Those who abandon Livingstone today will abandon Corbyn tomorrow - Stand Up for Free Speech on Israel and Palestine

Why it’s time to boycott the Guardian and say no to liberal McCarthyism

Jonathan Freedland as Comment Editor ensured that the False Anti-Semitism Campaign met no opposition in the pages of the Guardian

The Guardian abandons any notion of free speech or democratic debate - as it lines up with the Zionists and Progress

The Guardian is pulling out all the stops to have Livingstone expelled

Yet another attempt to besmirch Livingstone by an erstwhile supporter

One among so many anti-Corbyn Guardian Opinion pieces -

Racist reactionaries such as Sir Trevor Chinn, former CEO of Lex Garages and the RAC - venture capitalist and all round member of the Establishment

The Jewish Labour Movement's Ella Rose explaining how peaceful Zionism is

So pleased were the Nazis with the visit for 6 months to Jewish Palestine by Baron von Mildenstein, the Head of the Gestapo's Jewish Desk, that on his return they struck a medal with a swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other!

‘Throughout the 1930’s, as part of the regime’s determination to force Jews to leave Germany, there was almost unanimous support in German government and Nazi party circles for promoting Zionism among German Jews’. 

Cartoon in the Zionist press about Ha'avara - Don't be upset Hitler the Jews r helping u

The Guardian is now putting out the begging bowl as the Corporate Media appeals to the values of social solidarity

Its anti-Semitic to mention this book by right-wing Zionist Edwin Black

Dear Ms VinerI notice that the Guardian has once again jumped in, with both feet, into the false and concocted moral panic around 'anti-Semitism'.  This time attacking Ken Livingstone.  
According to your current leading article, Labour has put Ken ahead of a fundamental principle.  I can't imagine which principle you are referring to.  Free speech?   The principle that you placed to the fore when Muslims protested at the attacks on their religion?  Or is this just another bout of Guardian hypocrisy? 

According to your Leader it is 'only for decorum's sake' that the word 'Zionist' is used instead of 'Jew'.  It is difficult to know where to begin when face with this type of ignorance and sheer stupidity.  Perhaps Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic Trump Advisor and ex-Breitbart CEO, should be called a Jew instead of a Zionist?  Or perhaps Pastor John Hagee, of Christians United for Israel, who is of the opinion that Hitler was a messenger sent from god, should also be called a Jew rather than what he, an anti-Semitic Zionist.  Jonathan Freedland is perfectly well aware that  Michal Kaminski, the former Polish MEP, combined anti-Semitism and Zionism in equal measure. 

It may be anti-Semitic to mention it, but the Zionist Federation of Germany's paper, Judische Rundschau, welcomed the `1935 Nuremberg Laws

I find it amusing that the Guardian has now invented a new principle viz. that all allegations of racism, even by racists, have to be taken at face value.  Apart from the fact that the British in India and Africa considered they were the victims of Black racism (the 'Black peril') if you had any acquaintance with racism you would know that British fascists have long campaigned on 'Whites for Rights' arguing that White people are the real victims of racism. 

The Zionist movement has long attacked opponents as anti-Semitic.  It also has a long record of working with anti-Semites.  From William Evans Gordon MP, founder of the British Brothers League in this country to its fulsome welcome to Trump and his anti-Semitic entourage.  Unfortunately this included, as even Zionist historians like David Cesarani, Lucy Dawidowicz and Frances Nicosial concede, Nazi support for Zionism.  The examples are legion and if you say that even mentioning this is 'anti-Semitic' you are engaging in a form of political terrorism. 

You have today also carried an article by David Baddiel, 'Why Ken Livingstone has it so wrong over Hitler and Zionism'.  What it fails, as the Guardian has consistently failed to mention, is that Ha'avara, the trade agreement between the Nazis and the Zionist movement was made in order that the Jewish and International Boycott of Nazi Germany could be destroyed.  It was treachery to German Jews and allowed the stabilisation of the Hitler regime at its weakest point. 

Are you prepared to allow a reply by me of equal length or are you going to carry on your tradition of the past 18 months of refusing to carry any article or opinion piece criticial of the false anti-Semitism campaign?  A campaign motivated by the desire to remove the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.As someone who took the Guardian for 40 years it is sad to see the Guardian's fine traditions of journalism being destroyed as you campaign to destroy free speech on Israel and Palestine, which is the real reason for the current attacks.  There was a time when people like David Hirst wrote for the Guardian that the paper evinced real and genuine sympathy for the Palestinians, the real victims of Zionist accusations of anti-Semitism. 

The article 'McCarthyite Anti-Semitism Smears and Racism at the Guardian/Observer' on Alex Cockburn's old site, Counterpunch, substantiates the persistent and consistent bias of the Guardian/Observer.  

Many people on the Left now consider the Guardian & Observer, with Islamaphobic columnists like Nick Cohen, already beyond the pale.  Perhaps an organised boycott of a paper whose agenda today is little different to the Tory tabloids is the way ahead?

Tony Greenstein

McCarthyite Anti-Semitism Smears and Racism at the Guardian/Observer

by Gavin Lewis

Over the last few years, and as the corporate neoliberal project has started to unravel, the Guardian/Observer news stable has devoted a considerable amount of space to smears on re-emerging alternate sites of power, located in grassroots activism. An early example was former Labour Leader Ed Miliband’s McCarthyite ‘reds-under-the-beds’ attack on trade unionists in Falkirk, propped up by yet another New-Labour-type ‘dodgy dossier’ – the assertions of which were rejected by the police who “concluded there are insufficient grounds to support a criminal investigation at this time”.[1] This was followed by attacks against the Labour grassroots, including the Corbyn campaign group Momentum, associated Party societies, residents groups, co-operative supporters, trade unionists, and other affiliates getting subsidised membership rates – with the implication that Labour voting privileges should now be the exclusive preserve of the affluent Guardian-reading middle classes.[2]

Similarly, in the Guardian/Observer universe, peace activism of the ‘Stop the War’ movement type has been pejoratively labeled as ‘disreputable.’[3] Its editorial policy apparently presumes that Labour supporters should embrace a pro-imperialist, pro-war position or, as Labour’s social base frequently joke, a ‘Start-the-War’ movement – which is in stark contrast to the reality of the Party’s actual history and grassroots membership. For example historically, Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour government kept the UK out of the Vietnam War, and some trade unions have continued to affiliate their members both to the official Party and to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Student activism of all types has also repeatedly been smeared in articles across both papers. Obviously if, for example, Black students are as successful as their grandparents in critiquing the Cecil Rhodes model of racist-imperialism, then the status of those elitist neoliberal politicians responsible for criminal debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, becomes questionable, even untenable.[4]

