The New Statesman's Stephen Bush & Ailbhe Rea Are a Perfect Illustration of Journalists Who Reinforce Rather than Question Those in Power
It is a question that has often puzzled me? Why is it that 90+% of journalists have no integrity or honesty? It can’t just be the money. Does the atmosphere and norms of a newsroom corrupt them? Or are most journalists already corrupted before they even begin their jobs?
you cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
In an interview with Noam Chomsky in February 1996 Andrew Marr fatuously asked “How can you know I’m self-censoring?” Marr smugly assumed that Chomsky would not be able to answer this question since no one can get inside the mind of another. But Chomsky responded:
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
As Marr admitted this was unanswerable, not because it was a conspiracy as he alleged but because it wasn’t a conspiracy. Marr would not be fronting the BBC’s key Sunday politics show if he was not a right-wing Tory. It is inconceivable that such a programme could be hosted by a socialist journalist.
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| Andrew Neil, who was so concerned about 'Labour antisemitism' hired holocaust denier David Irving to examine the Goebbels Diaries for the Sunday Times |
It is hard to point to one mainstream TV political correspondent who isn’t on the Right. Andrew Marr, Laura Kuensberg, Andrew Neil, Fiona Bruce, Robert Peston, Michael Crick etc are all right-wing. Andrew Neil, as Editor of the Sunday Times, employed a holocaust denier, David Irving, to examine the Goebbels Diaries and employed an open anti-Semite, Taki at The Spectator.
Despite this Andrew Neil was a fervent advocate for the ‘Labour is anti-Semitic’ narrative. Indeed he asked the killer question of Corbyn, ‘will you apologise to the Jewish community for anti-Semitism’ at the last election. If Corbyn hadn’t been so stupid and if Seamus Milne had bothered to brief him for the interview, then Corbyn could easily have turned the tables.
Does anyone think that Boris Johnson became a Telegraph columnist by chance, having already been sacked by The Times for lying? Does anyone think that Jonathan Freedland would be in a position to be the Guardian’s gatekeeper if he wasn’t an integral part of the British Establishment and almost certainly an Intelligence Asset?
The fact that a brilliant journalist like John Pilger, a man who played a key part in revealing the role of the United States in genocide in East Timor and Pol Pot in Cambodia and who is responsible for saving the life of thousands with his journalism, can be kept off the BBC and out of the British press illustrates Chomsky’s point.
Julian Assange
The role of the yellow press is best illustrated by the torture of Julian Assange. His lawyers fear for his life in Belmarsh yet the Press have not raised a squeak of protest. I feel guilty even comparing journalists to prostitutes. Prostitutes are forced to sell their bodies and can at least take a shower afterwards. Journalists cannot expunge their treachery so easily given that they betray people with malice aforethought.
The Guardian exploited Assange and Wikileaks for a series of exposessuch as Kenyan President Daniel Arap Poi looting hundreds of millions of pounds and placing it in over 30 countries.
As Editor Alan Rusbridger wrote:
‘In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing.’
And how did the Guardian repay Assange after he had sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy after the submission of an extradition request from Sweden on bogus allegations of rape, whose sole purpose was to send him back to the United States?
There were a constant stream of attacks by people like Suzanna Moore, perhaps the most disgusting ‘journalist’ of all. It’s no coincidence that one of the papers she used to attack Assange was the New Statesman.
In one tweet Moore called Assange a ‘flattened guinea pig’. to which I responded that I could only assume that it was a bird that Moore had sat on.
Germaine Greer observed that Moore possessed “hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage.’
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| Marina Hyde is a 'journalist' without any seeming purpose to her |
If you want to get the measure of the treachery of Guardian journalists such as Marina Hyde, James Ball etc. then read ‘How the Guardian’s deferential mediocrities behaved like a pack of wolves in defence of the special relationship & the British state’. John Pilger called her behaviour ‘slow witted viciousness.’‘
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| The lies and fake news of the Guardian as they tried to undermine Julian Assange |
This culminated in November 2018 in a Guardian fake news story about talks between Trump’s Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. There was no truth in it but the Guardian have refused to provide any proof of their allegations.
But this is not just true of the mainstream press. It is equally true of the New Statesman, a magazine that likes to think of itself as on the radical wing of the British press but in reality functions as a repository for failed Establishment journalists who like to think of themselves as radical.
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| Audrey, Berry and Campbell |
To be fair, it has had periods in the 1970’s and 1980’s when the New Statesman was a radical paper. One of its journalists was a friend of mine from the days of Brighton Voice, Duncan Campbell, who was prosecuted with two others in what became known as the ABC Trial.
