A curious omission

 
The Daily Mail has a fascinating story today:

Surely the interesting question here is who at the BBC sanctioned the decision to leave Tom Watson's name out?

Boo bloody hoo

Tom Watson is aligning himself with Mohammed Shafiq now. They are both imploring YouTube to complete Tommy Robinson’s banishment from social media. How peculiar.

The fact that extremist Jew-haters and would-be Jew-exterminators like Hamas and Co are free to rant all over the www is rarely considered (either in comparison to Tommy Robinson or indeed in comparison to “British values”.)

Of all the crocodile tears coming from the Labour Party about antisemitism through people like Watson and Barry Gardiner, this ban Tommy business is an appallingly hypocritical manifestation of "anti-racist" virtue signalling. 

Actually, shedding tears seem to be trending. Have you noticed? MPs seem to think making speeches with sobs in their voices makes them look  ‘human’ and sincere. In my opinion, it does the opposite. (Did you spot Jess Phillips suppressing the sobs over poverty?)

I think Sky won this morning’s political TV. I’m not much of a fan of Sophy Ridge - she seems to be out of her depth - but the line-up on her programme was better than Andrew Marr’s this morning.

Look at her interview with John McDonnell. He has mastered the art of smooth-talking. He didn’t  burst into tears, but he did manage to put on a convincing show of contrition over his party’s “antisemitism problem”.

“Yes, we must root it out. Yes, we haven’t dealt with it quickly enough.” As evidence that they're dealing with the problem, he has cited a problematic Momentum video, which sets out the ‘memes’  and ‘tropes’ one has to look out for in order for those, like Naz Shah, who need help to recognise what antisemitism is. It's Nazi stuff, and it comes from the far right. 

The conspiracy behind conspiracy theories 👀#Rothschild #Antisemitism #Socialists4Change pic.twitter.com/L3ELpXG6Xr

— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) February 28, 2019

Mustn’t allude to the antisemitism that stems from the Muslim community. Oh no. Because the community the Labour Party has to keep onside is, let’s not beat about the bush, inherently antisemitic. Tom Watson has to pretend not to notice that.  He has to if he wants to stay in employment. Is Tom Watson stupid enough not to see that this cognitive dissonance of his looks like hypocrisy and opportunism?

Of course, none of the MSM would dare to raise this; I doubt if Andrew Marr would handle it any better.

Oh Tommy, Tommy!

Tommy Watson

"I’m Tommy Watson from Kidderminster", Labour's deputy leader said to Andrew Marr last weekend. Meanwhile, this weekend Tommy from Kidderminster is trying to get Tommy from Luton banned from YouTube. 

Maajid Nawaz, for one, is appalled:

I have run out of patience with tech platforms that neglect terrorist, fanatical & paedophilic content online while chasing irrelevant “offensive” opinions or deplatforming legal personas non-grata merely to virtue signal for the elite liberal East & West coast echo chambers. 

These tech platforms neglect jihadist terrorists & paedophilic content. Hamas, Hizbollah, other terrorists & pedophile rings still operate online. [To Tommy Watson, Labour's deputy leader:] Your own party objected to a UK ban on Hizbollah. Meanwhile, you’re busy deplatforming legal personas non-grata —> 1st world problems.

Meanwhile, here's a 'conspiratorial thought' from a lady I follow on Twitter:

Michael Gove: the speech

Everyone else has done it so we might as well publish the barnstormer we enjoyed yesterday. Funnily enough, the BBC chose instead to feature Tom Watson’s effort, over which the spectre of an enormous  ‘elephant’ loomed.

I have to admit that many of my political and philosophical positions are primarily emotional. For example, I’ve loathed Corbers ever since he hove into view alongside his Judeophobic colleagues, like, say Andy Slaughter and, I don’t know, Chris Mullin. That was long ago. Back when the prospect of such a wrong-headed individual becoming leader of the Labour Party was simply unthinkable.

But I’ve admired Gove, particularly are reading his 2016 Times piece (£) on antisemitism, way before the issue became a hot topic. 

From an emotional angle, admittedly, I think the label ‘back-stabber’ is unfair because I can very well understand his misgivings about Boris’s leadership potential and his reluctance to be closely associated with what he foresaw as a potential accident-waiting-to-happen. With hindsight, it may or may not have been a big mistake, but I like to believe it was sincerely motivated rather than malevolent. 