Like many grassroots groups, students have increasingly turned their backs on the orthodoxy of neoliberal corporate media hegemony, which defines politics as a cozy deal between corporate lobbyists, bought professional politicians, their spin doctors and the journalists who regurgitate the resulting pre-packaged copy. Students in particular have been unwilling to accommodate, in their social spaces, speakers who have a hostile corporate-media-supported profile. The response by the Guardian/Observer has been to generate significant moral panics about free speech being under attack, in alleged student No-Platforming’ incidents. This is clearly an attempt to force the influence of an oppressive corporate media narrative into the social spaces that are rejecting it. It is a measure of how heavy-handed this campaign has been that feminists and fairly innocuous transgender activists have been amongst the victims caught in its crosshairs. A letter of complaint about this moral panic and its attacks on student political protest signed by hundreds of feminist supporters was published in the Observer.[5] After being smeared for allegedly ‘no platforming’ celebrity campaigner Peter Tatchell, transgender activists supported by more than a hundred signatories felt the need to sidestep Guardian/Observer hegemony by taking this specific aspect of their complaint to the pages of Pink News.[6] Perhaps this was because hypocritically, the Guardian/Observer’s own willingness to reciprocate by allowing fair equal representation on its pages is strictly limited?

II

Despite its ‘free-speech-under-attack’ smears, the Guardian/Observer practices its own racist form of ‘No-Platforming’ where – even in its ‘hard news’ sections – criticism of Israel particularly by Black and/or Muslim Britons is labeled as a form of bigotry often accompanied by demands that the ‘perpetrator’ be driven from public life. The most recent victims have been women of colour. Naz Shah, a Labour MP of Pakistani origin, has been headlined as anti-semitic after a two-year-old Facebook post of hers was found, which fancifully expressed a desire for Israel to be relocated to the US. That members of Black diasporas might yearn for a Middle East prior to white western imperialist intrusion, is hardly surprising. Israel is a society only recently invented by the genocidal colonial conquest of Europeans, Russians, White Americans and White South-Africans who were non-indigenous to the region, and some of whom who were obviously on their second attempt at segregationist white settler society exploitation.

Previously and inside the first week of her tenure, the National Union of Students first Black and Muslim woman president Malia Bouattia and critic of Zionism was similarly smeared. She has had the label anti-semitism put next to her name in a number of Guardian headlines and this process seems to be ongoing. So far neither she nor Naz Shah has been found to have expressed any pejorative views about Jews. Neither woman has expressed sympathies that even exceed that of the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela who stated “If one has to refer to any of the parties as a terrorist state, one might refer to the Israeli government, because they are the people who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied territories, and we don’t regard that as acceptable”[7] and “We identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self determination.… Arafat is a comrade in arms.”[8] But both women have been smeared anyway.

III

These smears and contextual omissions are part of a broader conservative revisionist rebooting of the news-outlets’ worldview. Absent from the Guardian/Observer’s editorial practice of equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is any sense of the country’s dubious standing within the global human rights community. Israel is a society that another Noble Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has repeatedly compared to Apartheid South Africa.[9] UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard described it as “an apartheid regime … worse than the one that existed in South Africa.”[10] Kgalema Motlanthe, the Deputy President of South Africa and of the African National Congress described the Israeli occupation as creating conditions worse than “for Blacks under the Apartheid regime.”[11] In October 2012, Baleka Mbete Chairman of the ANC also used the words “far worse than apartheid South Africa”[12] Moshé Machover of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organization has gone further, saying, “Apartheid can be reversed. Ethnic cleansing is immeasurably harder to reverse; at least not in the short or medium term.”[13] These findings have been supported by Jewish activists, academic intellectual Noam Chomsky, and investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.[14] In the current climate of corporate media McCarthyism, all these prominent voices could now expect to be smeared as anti-semites.

In the case of the two most recent female victims smeared, the fact that the neoliberal end of the corporate media expects that Black women should be somehow ‘compelled’ to identify with Israel – a country in whose non-tourist areas they’d be justifiably fearful of walking – raises a number of issues of racist editorial policy. First, there is obviously a practice of privileging a specific ethnic-religious ‘point-of-view’ within Guardian/Observer hard news coverage. Second, there is also a news management policy which deliberately either censors or dismantles reports of Israel’s ongoing racist policy offences into isolated single-incident examples with no relationship to previous historical and repeated ongoing transgressions. However, once you start to reintegrate the data available even from within the corporate media, then the exceptionalist nature of Guardian/Observer smears – even in the context of broader media’s pro-Israel ‘anti-semitism’ moral panics – and the racist enormity of what women-of-colour in particular, are expected to tolerate, becomes all too apparent. Israel is a society built upon genocidal white western expansionism. Even leaving aside the ‘ethnic cleansing’ horrors of the Palestinian experience, Israel’s victims are largely Black and Indigenous and – contrary to corporate media anti-semitism narratives – these involve processes whereby Jews also racially oppress other Jews.

Violence against Ethiopian Jews in Israel – including that committed by the police – is a fact of life. Even after a 2015 incident in which a white police officer shown on film assaulting an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier became international news, the culprit as usual escaped prosecution. The Guardian highlighted the race riots provoked by the incident but referred to the attack as a “scuffle” – even Murdoch/Fox-owned Sky News permitted the word ‘assaulted’ in their coverage – and the Guardian further failed to cover the subsequent scandal caused by the lack of judicial prosecution.[15] By contrast, the resulting particularly newsworthy protests were carried by the Jerusalem Post, ynetnews.com, the Times of Israel, and other news outlets.[16] Unsurprisingly, the report on racism in Israel presented to the UN by the researcher David Sheen and the resulting numerous postings of video footage of mob intimidation and violence against Africans in the country, was never allowed into the news-outlets’ coverage either.[17]

For many years donations of so-called ‘black blood’ by Ethiopian Jews have been dumped by Israel’s hospitals and Red Cross. In 1996 this provoked the race riots covered by the Independent newspaper, the New York Times and other news outlets.[18] In 2013 a protest by the country’s main Ethiopian-Jewish politician highlighted this practice and kept it in international public scrutiny – subsequently featuring in the Daily Beast, the Times of Israel, Haaretz, ynetnews.com and elsewhere.[19] Despite many years of controversy, the Guardian only finally touched the story – after international embarrassment forced Israeli President Shimon Peres into condemning the practice – when it then could be conveniently spun as rapprochement.[20] A comparison between western white settler society Israel and the multi-cultural UK demonstrates both the oddity of the Guardian’s years of absented coverage of this scandal, and the obvious scientific medical invalidity of ‘racial’ blood segregation. The British National Health Service, as a matter of policy, rejects such segregation.[21]