Campbell together with Crispin Aubrey and John Berry were charged under the Official Secrets Act but the case blew up in the face of the State. All 3 were convicted but such was the atmosphere surrounding the case that custodial sentences were not imposed. It was an example of a right-wing Labour government in action.
Today Campbell would have no place in the New Statesman which functions as a repository for mediocrities or failed Guardianistas.
In much the same way journalists of the calibre of Jonathan Steele, John Palmer and David Hirst would not be employed by The Guardian today.
many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists.
New Statesman – a Propaganda Vehicle for the JLM
The New Statesman bought into the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign 101%, acting like a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist (Jewish) Labour Movement. They printed a piece by Mike Katz and Adam Langleben denying that their then Chair Ivor Caplin had accepted Labour’s Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct in 2018.
The Jewish Chronicle report Jewish Labour Movement chair condemned over Labour antisemitism meetingclaimed that Caplin ‘was 'played' by Labour leadership’. At the next JLM AGM Caplin was heavily defeated, with less than 20 votes against 160 for Mike Katz as Chair. Caplin didn’t appreciat that the whole purpose of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was that the issue could never be resolved without Corbyn’s resignation. It wasn’t about anti-Semitism.
That famous Zoom meeting
When Jackie Walker and I spoke at a Zoom meeting with Dianne Abbot and Bell Ribaire-Addy – the Press narrative was about Anti-Semitism not Free Speech and none more so than Ailbhe Rea’s Labour’s Zoom call row reveals a party deeply divided over racism
You might think it an absurdity that two Jewish people, one of whom was Black, could be used as an example of ‘anti-Semitism’. But this all took place in the context of the narrative that anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism. Since both of us were Jewish anti-Zionists, we were therefore anti-Semites according to the ‘logic’ of Israel’s defenders.
The attempt to ‘no platform’ us by the Board of Deputies, which has unquestioning support for Israel and Zionism hardwiredinto its constitution, is no different to the banning of anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa under the 1982 Internal Security Act. Just as Jewish anti-Zionists are hated by Zionist Jewish Supremacists, so White anti-Apartheid activists were hated by supporters of Apartheid. Indeed we are both termed ‘traitor’ by the respective nationalists.
The witless Rhea wrotethat ‘Keir Starmer is facing his first test over antisemitism since becoming Labour leader’. As George Orwell observed in 1984
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
Two Jewish anti-Zionists who use their Jewish identity to oppose the actions of a racist ‘Jewish state’ which separates and segregates its Arab citizens in schools, employment and housing, even to the extent of operating segregated maternity wards, where Jewish women can give birth without the presence of Arab women, are called ‘anti-Semitic’. We used to be called ‘racist’ by the National Front and BNP as part of their ‘'Defend Rights for Whites' campaign.
Instead of dealing with the question at the heart of the issue, namely whether criticism of Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic Rea meekly accepted the Zionist narrative. Rea wrote:
He [Starmer] has come in for criticism, however, for not expelling the pair, having signed a pledge during his leadership campaign promising to suspend MPs or activists “who support, campaign or provide a platform for people who have been suspended or expelled in the wake of antisemitic incidents”.
The row exposes the complexities underlying Starmer’s clearly stated and simple commitment to stamping out antisemitism within Labour...
There is, firstly, the practical challenge of trying to implement the above pledge in an online context. The fifth of the Board of Deputies’ pledges to stamp out antisemitism outlines a clear “no platform for bigotry” policy,...
Nowhere does Rea explain how ‘stamping out anti-Semitism’ accords with banning 2 Jewish anti-Zionists.
If this had been 1933 then Rhea would have been asking the same questions as Viscount Harmsworth when he whitewashed Hitler’ anti-Semitism, alongside most of the British press, the Daily Mirror and Times included. Harmsworth wrote that:
‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’
This was a time when both Churchill and Lloyd George welcomed Hitler to power as a bastion of defence against Communism.
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| What kind of Uncle Tom calls criticism of Israeli Apartheid an 'antisemitic trope'? Step forward Stephen Bush |
Stephen Bush, the Political Editor of the New Statesman, is if anything worse than Rea. In his piece for the ‘i’ he accepts that Starmer’s mission is ‘to rid the Labour party of the taint of antisemitism’.
Starmer has appointed a Committee of hand picked right-wingers in order to gloss over the racism revealed in Labour’s leaked Report. See for example Yomi Adegoke’s The leaked Labour report reveals a shocking level of racism and sexism towards its black MPs.
Bush has nothing to say about this or indeed the anti-Semitism of the head of the Compliance Unit, John Stolliday who referred to Ed Miliband as ‘beaker’.
