a complete right of return. We know from its campaigning that PSC don’t mean a symbolic settlement of this issue with small numbers of Palestinians returning to Israel, and compensation for others, it argues for the absolute right to live in Israel of all descendants of Palestinian refugees, about seven million people. This would mean Israel ceasing to exist as a Jewish state. There would be two Palestinian states, not two states for two peoples.

One plausible suggestion for an outside-the-box, vote-winning, strategy for Labour is to ditch the pretence. (I'm not sure that Dawn Butler isn't ahead of the curve already.) At least they wouldn’t have to make contorted arguments that do not compute, and at least they could run on a unique platform of extreme, radical honesty.

Questions of story selection

A hot topic on my social media feeds over the past couple of days had been the extraordinary folly engulfing Labour over the trans issue, especially (a) the statement by Lisa Nandy ("the sensible one") that trans prisoners - including rapists - should be held in jails that match their self-declared gender and (b) the ideologically-driven flat-earthery of Labour shadow minister Dawn Butler telling ITV's Good Morning Britain that “a child is born without a sex”.

Except for Andrew Marr tacking Rebecca Long-Bailey on a related matter on Sunday, the BBC has shown very little interest in this - for some reason. Well might Patrick O'Flynn tweet:

Who in  BBC News is deciding that Labour's trans madness is not a major story? Much of the BBC's increasingly extreme bias is imposed via its story selection, not just its story treatment. 

Well BBC Politics website running nothing on Lab leader contenders' trans lunacy as of now. Can it be that none of the dozens of Beeb political correspondents has noticed the story? I suggest not. There is clearly a de facto ban on covering furores that challenge the extreme woke orthodoxy.

Moaner Lisa

From her interview with The Sunday Times today we learn that Labour leadership contender Lisa Nandy refuses to appear on The Andrew Marr Show:

The Wigan MP, 40, has also declined to appear on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme, filmed live in the capital on a Sunday, because it would mean being away from her partner, Andy Collis, and their son, Otis, 4. “I’ve refused to do it for the past three years because I won’t go down to London at the weekend, stay overnight on the Saturday, do a 10-minute interview and then come all the way back,” she says.

First thought: How odd! Has she never heard of Skype, or the BBC's studios in nearby Salford? Plenty of Marr Show interviews are conducted via video links, so she doesn't need to waste her weekend travelling to London and back, does she?

Second thought: Hmm, but I'm sure I saw her on The Andrew Marr Show recently...

…and, yes, checking the list of previous guests on the programme's webpage, there she was, on the programme, on 15 December 2019, appearing via a video link. 

So she has done the show without needing to go to London after all. Not quite what the interview was implying.

Still, if she's refusing to deal with 'the London bubble' on their terms and sees The Andrew Marr Show as part of the problem with journalism today (as the article suggests), then all power to her elbow. Or some power anyhow.

Get real

Think of all those misguided causes that once seemed as cool as they now seem wrong. In retrospect we ask ourselves - how could we ever have gone along with that?

Anyway, we did go along with, for example, smoking. We bought into it. We were fooled by the combined efforts of the tobacco industry’s advertising campaigns and our own wishful thinking. Not only did we think smoking was cool, but we allowed ourselves to believe it was harmless. Now we know better. The one consolation is that the more we know about smoking - it causes cancer, folks - the less cool it looks. 

A regular defender of the BBC once humorously referred to me as “Biased-BBC’s correspondent for Tel Aviv.” It was supposed to be a joke. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly hilarious; just slightly amusing and at the same time, disparaging. 

However, today I make no apology for taking advantage of this relatively obscure platform to highlight the issue that is more important (to me) than the relatively transient and trivial Twitter in-fighting and gossip that sparks more interest below the line on ITBB than my ‘special subject’.

I’m aware that a website I often refer to isn’t everyone’s cup tea. Harry’s Place used to be a rather staunchly left-wing, Labour-supporting site with an equally staunch pro-Israel agenda. The recent turmoil in the Labour Party means holding those two principles at once does-not-compute. HP now takes more of a centrist and even a ‘right-leaning’ position. Well, it would, wouldn’t it, now that supporting Israel automatically makes one ‘right-wing’.