Further illustrating the plight of Africans in Israel, both The Jerusalem Post and Ynew.com conceded that Ethiopian Jews – who are disproportionately constrained to menial support jobs – were faced with neighbourhoods operating ‘whites only’ housing policies.[22] Again this was not integrated into Guardian/Observer’s overall ongoing coverage of Israel. Far more disturbingly, and echoing Nazi eugenics policies, Forbes, Haaretz and even the Guardian have all had to acknowledge that Ethiopians in Israel were subjected to regular forced injections of the long-acting contraceptive drug Depo-Provera – a policy of temporary sterilization – that deliberately plummeted Ethiopian-Israeli reproductive rates by at least 20%.[23] There is no evidence of any other western country which accepted Ethiopian refugees pursuing such a policy. One might hope that a story with such Nazi-like implications would feature on the front page of a so-called progressive newspaper, but in the Guardian it was largely buried on its inner pages. Imagine the front-page media storm if the ethnic identities of victim/perpetrator had been inverted.

To the brutal racism experienced by Ethiopians and Bedouins and obviously the Apartheid horrors of Palestinian life, we can also add the ugly discrimination experienced by indigenous Jews such as the Sephardi/Mizrahi. The complaints of these groups now feature on their own ethnic-themed websites and have even been explored on certain peripheral corporate media outlets such as Haaretz. The Huffington Post’s David Shasha also returns to this issue periodically. On different occasions he has complained of “the evisceration of the traditional Sephardic Jewish heritage,” and written “most Israelis saw them as culturally and intellectually ‘backward,’ like the Arabs in whose countries they once lived. The Israeli political system forced many Sephardim to live at the margins of society, where they often found themselves caught between the warring forces of religious extremism and imposed secularization.”[24] However, for all the performed outrage about anti-semtitism, you’ll struggle to hear about oppression of Indigenous Jews within the Guardian/Observer stable.

African-American and British-Caribbean Jews have also fallen foul of white-ethnic settler sensibilities. Israel offers citizenship to Jews from across the western world but for years has resisted allowing black converts to Judaism anything other than temporary visitors’ visas. In some cases, even these won’t be honoured. African-American Idit Malka intended to visit the country for a family event but instead found herself and her family detained at an Israeli airport for two days, and – she claims – racially insulted as a cushim (a racist Hebrew word for black people) before being deported.[25] The issue of black entry to Israel has had to be repeatedly contested on an individual case-by-case basis. In 2010 the Jewish Chronicle noted that the Caribbean Levy family from South London were denied ‘Aliyah,’ (immigration to Israel) “despite testimonials from British rabbis and intervention by Israeli lawyers on their behalf.”[26] Regardless of a recent successful campaign by the African-American Mosley family, which took very many years – and against the context of a long nurtured historic Israeli paranoia about the legitimacy of the so-called ‘Black Hebrew Community’ – it is yet unclear whether any precedent has been set, which will spare other Black families the same humiliation.[27]

Variants of this ethno-religious exclusive ideology permeate the highest levels of Israeli society. Recently Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef – who thankfully has no official government policy status – stated that “non-Jews should not be allowed to live in Israel”. Given that prior to the recent invention of Israel, Indigenous Jews, Christians, Muslims and other groups lived with varying degrees of success alongside each other for hundreds of years in the Middle East, you can only wonder what frightening strategy he has in mind for achieving this demographic realignment. However, equally concerning is his prescriptive requirement of ethno-demographic ‘exceptions’, constrained within the boundaries of Israel but compelled to live by Jewish religious law, without whom he asks “who, otherwise, will be the servants?”[28] It’s hard to read this other than as desire to create a society where there is a class of masters and then a pre-selected subordinate ethno-religious caste doomed to do nought else but serve them. Certainly a Muslim religious leader making this statement would be rigorously condemned as an extremist, which may explain why coverage of this story was to be found – albeit without any form of critical interrogation – in the Independent, but was apparently absented from the Guardian/Observer. Significantly, even Israel Defence Force Deputy Chief Major-General Yair Golan felt compelled when commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day to state “If there is something that frightens me about the remembrance of the Holocaust it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular…and finding signs of them here among us, today, in 2016” (note: “revolting” could be “nauseating” depending on translation).[29] This story was covered by Haaretz, the international broadcasters Aljazeera, Deutsche Welle and many other news outlets but once again the Guardian only finally covered the story when the General was forced to backtrack after heavy criticism from Prime Minister Netanyahu – and then instead of being indicative of colonial racist intolerance, the controversy could again be spun benignly.[30]

At the level of inequality alone, and of the potential racist existential ethnic threat to those who could be mistaken for any member of the ethnic groups Israel oppresses – Ethiopian Jews, Indigenous Jews, or Palestinians – it is inexcusable that Naz Shah and Malia Bouattia should face efforts to somehow compel them to identify with Israel. As females, who could conceivably be mistaken for Palestinian women, they have other escalating issues of potential violence with which to contend. Racism in Israel also opens the door for repellent forms of gender violence. In 2014, Bar-Ilan University lecturer Mordechai Kedar publicly discussed the idea that the mothers and sisters of Palestinians who take up arms against Israel ‘could’ be raped. “The only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped… the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped. That’s all. That’s the only thing that will bring him back home, in order to preserve his sister’s honor.” Kedar is not some peripheral figure to governmental authority but served for twenty-five years in IDF Military Intelligence. Subsequent press releases have attempted to downplay his comments, but the fact that rape is intimidating is so self-evident, that it is difficult to imagine that floating the idea was anything other than the most blatant incitement to sexual violence.[31]

Despite Mordechai Kedar’s high profile, his rape comments are omitted from the Guardian/Observer coverage. But his comments are far from an isolated form of articulation from within the dominant settler culture, having been supported by the frequently expressed public sentiment “go pound their mothers and come back to your own mother”[32] which according to Haaretz has also featured as a large banner in the town of Or Yehuda.[33] In global debate Palestinian critics and Israeli state apologists dispute whether this refers to sexual violence or gender violence but the latter explanation is no more excusable – though sadly it is an ongoing feature of the settler culture. In recent years members of the Israel Defence Force and its veterans have been caught wearing t-shirts featuring the image of pregnant Palestinian women in Israeli sniper gun-sights, logoed ‘one shot two kills’ (to glimpse this reality, enter ‘Palestinian Women Killed Checkpoints’ into your internet search-engine).   [34]

Despite all this material being available in the public domain, none of the Guardian/Observer’s coverage smearing Naz Shah and Malia Bouattia for their critical relationship to Israel points out that proximity to the country’s social spaces could pose a very real racist and misogynistic threat to their existence. It also says something about broader issues of racism, hypocrisy and Israel’s status as a site-of-power, that currently the British government, while issuing cautions to Britain’s LGBT community about the difficulties of travelling to North Carolina, broadcasts no such equivalent warning to Black Britons about the very real dangers of visiting Israel’s non-tourist areas.