One might consider how Tom Watson must feel, knowing that despite losing an elephantine amount of weight he’s still shackled to another humungous elephant.

Tom Watson on the Marr Show

.@tom_watson says Jeremy Corbyn "has expressed deep regret" for comments he made about an 'anti-Semitic' mural

"I want Jewish members of Labour to feel welcome in our party" he tells #marr pic.twitter.com/PfORyQrQye

— The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) March 25, 2018

They used to say “It takes all sorts” and here’s where Craig and I see things a bit differently. I didn’t find Andrew Marr’s interview with Tom Watson satisfactory at all. I was glad that Marr brought the subject up, but hey, I don’t regard being grateful for small mercies especially pleasing. 

After the recent hooha about Jeremy’s memberships of not one but two antisemitic Facebook groups, to ignore the matter of the mural in a ‘flagship’ politics show would have made the BBC look positively complicit. 

Andrew Marr did indeed quiz Watson on the mural debacle, but treating each example of  antisemitism in the Labour Party as a separate incident minimises the gravity of the case. Jeremy Corbyn’s record in particular in that regard needs to be seen as a whole.  

“It is not only women whom Momentum doesn’t seem to like very much, of course. There are also Jews. Jeremy Corbyn resists the charge of anti-semitism, as you might well expect — heaven forfend, Jews are absolutely bloody marvellous, he will announce when challenged on this issue — but his other utterances, and indeed actions, tend to give the game away.[…] 

He has called the genocidal racists of Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends”, for example. He could not bring himself even to meet the Israeli prime minister last year (which must have really disappointed Benjamin Netanyahu), and a recent Labour Party fact-finding tour to Israel disdained to meet any Israeli politicians who don’t want to give their country over to the Palestinians first thing Monday morning.[…] 

Then there’s the other stuff. The extraordinary tolerance shown by the party leadership to people who have said the most outrageously anti-semitic remarks. The whitewashed report into anti-semitism within the party. Jezza is also a member of a virulently anti-semitic Facebook group that accuses Jews of controlling the media, of wishing to establish a New World Order and of harvesting organs from Syrian prisoners. 

Corbyn latterly claimed he’d been added to this forum without his knowledge. How’d that happen, Jezza? Most recently there’s the mural, a ghastly painting, titled Freedom for Humanity, by a talentless American graffiti artist called Mear One. It was commissioned in 2012 for a wall in east London (presumably at your expense somewhere down the line), then swiftly removed because of its quite astonishing anti-semitism. A cabal of hook-nosed money men playing Monopoly, the table resting on the backs of naked workers.

That was an excerpt from Rod Liddle’s piece in today’s Sunday Times (£). I deliberately left out the paragraph about Israel because that throws up another aspect of the situation, which should be addressed all by itself. 

The BBC-educated (un)intelligentsia see Israel as a racist project, which vindicates the Labour Party’s anti-Zionism and enables them to say with a ‘clear conscience’ that they’re against racism  in all its forms when and wherever they find it. Which is what they do, over and over again. They are able to get away with it because, through ignorance and bigotry, the consensus is largely with them.

Back to Andrew Marr. If you look at the show’s Twitter - many of the comments below the clip that actually try to defend Jeremy Corbyn do so by saying that they don’t see anything antisemitic in the mural. Too late! He’s admitted it, folks! He even said he regretted making that error-strewn comment on Facebook. That’s a rerun of Ken Livingstone denying the antisemitic nature of Naz Shah’s offensive retweet even after she had admitted  it was antisemitic and apologised most sincerely, folks.

This is not a matter of people making moronic comments about people’s noses. It’s about scurrilous antisemitic tropes as per The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an early example of FAKE News from 1920. Unbelievably, it’s actually available from Amazon for as little as £3.29. The blurb says:

“The Protocols has been proven to be a forgery.The forgery contains numerous elements typical of what is known in literature as a "False Document" a document that is deliberately written to fool the reader into believing that what is written is truthful and accurate even though, in actuality, it is not.”

I wonder how many people who purchase this item keep that in mind.