When you think that those who were behind Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign were John Mann, a virulent anti-Roma racist and Tom Watson, who in the 2004 by-election in Birmingham Hodge Hill, issued as Campaign Manager a leaflet which said‘Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."
The same Tom Watson who ‘lost sleep’ when racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court, having waged an election campaign designed to ‘make white folks angry’ There is only one conclusion you can draw. Stephen Bush is yet another example of a presstitute as well as an Uncle Tom journalist.
A friend has just rung me up, she is a Black woman, to tell me that she is being investigated by the Labour Party because she commented on social media about the fact that the genocide in the slave trade and in the Congo is ignored whilst the holocaust of Jews (but no others) is prioritised. She feels aggrieved. She is an anti-racist campaigner yet she is being targeted by Labour with the full support of Bush.
The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has targeted not only Jewish anti-racists but also Black activists such as Marc Wadsworth and my friend. Black people ask why anti-Semitism, a marginal prejudice in Britain, is held to be so important whilst actual racism, such as Windrush is ignored. Yet they are told by the Labour Party that they are responsible for preventing Labour campaigning against racism! This is one of the charges now made by the witch-hunters. And Uncle Tom journalists like Stephen Bush lend their name to this campaign.
There is no Jewish Windrush scandal. No Jews have been deported. There is no state racism against Jews. Jews are not disproportionately imprisoned or the victims of Police violence because they are White. Yet collaborators like Bush, in their eagerness to please the British Establishment, bend over backwards to repeat the ‘anti-Semitism’ mantra about Labour anti-Semitism.
To Bush alleging that Israel trains and helps militarise police forces in the United States is an ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’. The fact that this is well documented by groups like Amnesty International is irrelevant. ‘Journalists’ like Bush never ask basic questions such as why Black Lives Matter consider Israel an Apartheid and Genocidal State. BLM have been repeatedly accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. It would no doubt be worth more than their jobs to mention this and would lead to him no longer being invited on BBC programmes.
Wikipediatells us that Presstitute is a ‘portmanteauof pressand prostitute’. It is a journalist who writes what their Editor expects. A journalist who writes to please those in power but whose writing is devoid of all substance and analysis. It is not the ‘why’ but the ‘how’that is important. They writing is descriptive rather than analytical. They describe procedure and process and assume their case without ever arguing or explaining it.
For example the Labour Party at the Zionist insistence adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018. Why? To redefine anti-Semitism in such a way as to net criticism of Israel. Yet virtually none have spoken out. When my dad, like thousands of other Jews, ignored the Board of Deputies to take part in physically opposing the British Union of Fascists, he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what it’s about.
For Bush and Rea ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ is received wisdom. It is part of what Chomsky called ‘manufacturing consent’.
‘Labour anti-Semitism’ became a ‘disinformation paradigm’ in which all evidence to the contrary was excluded. ‘Journalists’ like Rea or Bush would never think of asking such basic questions as to why the whole of the Tory press, which is so unconcerned about other forms of racism, was obsessed by ‘Labour anti-Semitism’.
Why should the Daily Mail and Sun, which employed Katie Hopkins, for whom refugees were ‘cockroaches’, a term the Nazis applied to the Jews, be so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’? Such simple questions were never asked because their answers would throw into doubt the basic assumptions of the paradigm.
Or why Boris Johnson, who calls Black people ‘picanninies’ with ‘water melon smiles’ and who has written a novel, ’72 Virgins’ which depicted Jews as controlling the media, is also concerned about ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. Such basic questions as these have never occurred to presstitutes like Rea or Bush.
Julian Assange
The purpose of the writing of ‘journalists’ like Bush and Rea is to reinforce the disinformation paradigm and the existing narrative. It is not to challenge it or ask questions. Of course it wasn’t always like this. Julian Assange is a prime example of a journalism which revealed horrific war crimes.
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| Chelsea Manning served 10 months in solitary confinement rather than betray Julian Assange - Guardian journalists couldn't even give up their lunchbreak |
Assange is paying for his journalism with his liberty and possibly his life but this is of no concern to the Bushes and Rhea’s of the New Statesman or the yellow press in Britain. If you want to look for someone with integrity and courage you have to go to the United States where Chelsea Manning endured 10 months imprisonment in solitarity confinement rather than testify against Assange. The only sacrifices Rea and Bush are likely to make is in foregoing the best seats in a restaurant.
Tony Greenstein
Open Letter to Ailbhe Rea
Dear Ms Rea,
On 1stMay this year, you wrote an article‘row over Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy’s online meeting with expelled members’. Jackie Walker and myself were in the audience when both MPs spoke and after they had spoken we both spoke.