IV

A significant factor in the generation of the Guardian’s ideological agenda is the lack of demarcation between its Hard News coverage, its favoured sites of power, and its own reporters who also frequently make up its public relations driven commentariat. For instance the notion of peace activism being ‘disreputable’originates with the right-wing Blairite MP Tristam Hunt who gets to situate his smear in the Guardian with the ease of placing a gratis classified ad, which of course in a way it is. But then sometimes a smear doesn’t have to be placed because reporters are either already ideologically onboard and/or adhering to a predetermined editorial agenda. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the context of the current ‘anti-semitism’ moral panics. Here, when reporting the smears against the NUS’s Malia Bouattia, Guardian contributor Hannah Weisfeld blatantly goes to bat for the Israel lobby. “Bouattia says she has a problem with ‘Zionist politics. Zionism, at its core, is the belief in the right of the state of Israel to exist. Whether Bouattia likes it or not, connection to Israel is a key part of Jewish identity for an overwhelming majority of Jews in 21st-century Britain. In nearly every synagogue around the world, on Shabbat and major festivals, Jews pray for the safety of the state of Israel.”[35]

What is really telling about this passage is not simply that this argumentative polemical construction is infecting a Hard News story, nor is it simply that religious fundamentalism is being used to justify white settler conquest in a manner that would be regarded as intolerable in the case of violent ‘gay men should be stoned to death’ homophobia. But by comparison, if any Black and/or Muslim Briton similarly tried to excuse violent conquest and ethnic cleansing by what went on in their place of worship, the police would arrest and prosecute, and it would be demanded that a government ‘Prevent’ team be quickly in attendance. Not for the first time, you simply you have to invert a Guardian narrative, for the racism and white privilege to stand revealed. Also absent from the Guardian’s coverage, as part of its pro-Israel historical revisionist rebooting, is the fact that the very western colonialist ideology that Weisfeld is being allowed to champion here was condemned by UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which in 1975 “determine(d) that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”[36] (this Resolution from the era of black liberationist global culture, lasted until in 1991 US President George H.W. Bush strong-armed a new UN vote).[37]

This editorial positioning even infects the material selected for the Letters sections. Reference to the actual practices of ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Israel – unless supported by mass signatories or a contributor with a very high media profile – is becoming less and less permissible, as is the citing of pre-conquest indigenous population levels of Palestine that therefore might indicate extermination or mass displacement.[38] Words like ‘white settler’ and ‘conquest’ are starting to become taboo in favour of ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israel being formed’ designed to invert the obvious indigenous victim vs foreign aggressor representational dynamic. In the aftermath of Muhammad Ali’s death Guardian letters permitted a couple of critical tributes. No reference to Ali’s historic outspoken criticism of Zionist white settler conquest was allowed, which might have risked normalising the positions of Naz Shah or Malia Bouattia. By contrast, when supporting a pro-Israel position it’s amazing just who and what gets published on the Guardian Letters page. In August 2015 the paper printed a letter from the recently released jailed expenses thief and disgraced former MP Denis McShane who, given that he was articulating a pro-Israel position accusing Iranians of “pervasive Jew-hate” and practicing an “anti-Jewish ideology,” was now apparently to be treated as a respectable commentator.[39] The blatant flaw in McShane’s smears is that there are Iranian Jews too. As news outlets as diverse as the BBC, The Independent, and Electronic Intifada point out, Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, numbering up to 20,000 and served by some 60 synagogues.[40] The irony is that once again, it is those invoking the smear of anti-semitism in defence of a settler culture who find it convenient to refuse to recognise the identity of indigenous Jews.

V

Black feminist academic bell hooks, in her books Talking Back (1988) and Black Looks (1992), refers to the practice, dating back to slavery, of creating a social taboo which prevents Black and Indigenous people from ‘talking back’ to challenge the authority of the dominant white group. Obviously this notion is relevant to the case of the two women caught in the Guardian’s oppressive anti-semitism moral panic. But it also appears to be a persistent tactic. After anti-semitism attacks on the historically anti-racist politician Ken Livingstone, the Black Labour MP Diane Abbott appeared on Sunday television condemning the pervasive smearing of ‘decent working-class Labour supporters’ as anti-semites. Unusually, almost every news outlet headlined the story neutrally by using her comments. The Guardian initially did the same running ‘Diane Abbott says claims of antisemitism within Labour are smear’ but within a matter of hours relabeled the link from its homepage to exactly the same story as ‘Calls for Corbyn to take tougher action after Abbott dismisses crisis as smears.’[41] This relabeling is editorialising, which manages to simultaneously imply that Abbott’s ‘talking back’ behaviour is questionable and elevate claims about anti-semitism into being a ‘crisis’ without offering any evidence of either.

This manipulative binary process of privileging a certain ethno-religious identity while suppressing legitimate black voices and grievances, becomes all the more apparent when applying any form of comparative sociological or statistical demographic analysis. Reports on racism and ethnic demographics presented by the academic, Dub poet and musician Benjamin Zephaniah on behalf of the Newham Monitor Group show that Black Britons are nearly 6 in every 100 people. By comparison we know that British Jews are 250,000 out of a population nudging 65 million – or only 1 in every 260 people, which means they are outnumbered by black Britons by a ratio of nearly 15 to 1. If we add in the number of people of Arab origin, the number of Black Britons is even higher. For convenience sake we could underestimate these numbers and call the ratio 16-1. Despite the demographic spread, the Guardian/Observer’s moral panic – as increasingly stimulated by its commentariat – exclusively focuses on the smaller, privileged middle-class, and quite obviously less oppressed white ethnic group, and constructs any criticism of white settler oppression as an offence against them.