I’m going to be mean and admit that many of HP’s above-the-line pieces are of less interest to me than its below-the-line content. I’m jealous of the high level of engagement it engenders.  (The comments here are heroic and much appreciated - but to coin a phrase - never mind the quality, feel the width. That means I want more, more and more. 

Why am I talking about other websites when I could be sticking to the subject - what was it again? Oh yes, wrong-headed causes.  Sarah AB, formerly a major contributor to Harry’s Place, has commented about Lisa Nandy: 

“One thing I find very intriguing is how little the fact Lisa Nandy is Chair of Friends of Palestine and the Middle East seems a factor. It doesn't prevent her from being called a 'Zionist stooge', on the one hand, and it doesn't prevent several of the people who have deep concerns about and/or who left Labour over antisemitism thinking she'd be a good leader

I’ve been worried about Nandy ever since I saw that she was chair of Labour Friends Of Palestine and the Middle East.

On #HolocaustMemorialDay we remember those who lost their lives to prejudice, racism and intolerance. Today, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we are reminded of the importance of working together for a better future. pic.twitter.com/4iAhIkR3LB

— Lisa Nandy (@lisanandy) January 27, 2020

We know that the pro-Palestinian lobby expends a huge amount of energy on promoting its cause and enticing political groups with its dishonest and fictitious propaganda. Lisa Nandy has been sucked in and hoodwinked by it.  

“I visited Palestine as a new MP and I was struck by the threats facing the next generation, the ferocity of the attacks they endure and the systematic denial of their rights. I met a three-year-old child whose house was surrounded by the Separation Wall and was growing up without daylight. I saw a 15-year-old shackled by the ankles, who had been held in administrative detention for months without any contact with his family, access to school or a lawyer. I saw families humiliated at checkpoints on a daily basis and the denial of basic medical care as a result.”

Sorry, but when an MP starts with “I visited Palestine” she is virtually bragging about having been duped by antisemitic propaganda.  (Don’t forget the reason why Islam rejects the fundamental concept of accepting any Jewish State in the Middle East)  

A few months ago, Nandy Tweeted:

“As someone who has fought for Palestinian rights, opposed settlements and wants a two-state solution I say Israel has an unequivocal right to exist. Why, on earth, is this so hard?”

It is hard because the stuff you’ve just stated you believe in is largely propagandistic baloney.  Palestinian ‘rights’? Settlements? Two-State Solution? Based on gullibility, fantasy and the wishful thinking of the ill-informed. 

I recommend two excellent pieces that have appeared in The Conservative Woman.

Why remembering the Holocaust is more important than ever.

As well as succinctly setting out the value of these anniversaries, Paul T Horgan’s article answers those resentful folk who claim that “We fought WWll to save the Jews” with particular clarity: 

“The British and French Empires declared war on the Third Reich not because of the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Instead, war was declared in response to Germany’s invasion of Poland. The prevention of the Holocaust was never a strategic objective of any Allied power, as any effort used in such a manner would detract from the effort to defeat Nazi Germany militarily and thus prolong the war.

This is a ‘must-read’.  On the subject of Lisa Nandy, though, another Paul has also written on that site. Paul Hurt ends with: 

“The failures of LFPME reflect badly on Lisa Nandy and have relevance, I think, to the election of the next leader of the Labour Party.”

Even so, it’s conceivable that Nandy is the ''least worst' of the remaining four candidates. At least she gives the appearance of someone who looks and sounds relatively normal. Sorry, but the other three are plain odd.

The only consolation is that the more we know about the part that gullible but earnest pro-Palestinian activism plays in the rising, worldwide tide of antisemitism, the less cool it looks. Give it up.

Hawks and Doves

Oz Katerji 

No man has more civilian blood on his hands in the Middle East than Qassem Soleimani.

His assassination is an era-defining moment for the region, and will have massive and unforeseen repercussions.

Tonight the only people I keep in my thoughts are the families of his victims.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) January 3, 2020

Melanie Phillips  (extracts)

"Soleimani has been described by some outlets as a terrorist leader. This is vastly to underestimate his importance. The al Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is part of Iran’s hugely powerful proxy army, and Soleimani was the regime’s key military strategist and military commander. 

He launched countless military operations against US, Israel and others. He was responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq. He was the invaluable architect of Iran’s territorial drive for regional incursion and hegemony.