Any radical journalist with an ounce of integrity would have asked why the Board of Deputies were concerned with preventing our free speech. What had they to fear? Someone who wasn’t simply acting as an echo chamber for the lies and deceptions of the purveyors of Labour’s false anti-Semitism campaign would have asked a few questions.
However you are not the kind of journalist to ask questions of those in positions of power. You are the equivalent of a faithful court reporter, who records the views of the powerful. Those who are responsible for the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign are nothing if not powerful.
They include for example Donald Trump who, when telling4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go back home’added for good measure that they hate Israel and are anti-Semitic. The same Trump who tellsAmerican Jews that their ‘real home’ is Israel and that they “don’t love Israel enough.’
Of course the Board of Deputies which welcomedTrump to power has no objection to such anti-Semitism because Zionism’s foundational beliefs is that Jews do not belong in non-Jewish society. That was the whole point of Zionism.
It would be churlish to point out all the figures on the far-Right who love Israel and Zionism. People like the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right Richard Spencer, a ‘White Zionist’. Or Tommy Robinson for whom Israel is the embodimentof the ethno-nationalist state.
An honest journalist might point out that the Board has support for Israel and Zionism hardwired into its constitution and ask if there was any connection with it taking umbrage at 2 Jewish activists, one of whom was Black. However you are neither honest nor a journalist.
A journalist with an ounce of integrity would ask why an organisation which has never concerned itself with the anti-Semitism of the far right should be concerned with preventing free speech of Jewish anti-fascists.
If you had been daring you might have drawn an analogy with South Africa and ‘banned persons’ under the 1982 Internal Security Act. It was a criminal offence to quote or even mention the existence of banned persons. White opponents of Apartheid, like Jewish anti-Zionists today, were particular targets.
Anyone who has pretensions to the title ‘journalist’ might ask why it is that the Board of Deputies opposedJews in the 1930s physically confronting Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and in the 1970s did the same with the Anti-Nazi League which was ‘constantly under attack from the Jewish Board of Deputies.’ according to Paul Holborrow.
Why is it that the Board of Deputies’s first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration was not against the National Front or BNP but against Jeremy Corbyn? Any journalist who was not prostituting themselves to the powerful would have asked these simple and obvious questions.
Any journalist with even an iota of honesty would have asked why the Board’s demonstration includedNorman Tebbit of the ‘cricket test’ and Protestant bigot Ian Paisley MP. This must have been the first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration for both of these gentlemen or for another two Uncle Toms, Sajid David and Chuka Ummuna.
Of course you asked none of these questions because you don’t see your role as asking questions of those in power. Your duty is to echo the views of the British Establishment.
If you were to ever exercise the grey matter between your ears you might understand why a ‘Jewish’ State in a land whose indigenous population was ethnically cleansed cannot be other than a racist state. By its own definition Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens only. However you are not employed to think either.
In Afula crowds of demonstrators, led by their Mayor, protested at the sale of a house to an Arab in an all Jewish city. Dozens of rabbis in Israel have forbidden the letting of homes to Arabs. But you and Bush, are journalists in name only.
For Stephen Bush to cover up the crimes of Apartheid Israel is to make him complicit. The use of the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ is no different to the accusations of ‘anti-White’ racism that the Apartheid regime in South Africa levelled at opponents. This is why Bus is an Uncle Tom journalist. Any Black journalist who defends Apartheid is a collaborator.
Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to libel and lie. Even your references to Jackie Walker and I having been expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ had to be corrected. You hadn’t bothered to ask simple questions such as why, despite being suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ the Labour Party didn’t charge us with anti-Semitism. Strange that.
If you had been particularly adventurous you might have drawn an analogy with McCarthyism in America when people were banned from public platforms and prevented from working in the film industry. People like Pete Seeger to Charlie Chaplin.
If you or Bush had been around no doubt you would have cried ‘communist’ at fellow journalists. Both of you are the direct descendants of the ‘liberal’ journalist Arthur Schlesinger who went out of his way to attack those who were ‘communists’. When you shout ‘anti-Semite’ today you are doing no more than those who used to shout ‘Communist’.
The irony of all this is that the New Statesman was founded by a genuine anti-Semite, Sidney Webb. Webb, who was Colonial Secretary in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, proclaimed that ‘French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ And why? ‘There’s no money in it.’. [Paul Kelemen, The British Left & Zionism p. 20]. Ramsay MacDonald when visiting Palestine in 1922 contrasted the Zionist pioneers with
‘the rich plutocratic Jew, who is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred... he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ [David Cesarani, Anti-Zionism in Britain, p.141].
It is ironic that you and Stephen Bush, in your condemnation of ‘anti-Semitism’ are working for a publication founded by an anti-Semite! You are indeed Webb’s bastard children.
Have a good day!
Tony Greenstein