Yet the Black experience of racism is far more significant. The Zephaniah/Newham Monitoring Group material cites multiple instances where police officers were caught on recording equipment racially abusing suspects to quote, “the problem with you is that you will always be a nigger,” telling a suspect they’ll “smash his Arab face in” and many more such incidents without any serious disciplinary action taken.[42] It’s also noted that “African-Caribbean and Asian people together make up 5.6% of the population but 16% of the prison population.” Similarly in further contrast to white middle-class Jewish life experiences, not only are Black Britons marginalised from continuing education, the better forms of employment, and housing, but they also experience very serious state and societal racist violence. In December 2015, during the period when the Guardian/Observer was concerned with the ‘alleged anti-semitism’ of the ‘talking back’ taboo-type, Black Briton Jermaine Baker was shot dead by police – his family claim – while sleeping in his car. Previously, the dubious circumstances of Black mixed-race Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of the police and subsequent media misrepresentation provoked race riots. While doing his supermarket shopping, Sikh dentist Dr Sarandev Bhambra suffered horrific injuries in an attempted beheading incident perpetrated by a racist shouting ‘white power,’ who had mistaken Dr Bhambra for a Muslim.[43] An 82-year-old Muslim, Muhammad Saleem Chaudhry was stabbed to death on his way home from Mosque in a racist attack.[44] His murderer also “planted three bombs near three mosques in the West Midlands.” Locals complained “If these had been placed by bearded Muslim men, Cobra [the government’s emergency committee] would have been enacted and the country’s media would have descended on us. Instead the media almost had to be pushed into coming along.”[45] There also has been an epidemic of attacks and abuse aimed at Muslim women, particularly those wearing the Niqab – even to the extent that a man boasted on twitter of abusing a Muslim woman after the Paris attacks.[46] Plus, two successful further arson attacks on Finsbury Park,[47] Bishopbriggs mosques.[48]

What is especially amazing is that if you wade through the last few years of the Guardian/Observer’s anti-semitism moral panics while asking where are the equivalent victims, you’ll find it’s extremely difficult to find one. This omission is particularly obvious when you examine the listed articles of the three journalists prominently foregrounding the theme of anti-semitism in their work on a repeated basis – the Observer’ Nick Cohen, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, followed by the paper’s tamed house Labour Party supporter Owen Jones. Jones, despite significantly lesser output, has written articles at such strict regular intervals[49] that rather than a reaction to genuine events, the impression given is of a topic that is a type of statutory contractual requirement or of regular commissioned work. By comparison to the prioritisation given to the largely unsubstantiated theme of anti-semitism, if you search the back catalogue of articles of all three men, you’ll struggle to find mention of the killed Jermaine Baker, Mark Duggan, or Muhammad Saleem Chaudhry, maimed Dr Sarandev Bhambra or equivalent output on issues of Black equality. But you will find the words ‘Anti-semitism, the Left’ and ‘Labour Party’ and on occasion ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ hurled together in largely evidence- and incident-free narratives or in reference to criticism of Israel (obviously the real issue is, that the potential restoration of its traditional socialist anti-racist/anti-imperialist identity to the Labour Party, after the short period of entryist neoliberal service-to-power, is perceived as a threat to the powerful pro-colonialist Israel lobby). Cohen’s writing in particular has become so free of evidence and cited incident that he appears to have resorted to self-plagiarising melodramaticism, with critics observing that his sudden angry conversion noted in his Observer March 2016 article “Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too” is strikingly similar in theme to his 2009 Jewish Chronicle article “Hatred is turning me into a Jew.”[50]

The absent equivalent commentary on black and Muslim experiences of racism does not appear to be an accident. The Middle-Eastern commentator Jonathan Cook observed that Jonathan Freedland and other white panelists addressed the issue of anti-semitism while appearing on the BBC political discussion show ‘Question Time’. When the issue of the effaced representation of Muslim victimisation was raised by pro-Palestinian MP George Galloway, Freedland and panelists had a pre-prepared sound-bite position about not wanting to get into an ‘arms race’ on oppression.[51] After the show Freedland was apparently still trying to obscure the inequality in the representational dynamic, writing “Jews and Muslims are not in competition over who is hated most: that’s not a competition anyone would want to win.”[52] However it’s not just that black and Muslim experiences of racism are being effaced from representation. Guardian contributor David Cronin has claimed “the Guardian has told me to steer clear of Palestine.”[53] Nafeez Ahmed has similarly claimed he was ‘censored’ and ultimately had his blog ‘discontinued’ for referring to Palestine.[54] Significantly, whenever anecdotes of this type are made public, the name of editorial writer Jonathan Freedland often features prominently – accused of being linked to this repression either as a direct participant or as the originator of managerial policy.

In total the Guardian/Observer’s anti-semitism moral panic coverage has almost entirely been an application of the racist ‘talking back’ taboo, mobilised against those critical of Israel.[55] A search of the Guardian/Observer’s website suggests that this coverage is now greater than that afforded terrorist Brixton bomber David Copeland, whose explosive devices targeted Caribbeans of South London, Gay men of Soho, and Asians of East London.

VI

Breaking the pattern of the Guardian’s recent attacks on politicised students, has been the uncritical prominence given to the claims of Oxford University pro-Israel student-activist Alex Chambers and his colleagues that “Labour have some sort of problem with Jews” – this because of criticism of Israel.[56] Similarly it’s unquestioningly taken at face value that an Oxford University pro-Israel student-activist campaign, threatening to leave the NUS after the election of Black Muslim woman President Malia Bouattia, has no racist dimension.[57] By comparison, in the case of Oxford’s Black students campaigning to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, the Guardian has permitted rigorous repeated criticism, even to the point of suggesting that notions of “racist…structural violence” were in fact questionable, and designed to shut down debate.[58] The Guardian has similarly given prominence to the complaints of New Labour Blairite pro-Israel peer Michael Levy “Lord Levy warns he could quit Labour over anti-Semitism.”[59] All of which is not evidence of equivalent oppression but of exceptional White Privilege. In these examples, you have a peer of the realm, white ethnic Jewish students who have been able to enter one of Britain’s most expensive and elitist institutions in such numbers as to be able to threaten to change its policies, plus white middle-class Israel-supporting journalists with lead columnist and editorial power such as Cohen and Freedland claiming they are victims. This is particularly interesting in Freedland’s case because in apparent violation of the norms of equal opportunity employment policies, his father Michael also gets occasional columnist work at the Guardian that could alternately be open to Black or working-class applicants. To these numbers we can also add writers such as Hadley Freeman and Hannah Weisfeld also indiscriminately invoking anti-semitism in support of Israel. Now ask, that for every student Israel supporter at Oxford University, every powerful pro-Israel Levy figure in the house Lords, Cohen at the Observer, and Freedland et al on the Guardian editorial writing desk and across the paper, where are the representative 16 Black Britons enjoying similar status? This is how disproportionate the privilege being mobilised is and how different it is from the black experience. Scandalously, rather than provoking embarrassment, simply identifying in this way the unrepresentative presence of the Israel lobby will routinely incur, in the British media, accusations of Jewish-conspiracy-type anti-semitism.