President Trump, who ordered the strike against Soleimani, has already weakened the regime through reimposing sanctions. That in itself has helped inspire the immensely brave Iranian protesters who, despite suffering in their thousands murder, jailing and torture, have continued with their demonstrations aimed at bringing down the regime that has so oppressed them and ruined their country.

Even a mortally wounded serpent, however, can still cause death and destruction through the thrashing of its tail. America and Israel are now braced for Iran to retaliate. Since the middle of last year it has been escalating its aggression in the region, firing rockets at US bases, attacking oil tankers in regional waters and crippling Saudi Arabia’s most critical oil installation through a multiple missile strike

President Jimmy Carter was paralysed by the 444-day Iran hostage crisis. President Clinton vacillated between sanctions against Iran and appeasement. 

Most infamously, President Obama did a deal with the regime which would have allowed it to develop nuclear weapons after at best a ten-year delay, and which opened the way for millions of dollars to be funnelled into Iran to finance its continuing terrorist attacks, regional aggression and genocidal agenda against Israel. 

Faced with attacks on American assets, Carter ran away, Clinton prevaricated, Obama actually helped fund them – but Trump ruthlessly and decisively killed the attacker. America is now back as a force to be reckoned with.

@NikkiHaley

Qassem Soleimani was an arch-terrorist with American blood on his hands.  His demise should be applauded by all who seek peace and justice.  Proud of President Trump for doing the strong and right thing. @realDonaldTrump 🇺🇸

*************

@Keir_Starmer

This is an extremely serious situation. There’s a clear danger of further violence and escalation in the Middle East. We need to engage, not isolate Iran. All sides need to de-escalate tensions and prevent further conflict.

@lisanandy

This is a very dangerous moment. 17 years after the catastrophic decision to go to war in Iraq violence still rages every day. World leaders must stand up to Trump. The last thing we need is another all-out war.

Qasem Soleimani: 'This will escalate an already volatile situation’

The US assassination of Qasem Soleimani is an extremely serious and dangerous escalation of conflict with global significance. The UK government should urge restraint on the part of both Iran and the US, and stand up to the belligerent actions and rhetoric coming from the US.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) January 3, 202

Update: I swear I hadn't looked at Lucy Lips's post on Harry's Place when I chose these tweets and  quotes.  I haven't been plagiarising, honest.

Complaints from both sides.

No 36 “Bias by uneven standards” - (is this the same as bias by false equivalence?)

I contend that claims of equivalence between complaints from the left and complaints from the right are false. 

The Input. The Beeb’s employees are organically/biologically sourced from the Guardian. Some subsequently move on to al Jazeera. What I'm saying is -the BBC's balance point is out of kilter. 

(The definition of a balance point is when a place's heat 'right' output equals the heat 'left' input, or when weight is equally distributed when resting on a single spot.) 

The output. To achieve impartiality (where the ‘left’ output equals the ‘right’ output) the input must also be from both the left and the right. In other words “it’s the input stupid”.

Most complaints about 'right-wing bias' that the BBC cites in its defence come from the extreme left. The complainant is frequently outraged at anything they/he/she/xe deems ‘not left-wing enough’. On the other hand, complaints about left-wing bias are a) far more numerous, b) much more articulate, c) patently more substantive. I think there is now a pretty widely-held consensus to that effect.

Contrary to what the esteemed and rather self-deprecating DG might say, there is no equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia. Antisemitism is a (recognised) term for hatred of Jews. It traditionally comes from the right, as in extreme nationalism or ‘white’ supremacy, and - more overtly these days - from the left, where we see a ballooning of the (cognitively dissonant) alliance between left-wing anti-capitalists (mainly anti-Christian / agnostics) and pious Muslims who specialise in demonising Jews using extreme paranoid projectionism. This involves accusing the Jews of the very revealing wish-list kind of stuff that’s going on in their own heads, particularly but not exclusively, a burning desire for world domination.

Anyway, Jew-hate is blanket bigotry based on suspicion, envy and hatred of a ‘people’ whereas Islamophobia is a mechanism designed to silence criticism of an unnatural religious ideology. 

I don’t know why I even bothered to say that.

Anyway, here’s Stephen Daisley (£) saying what I (might have) written -  or if I haven’t, I meant to. 