Andrew Marr didn’t even flinch at the mention of the Chakrabarti whitewash. The reward bestowed upon her for that was a scandal that the BBC barely batted an eyelid at. Tom Watson mentioned measures that have been ‘put in place’ to tackle antisemitism in the party. What are they? I didn’t hear Andrew Marr press him on that.

No, I don’t feel pleased about that interview at all.

That interview

Here's part of The Andrew Marr Show's own transcript of that interview with Tom Watson:

AM: Some people suggest that the Owen Smith sacking was an attempt to deflect public attention. Can I ask you to look at this?

What is your reaction when you see that image?
TW: My reaction is that is a horrible anti-Semitic mural that was rightly taken down.

AM: And how long did it take you to glance at that and to make that judgement?

TW: Well, look, you’re showing it me on a 32-inch screen on national television and I’ve seen it about a hundred times on social media. Very different to seeing it on Facebook when you’re on the move.

AM: Because your leader, who apparently glanced at it, didn’t look at it properly and suggested to the guy who written in that it shouldn’t be taken down. He said, I quote, ‘some of the older, white Jewish folk in the local community had an issue with me portraying their beloved #Rothschild or #Warburg as the demons they are.’ And he said it was being whitewashed and taken down, and Jeremy Corbyn said, ‘why? You’re in good company, Rockefeller destroyed Diego Rivera’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.’ Which seems a remarkable thing to say. You’ve only to glance at that to see what it’s about. It’s Third Reich propaganda anti-Semitism.

TW: Well, look, that is why Jeremy has expressed deep regret and apologised for that, and has actually said that it’s right that the mural was taken down.

AM: And yet, you know, it’s taken years for some of your colleagues to get him to respond to this. Luciana Berger, who’s a Jewish Labour MP, has been trying to get a response out of Jeremy Corbyn for a long, long time and she’s still very, very upset that he has not completely, fully apologised for this.

TW: Well, I’m very, very sorry that people feel hurt by this, and that’s why I think it’s right that Jeremy has expressed regret for it. He said that he didn’t see the mural, he was talking about free

expression, and I think you know, now that he has seen the mural he’s right to say that it was right not just to be removed but that he expresses deep regret for the offence caused by the mural.

AM: He regrets not looking more closely at it. Can I suggest to you that if this was a mural attacking black people or any other ethnic group then nobody in the Labour Party would have the slightest hesitation about condemning it.

TW: Well, nobody in the Labour Party should have the slightest hesitation in condemning this mural. It’s anti-Semitic, it’s horrible, and I want Jewish members as well as every other member of the Labour Party to feel welcome in our party. I think it’s time we said that enough is enough on these anti-Semitic stories, and we are taking measures to do that. You know, we’ve increased our staff that do these investigations. We’ve had the Chakrabarti Report. We worked with our affiliated organisation, the Jewish Labour Movement, to redefine anti-Semitism at our conference last year.

I understand the concern out there.

AM: Do you agree with Chris Williamson that what’s going on is the weaponising of anti-Semitism?

TW: No. No, I don’t agree with that at all. But what I do think is we’ve got to work harder to stamp out anti-Semitism, and that requires our own internal procedures to be faster in the way they

operate and deeper. But all I can say -

AM: These allegations carry on. Every few weeks there’s another anti-Semitic row involving the Labour Party. It seems to be something that you can’t shrug off or slough off. Is this not the moment for you and for Jeremy Corbyn to go and meet the Chief Rabbi and talk it through and explain your position and start to try and get this behind you? Because if it goes on till the election you’re in dead trouble with Jewish voters.

TW: Well, I’m very honoured to have already me the Chief Rabbi and discussed this. I’ve spoken at our Labour Friends of Israel lunch, I talk to the Jewish community regularly. I talk to colleagues who are concerned about this.

AM: What about Jeremy Corbyn?

TW: So let me say it’s time we stamped out anti-Semitism and we’re doing so. We’ve increased our resources to investigate these individual cases. But you know, we’re a member-led party, we need to make sure that we investigate these things thoroughly to make sure justice is done.

.....
(doubtless after someone shouted down his earpiece)

AM: Okay, before I finish I should say that that quote I read out from the artist about his mural was not the one that Jeremy Corbyn saw, he just saw the image.