Given that anti-semitism does exist, this form of partisan and often misleading victim narrative coverage does grave ‘boy-who-cried-wolf’ disservice to genuine future victims. In March 2015 the Guardian reported an attack on a Stamford Hill synagogue stating “A group of men tried to break into a synagogue overnight in north London in an anti-semitic incident, police have said.”[60] Missing from this article is the statement of Rabbi Maurice Davis who, much to his great credit, told the Jewish Chronicle, “There was a party happening across the road. We think a Jewish boy at the party ran out and got into a fight with other party-goers on the street. He came into the shul and it got out of hand, that’s when the other people smashed the windows. We want people to know it wasn’t an anti-semitic incident. Tottenham is such a wonderful place to live we have tremendous social cohesion here, and everybody gets on and we haven’t had any experience of antisemitism. We have had support from our local mosque, our local churches.”[61] Rabbi Davis was similarly quoted by the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard but his statements never made it into the Guardian, nor were used to update the existing story.[62]

The fact that this McCarthyite moral panic came to a peak just before British local elections has caused a number of commentators to argue that this was a coup d’état attempt designed to wrest control of the Labour Party from its social base and their democratically elected leader Jeremy Corbyn. This is certainly consistent with the Guardian’s ongoing attacks on grassroots social movements. The Huffington Post and even the Telegraph have reports of this being an attempt to bring down Corbyn, but adversarial critics could argue that these originate from within the Corbyn camp.[63] However the Financial Times previously predicted a summer coup attempt, without similar tame reliance on any of Corbyn’s inner circle but calling on largely rightwing neoliberal sources.[64] Jewish academic and Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein agreed, citing the natural relationship between neoliberals who pursue racist-imperialist ‘wars-for-oil’ and advocates of racist-colonialist white settler conquest: “You can see this overlap between the Labour Right and pro-Israel groups personified in individuals like Jonathan Freedland, a Blairite hack who also regularly plays the antisemitism card. He’s combined these two hobbies to attack Corbyn.”[65]

Like a lot of the corporate media, the Guardian’s pro-Israel agenda and overt prioritising of an anti-semitism moral panic hit a peak around the time of world condemnation of Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza’s children and was clearly designed to overwrite this critical reaction. However once again, the Guardian went further than many other news-outlets, publishing the notorious ‘Blood Libel’ advert alleging Palestinians were using children as human shields – an advert that even Rupert Murdoch’s Times refused to run.[66] The Blairite neoliberal capture of the paper goes back considerably further. So jarring was the sudden wrenching move to the right and the consequential dumbing-down, that in the late 90s staffers dubbing themselves the ‘Farringdon Therapy Group’ (after the paper’s London publishing site) advertised in the London Review of Books for submissions of critical commentaries on the process, intended to be published in a book called Reading the Guardian– which subsequently failed to materialise on its 2000 Verso publication date, prompting accusations of suppression.[67]

Over the years the Guardian/Observer has provided unfailing and manipulative support for this neoliberal capture of the Labour Party, frequently marketing the ending of free education, welfare cuts and workplace casualisation as ‘achievements.’ Whatever isolated incidents of progressive coverage the paper featured were largely an institutional hangover from the Guardian’s establishment-questioning past and – as exampled in the Snowden revelations – were prioritised at historical moments which did not inconvenience the paper’s favoured New Labour ruling elite. A similar strategic application of editorial policy ensures that scoops/coverage arising from its previous progressive value system and which reflect negatively on Israel’s offences – such as Israel providing the armament technology that Apartheid South Africa used to oppress its indigenous people[68]– are now never referred to.

Both the Guardian and Observer were also pro-war. There are reports of the Observer inverting its 3-2 anti-Iraq-war postbag to make support for imperialist western conquest seem more normal.[69] Even now, the papers present Tony Blair and other ‘senior’ (?) politicians, who have shared cabinet responsibility and complicity for torture – not to mention the killing of civilians – as credible and acceptable voices in political debate.

When it’s not saying ‘the left has a problem with Jews,’ the news stable is similarly asserting that ‘the left has a problem with women.’ This despite the fact, that the most recent sexist incidents involved neoliberals. New Labour neoliberal knight Richard Leese spent 20 hours in cell after assaulting his 16-year-old stepdaughter.[70] MP Simon Danczuk was found to have sent sex-texts to a teenage job applicant and was recently “put in a Spanish jail cell after an alleged holiday row with his estranged wife led to her being taken to hospital.”[71] In a historical context these claims make even less sense. On the left there has always been a revolving door between feminists, anti-racists and worker-activists. And the left has no ideology without the contribution of Jewish Marxists and sociologists.

VII

These smears are really indicative of the incestuous relationship between the minority entryist neoliberal right of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Guardian/Observer. In the New Labour era there was a marketing practice of constructing a centralised narrative at central office, then asking party officials or activists – who don’t declare their institutional status – to front this regurgitated material to news outlets, their letter pages and public opinion events. This is a process that the Guardian/Observer has been happy to accommodate. By comparison, previous coordinated efforts by New Labour officials marketing Tony Blair as a popular ‘political celebrity’ in BBC’s Radio4’s 1996 ‘Personality of the Year’ contest were caught by the corporation and resulted in 4000 ballots being disqualified – for ‘multiple voting’.[72]

This practice was more recently evident in the 2015 local and general election campaigns. For example, in February 2015 the Observer’s letters page featured a correspondent named Peter Atkinson stridently complaining about declining public services under his local Green Party council.[73] The giveaway, suggestive of an institutional narrative or press release, is that Mr Atkinson was regurgitating a description of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ – a historical media critique successfully aimed at the 1974-79 Labour government. This contribution exhibits the signs of being written by someone who is aware that the Guardian/Observer policy is to often replicate the ‘Loony-Left’ attack on grassroots movements that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and that kept her there. A casual search reveals that a Peter Atkinson was the Labour Party’s candidate in the local council elections.[74] This accommodating institutional interaction seems like a comparatively minor example, but what happens when this process is used to over-write genuine calls for grassroots democratic accountability?