He thinks the so-called moderate Labour MPs are guilty of enabling. Good article. (Did you realise that Lisa Nandy, for all her wisdom, nuanced reasoning and 'moderation', is chair of Palestine something or other. So there. And Boris doesn’t think much of BDS.

I contend that the BBC is equally guilty of enabling. It’s the Corbynism, stupid.

Pheeww! (OPEN THREAD)

A few observations, but please make allowances for someone who only managed about four hours sleep. 

Thank you for a lively open thread.  (You may use this as a new one if you like)

The magic has deserted the grandpa. The full pronunciation of ‘Party’ has resumed; Jeremy's ’T’ has been restored to its rightful place. He probably deduced that pandering to glottal-stopping troops was a waste of time if they’re going to just turn on him and kick him when he’s down.

Although I wouldn’t class Lisa Nandy and Lucy Powell as particularly disloyal, or Corbynista troops -  not by a long chalk - but don’t forget, they would have stood by him if Labour hadn’t been thoroughly trounced.  

Both of them publicly turned on him this morning, albeit in measured tones.  Lucy Powell said he could have shown some contrition and taken responsibility for Labour’s failure. He didn’t. He was irritable and he doubled down on the weaknesses in his campaign with remarkably stubborn intransigence. Sulky and, what’s the opposite of magnanimous? Mean-spirited?

I was sorry that Caroline Flint lost her seat. She was magnanimous. That's the way to do it.

What will happen next?

Where will all the antisemitism go? It’s out of the bottle and it can’t go back.

Let’s see how the BBC will adjust. Will they pretend they weren't institutionally hostile to the Tories all along?

Look at "ex-BBC" Paul Mason! I think he's completely lost touch with reality. Yet the BBC once employed him as a BBC economics expert. Look at shifty Shami Chakrabarti. She's been interviewed by the BBC's finest a few times since 'the whitewash'. Yet she wasn't even challenged on the fiasco of a report that earned her a peerage.

 But, hey. Pheewwww!

It's only words

I might have mentioned this before, but I’m not on Twitter. Life’s too short. However, I do get information from Twitter  - it reaches the parts (information-wise) that other information-providers don’t reach. 

A valuable source for anyone following Britain’s descent into pre-war 1930s Germany is the lively Twitter timeline of Sussex Friends of Israel; it does what it says on the tin. 

What’s it like for residents of Brighton and Hove during the Labour Party conference? What if you happen to be a Zionist, or simply Jewish, and a furious mob of antisemitic zealots descends at your back door with their “Free Palestine” T-shirts and starts setting up their vile, incendiary fringe-events and stalls. 

No wonder the Sussex friends of Israel is a-buzzing.

I have to say that I watched quite a bit of the Labour Party Conference on the Parliament channel. Think of it as part ‘rubber-necking’ (as in something horrifying that you can’t take your eyes off) and part ‘better keep an eye on it” as you might with, say, a lit candle or a headache after a concussion. You know, it might turn out nasty.

Sussex Friends of Israel Twitter feed provided me with concrete evidence of some of the things I saw with my very own incredulous eyes and wanted to see again just to make sure they were ‘real’. I’m not talking about the sea of Palestinian flags that Elder of Ziyon featured the other day. Nor about the wild applause speakers received for announcing that they were ‘first-time’ delegates and ‘first-time’ speakers - like Madonna’s virgin, a bit “touched”  (in the head) for the very first time. 

No, I’m not even talking about the sub-standard quality of the speeches, the venomous anti-Tory rhetoric, or the bitter, envious negativity that tainted the whole caboodle, let alone the farcical bungled confusion over their ‘crucial’ vote on composite 13 -  where a show of hands narrowly rejected a motion that would have committed the Labour Party to campaign for “Remain”, (though some ‘Remainers’ dispute the outcome)

No, what I needed to see again with my own eyes were two speeches, which I suppose came loosely under the “Foreign Affairs” umbrella. They tackled ‘Palestine’. The first abomination consisted of an  illogical tirade from a female delegate called Ali Brownlie Bojang (look her up - troubling - if she is who she seems to be) 

This person recounted a ‘historic’ tale about Jewish armies driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes: ‘they left with nothing because they thought they were coming back in a few days’. After delivering more crowd-pleasing fantasies she concluded with a rabble-rousing but strangely tremulous cry: “Free Palestine!” Unfortunately, the video only captured the finale, which saves you, dear reader, from the bit-by-bit deconstruction I might otherwise have had to include. 