Objections to the neoliberal capture of the Labour Party crystallised around iconic issues of class and representation – occasionally known as the ‘Toff-Labour’ phenomenon or the problem of nepotism. Former head of the Labour Party Ed Miliband was the son of one Britain’s most prestigious academics. He served in cabinet with his brother David, and husband and wife team Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Prominent positions in the Party were also eventually found for Stephen Kinnock son of former leader Neil Kinnock, Will Straw son of former cabinet minister Jack Straw, and the children of former ministers John Prescott, Harriet Harman and Jack Dromney. Stephen Kinnock had been parachuted into a constituency as its candidate for MP, despite the fact he been embroiled in a tax avoidance scandal in Denmark – where he and his wife, the Danish Prime Minister, had given the national tax office conflicting information on his residency status, thereby avoiding tax while simultaneously allowing him to be eligible to buy property in the country.[75] Will Straw was forced into the Rossendale and Darwen constituency as its candidate. He subsequently lost amidst rumours that local activists wouldn’t campaign for an outsider. Ed Miliband’s problems of downplaying his social advantages were compounded by issues raised by his public appearances. He seemed unable to function in a working-class café situation, unable to talk credibly to a homeless man, and Miliband’s house – with its two kitchens – invoked notions of Upstairs, Downstairs/Downton Abbey-like privilege.

Labour officials trying to combat this understandably negative impression were allowed to present their press releases once again incognito on the Guardian letters page. In February 2015, apparent ordinary citizen contributor Tim Daniel attacked Green Party Leader Nathalie Bennet and congratulated Miliband on his housing policy.[76] However a cursory search revealed that a Tim Daniel was listed as Labour candidate for Wincanton & Bruton and Vice-chair of his local Party.[77] Similarly Ian Flintoff wrote, “Ed Miliband is the best possible leader for the Labour party and will also be the best prime minister…I have never met him and have no incentive to write this other than my deep and honest care for the people of Britain.”[78] Ian Flintoff states that he has ‘no incentive to write’ but a casual internet search reveals he was Labour Party parliamentary candidate in Plymouth Devonport, a Councillor in Kensington & Chelsea, and is active in the Oxford Labour Party.[79] Again institutional allegiance is allowed to be undeclared. Michael Hudson’s letter contribution is the most worrying and the most familiar. “I’m disappointed you used the picture of Ed Miliband eating a bacon roll…It seems to me the reason is the antisemitic subliminal message: Ed Miliband is a Jew; he chokes on bacon.” However, if you google contributor “Michael Hudson Chairman of Sleaford and North Hykeham Labour Party” you’ll get at least 7 references to Mr Hudson’s local Labour Party chairmanship dating from at least 2009 onwards.[80]

Clearly this anti-semitism narrative placed by Mr Hudson – if in fact he is the originator of it – attempts to manage the bad publicity that Miliband’s awkward café appearance generated. To work effectively, it demands acceptance of the assumption that the entire British public are aware of Miliband’s ethno-religious background. In fact such is the distaste for elitist political corruption in Britain and the resulting voter disengagement, that three years after Ed Miliband became Labour Leader a Yougov poll demonstrated that nearly a quarter of the electorate still couldn’t recognise him.[81] If the reading of the data made by the right-wing Daily Mail was to be believed, some people were actually confusing him with a character from Sesame Street.[82] It seems unlikely therefore that large numbers of people were seeking out information on his religious heritage. Particularly, as juxtaposed against Black Britons, Miliband passes as simply white, privileged and middle-class. Also attempts aimed at the more politically aware voter, to establish a victim narrative for Miliband, can only succeed by separating him from the rest of the Toff-Labour phenomenon of class privilege Sadly on the Guardian letters pages it is now not unusual for the Miliband anti-semitism narrative to be conveniently repeated as a form of orthodoxy.[83] Obviously this constructed placement comfortably supports the ongoing elitist anti-semitism moral panic. The only McCarthyite-type smear that did feature the then Labour Leader was aimed at his late father Ralph Miliband who due to his background as a prominent Marxist academic the Daily Mail headlined as ‘The Man Who Hated Britain.’[84] Ironically, were it not for the fact that son Ed Miliband was a neoliberal, it’s entirely likely that the Guardian/Observer stable would have joined in with its own ‘why do the left have a problem with patriotism?’ narrative.

VIII

Overall this campaign has not been without economic territorial cost. Just as previous undemocratic neoliberal entryism cost the Labour Party millions of votes and two thirds of its peak membership, it appears the Guardian/Observer’s ideological war on its own natural readership base has been similarly damaging. Currently the Guardian is soliciting donations from its readers to prop up its ailing sales coffers. In 2015 the paper admitted to readership purchasing falling by 9.5%.[85] Its web-traffic readership has also declined.[86] The Observer has had comparable losses.[87] In 2016 the Guardian Media Group announced losses of £173 million.[88] If these figures are representative of a long-term decline – or of readers’ unconscious or even deliberate boycott – who could argue with the socio-economic logic or justice of it? Apparently, rather than perform a rudimentary representative function to their base demographics, neoliberals both within the Labour Party and at the Guardian/Observer, are prepared to risk killing off the institutions upon which they feed, in the pursuit of their own elitist ideology.

This has resulted in day-to-day practices that are politically and ideologically brutal. The Guardian/Observer stable as represented by Cohen, Freedland, Jones, Wiesfeld, Freeman and many others, is practicing a particularly pernicious multi-layered form of racism. White settler Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing is being championed. Black and Indigenous voices are being smeared for ‘talking back’ to power on the issue. Black grievances and experiences of racism are being both effaced from representation and stolen by a white middle-class elite who invoke the genuine suffering and marginalisation of others in order to defend the undefendable. These offences are being committed by those who are content to risk the viability of future complainants of anti-semitism being reduced to the status of simple partisan political ploys, by their ‘boy-who-cried-wolf’ practices. These abusive practices are being indiscriminately fielded because they also tie into larger strategic Blairite drives for power. Not for the first time and particularly in the neoliberal media, the worst racism is practiced by those careerists who hide in plain sight, masked in respectable office apparel, and polite middle-class mannerisms.

Postscript

Like other historical victims of McCarthyism before her, Naz Shah MP subsequently found it necessary and in her self-interest to ‘recant’ – in her case specifically on her previous posting about Israel. This allowed her to keep her career position on the powerful Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee. However, some months after the events reported in this article and just when it appeared that the high point of the anti-semitism moral panic was over, yet another woman of colour was smeared for her leftism and questioning of Zionism. This happened across the broader media but with the Guardian prominently involved.