The F***ING state of this. This is the floor of the UK's official party of opposition! pic.twitter.com/DQKG64urt1

— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) September 23, 2019

The second speech was even more of a farce. I even felt a pang of sympathy for the poor person who lost her smart-phone script mid-way through her diatribe. What was particularly farcical about this episode was that she received a standing ovation just for announcing “My name is Vanessa Stilwell and I am from Jewish Voice for Labour and I have never seen any antisemitism in the Labour Party”. Imagine, those credentials are even more virtuous than being a virgin speaker!

Thereafter she squandered the bulk of her precious two-minutes of hate-slot on searching and eventually failing to find page two of a tale about hundreds of thousands of peaceful unarmed Palestinians being shot in the lower limbs - we’ll never know the outcome of this tragic tale of unprovoked Israeli brutality.  Even the embarrassing hiatus of panicky but ultimately ineffectual scrolling through her phone and saying “oh dear - sorry “ didn’t dent the enthusiasm of the whipped-up mob. I found a video of the whole thing embedded within some godforsaken Twitter thread but I can’t quite find it again - so in a way, I know how she must have felt - bloody computers and smartphones and www.! Ugh!

Did the BBC report any of this? No. They were totally uninterested in that aspect of it. Even the Politics Live episode in which Sarah Baxter admitted she’d been to the conference didn’t bring the subject up at all, until  this exchange:

THIS 👇👇@CharlesWalkerMP delivers his damning verdict on the chances of @jeremycorbyn becoming PM:

“The HoC will never put @jeremycorbyn into No. 10. Never, ever. It will never happen because he has a fundamental problem with parts of our community that happen to be Jewish” pic.twitter.com/FBWvhPrWco

— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) September 25, 2019

This ‘tribal’ remark has enraged Sussex Friends. I’d always thought there was some hope for Lisa Nandy, but now I see her, just like Labour’s Laura Pidcock, as so engrossed in the trials and tribulations within the confines of her particular constituency that she can’t see beyond it. Maybe all an MP needs to be is a single-minded advocate for their own constituents, but if they hope to rise within their party they need to be aware of the bigger picture too. This unimaginative attitude is especially puzzling from Nandy as she keeps saying ‘we must protect our minorities’. 

From a profound matter that the BBC willfully ignores, to something relatively superficial that the BBC is amplifying to an absurd degree. They have made the most ridiculous and sensationalised pantomime out of this ‘language’ business. 

I watched the Parliament channel nearly all day yesterday. The rhetoric was acrimonious, spiteful and full of bile.  Indeed most of the speeches from the opposition benches were negative, repetitive and contained no constructive ideas.

The BBC headlines were devoted to “language”, in particular, the word “surrender” as in “the surrender bill”. Of course, we all know what Boris meant - that preventing Britain from walking away from negotiations if faced only with an unsatisfactory deal is tantamount to surrender. It leaves Remain as the only option, which is the whole idea of the bill. No-one made such a fuss over the French-as-a-nation being defamed with the facetious label ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’ Or any fuss at all. And incidentally, dragging Brendan Cox to tell us what Jo would have thought, as they did on Radio 4 this morning was a pathetic idea; bad taste and irrelevant.

The Greta-like, childish focus on Boris saying ‘sorry’ was another example of the media’s infantilising influence on politics and current affairs. There is a difference between saying “Sorry for causing offence” rather than apologising for the actual offence, as is often pointed out, and making Boris say ‘sorry’ forces him to make the kind of non-apology that attracts equal disdain. 

As it is, he had no alternative but to respect and abide by the decision arrived at by an institution considered to be the ultimate legal arbitrator, but even if one thinks he's morally obliged to apologise for the ‘proroguing’, which was retrospectively judged to be invalid - nullified and voided, does it follow that he is also required or to say sorry for making the case in the first place? I’m only asking.

Actually, he seemed to me quite magnanimous and gracious in defeat, unlike those Labour MPs. If the BBC is going to make such a massive fuss over ‘language’ what about the spiteful, personal and vindictive bile that comes from the insufferable pigeon-like SNP bore, Blackford?

You have to ask. Why does the BBC behave in this increasingly tabloidy and infantilised way? I used to be ambivalent about abolishing the BBC because of the good stuff that was in there. If the Labour Party can abolish Eton, do away with borders and dispense altogether with the letter ’t’ I’m coming round to thinking that abolishing the BBC is the only way.

I don't give a shit?

I haven’t been watching or listening to much Beeb lately, but sadly I did catch two of the most astonishing examples of BBCism over the last day or two. 

Number one was the Politics Live assault on Gerard Batten. The other was Nick Robinson’s bizarre interview with Ukip’s Stuart Agnew on the Today Programme. 

I’m not an avid Batten fan, but he has risen in my estimation due to his calm demeanour in the face of the outrageous treatment he’s been subjected to by people like Jo Coburn and various other media hacks - mostly women I think it’s safe to say.

No wonder he declined to appear on the Today Programme as Nick Robinson pointed out rather petulantly this a.m.

Jo Coburn wore a scowl of utter contempt as she interrogated him, not at all like her bemused and light-heartedly exasperated countenance when tussling with gorgeous George the other day, despite his downright rudeness.

The most remarkable feature of the press conference with Ukip, as well as interviews with Ukip people, is the total absence of any substantive argument forthcoming, from any interlocutor.  To a man (woman) it’s simply enough to bleat “the rape tweet” and “anti-Islam”.

What with Jo Coburn’s crass questioning and Lisa Nandy’s sanctimonious indignation about the ‘rape tweet’,  the interview was a total fiasco. What a waste of time. Lisa Nandy, whom I normally regard as one of the current Labour Party’s most reasonable (least unreasonable)  members, stubbornly refused to move past the “rape tweet” issue. Batten warned her that Benjamin was suing people for lying about the ‘rape tweet’,  which she took as a threat. 

Jo Coburn commanding Batten to provide an example of something Benjamin might say that would ‘cross the line’ was utterly ridiculous.

However, as far as I’m concerned Carl Benjamin has already crossed the line with his Holocaust remark. His PC-busting efforts are pretty indefensible as soon as one views them as anything other than the deliberate devices to get himself noticed he claims they are.

Personally, I do have a problem with the whole ‘rape’ fiasco because it’s almost as though he believed he was insulting Jess Phillips when he said he wouldn’t even rape her; as if she should be flattered by someone’s desire to rape her and insulted by his non-desire to do so. “Cos you’re (not) worth it,” so to speak. It’s as if he considers rape as, say, a possible last-resort resolution of unrequited sexual desire, rather than motivated by hate, anger, power and sadism, as it’s more commonly understood to be.  ("We had to resort to rape, as Dunkula quipped))

Of course the other offensive remark he made, which doesn’t seem to bother the media half as much as the rape thing, is the ‘I don’t give a shit” about the Holocaust. The fact that the media has shown no interest in that one is doubly disturbing.

.@UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin:

“Jewish people, unfortunately for them, have got to drop the identity politics. I’m sorry about the Holocaust but I don’t give a s***. I’m sorry.” https://t.co/GKxvtxNbhZ

— Jewish News (@JewishNewsUK) April 28, 2019

The context seems to have been that he was criticising identity politics, which he hates - and who doesn’t despise an exploitative “asaJew?” - but by saying “Jews this” and “Jews that” - even if he’s kind of damning “the Jews” with faint praise - (they work hard, they’re clever, and they obviously haven’t been ‘held back’ etc etc) well, that in itself is “identity” based stuff in a nutshell. So saying he’s sorry about the Holocaust (oh, and thanks for the benevolence) but then to follow it with ‘I don’t give a shit’ is something else; and he hasn't convinced me that he only said it to ‘get himself noticed’ in the ‘innocent face’ way of his. Especially if you consider the rabid antisemitism that this remark has drawn out, online. And that’s from his fans and defenders.

We have an epidemic of antisemitism, which is coming from all directions. People should be far more vigilant. Seriously.

Nick Robinson excelled himself on the Today programme. Making some sort of weird whataboutery point involving Christianity. That was one of the most inappropriate responses to Ukip’s politically incorrect anti-Islamness that I’ve ever heard. Nil points, Nick. The complaint about Gerard Batten having the temerity to decline an invitation to come along and be harangued about Carl Benjamin’s infamous rape tweet was the icing on a very stale and unappetising cake.