In the tradition of ‘Black Lives Matter’ activism, Jewish-Jamaican Jackie Walker, Vice-Chair of the pressure group Momentum, pointed out that Jewish entrepreneurs had been “financiers of the sugar and slave trade” and “the African holocaust”.[89] She then followed this up by asking that black victims of genocide be also included in Holocaust Day as she put it “In terms of Holocaust day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust day was open to all people who experienced holocaust?”[90] Sadly, given that Nazi crimes against humanity are frequently used to justify the Zionist conquest of Palestine – this despite the fact that territorialist efforts on behalf of the Zionist project precede the Nazi period – attempts at raising the previous historical horrors of the western colonialist tradition and any challenge to the claimed right of exclusivity of victimhood, are routinely and intensely contested by the pro-Israel lobby. As consequence, as in previous cases, Ms Walker faced calls for her sacking, and was resoundingly condemned by a powerful vocal minority that the Guardian once again privileged in its reporting (see notes 88 and 89). In order to do this there were significant omissions in the news stable’s coverage. The issue of Jews and their participation in the slave trade is mentioned in Jewish histories prominently enough to often make it onto news-sites but excluded from Guardian reportage. For example, to publicise his book The Jewish Slave, Rabbi Lody van de Kamp gave an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing Jewish owned slave plantations in Dutch Guyana, “At one point, Jews controlled about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies”.[91] Similarly, Rabbi Dr Marc Lee Raphael’s 1983 book Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary Historyis frequently cited on this topic and features on numerous websites. It confirms Jewish participation in the Dutch slave trade, and observes that “in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”[92] None of these very prominent sources featured as a balance in the Guardian’s condemnatory reporting of Jackie Walker’s comments.

But what was far more worrying, was that in the Guardian’s service-to-power it was actually willing to let the issue of comparable colonial genocide be viewed as again questionable, despite the weight of historical evidence available. Adam Hothschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, 1998) describes the death toll from European colonialism in just a single African country – the Belgian Congo – as 10 million, while Caroline Elkins (Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, 2005) describes Britain’s use of mass torture in colonial Kenya. The British suppression of India’s uprisings of the 1850s is described by historian Amaresh Misra (War of Civilizations: India AD 1857, 2007) as “an untold holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years. And this is not even the entire history of the British Raj. David Stannard (American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, 1994) calculates 100 million indigenous deaths in the conquest of the Americas.  While figures of ‘60 million and more’ have long been culturally accepted as the numbers of victims of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade – featuring in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘Beloved’ (1987) and cited by Paul Robeson in his 1956 testimony to HUAC.

What is significant is that a number of these sources had originally featured in hangover coverage from the Guardian’s previous progressive incarnation, either in its columns or on its literary review pages.[93] So this almost ‘black holocaust denial’ practiced in the reporting of Jackie Walker’s case cannot be written off as simply base incompetence. Clearly the ‘new’ Guardian embraces a ‘black lives DO NOT matter’ policy. As a consequence of the media frenzy, Jackie Walker subsequently lost her position.

Footnotes

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/05/ed-miliband-unite-falkirk-selection; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10201643/Labour-vote-rigging-scandal-police-rule-out-Falkirk-inquiry.html; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/25/falkirk-ballot-insufficient-grounds-inquiry-police

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/08/labour-concerns-leadership-election-rules; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/07/labour-leadership-election-260-former-candidates-and-members-rival-parties-apply-vote; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/19/labour-seeks-legal-advice-over-leadership-election-infiltration-fears

[3]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/06/jeremy-corbyn-urged-to-pull-out-of-stop-the-war-christmas-fundraiser

[4]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/safe-spaces-universities-no-platform-free-speech-rhodes

[5]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/22/letters-student-political-protest-under-threat-free-speech

[6]http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/02/22/academics-and-activists-condemn-bully-peter-tatchell-in-open-letter/

[7]http://www.jta.org/1990/10/25/archive/mandela-angers-australian-jews-with-fresh-anti-israel-rhetoric

[8] 1990 Town Meeting City College New York, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5TiUhhm7cQ

[9]http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Desmond-Tutu-Israel-guilty-of-apartheid-in-treatment-of-Palestinians-344874; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/desmond-tutu/divesting-from-injustice_b_534994.html

[10]http://www.haaretz.com/un-agent-apartheid-regime-in-territories-worse-than-s-africa-1.132494

[11] Delegation of Arab Political Leaders and Adalah Representatives in South Africa Meet with Lawyers from the Legal Resources Center, Ministers and Government Officials to Discuss Constitution Building and Human Rights, Adalah, 9 June 2008

[12] Mbete’s support for boycott of Israel noted (The Citizen, 29 October 2012)

[13]https://web.archive.org/web/20081212200155/http://www.jewsforajustpeace.com:80/pages/opinion/machover_01.html

[14]http://www.mintpressnews.com/noam-chomsky-israeli-apartheid-much-worse-than-south-africa/208936/; http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/02/inside-israels-apartheid-state/

[15]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/ethiopian-israelis-clash-with-police-as-anti-racism-rally-turns-violent; http://news.sky.com/story/1477169/violent-clashes-at-protest-by-ethiopian-jews

[16]http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Ethiopian–Israelis-continue-protests-week-after-A-G-closes-case-on-police-who-attacked-soldier-406802; http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4671495,00.html; http://www.timesofisrael.com/cop-who-beat-ethiopian-israeli-soldier-wont-be-tried

[17]http://www.davidsheen.com/racism/ Sheen’s video clips not only demonstrate intimidation and violence against black people, but a repeated trend of sexual threats directed against any white feminist woman who has the nerve to be anti-racist. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7dkF5UVx7Y, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOomBSTTzrU, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKIiDeKRGQU. This recurring threat to black Israelis, Palestinian women, and white feminists is frequently referred to – even by right-wing deniers – as ‘Israel’s rape culture’. http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Warped-Mirror/David-Sheen-knows-what-it-takes-to-demonize-Israel-379522

[18]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/black-israelis-riot-over-insult-to-their-blood-1326412.html; http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/29/world/ethiopian-in-israeli-riot-over-dumping-of-donated-blood.html

[19]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/13/why-is-israel-s-red-cross-rejecting-ethiopian-blood.html; http://www.timesofisrael.com/uproar-as-ethiopian-mk-denied-chance-to-give-blood/; http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.563273; http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4464560,00.html

[20]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/12/israeli-president-ethiopian-born-mp-blood-donor-shimon-peres

[21]https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/news-and-campaigns/news/call-for-black-blood-and-organ-donors-to-be-there-for-their-community/

[22]http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Report-Kiryat-Malachi-neighborhood-bans-Ethiopians; http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3671185,00.html

[23]http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/; http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/israel-admits-ethiopian-women-were-given-birth-control-shots.premium-1.496519; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/30/forced-contraception-jewish-ethopian-women

[24]http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.649892; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/israels-sephardic-ashkena_b_627445.html; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/sephardim-ashkenazim-and_b_615692.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel#Sephardim_and_Mizrahim_.28Middle_Eastern_and_North_African_Jews.29

[25]http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/detains-american-because/ Israel detains and deports American Jews because they are black

[26]http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/26613/family-heartbroken-israel-refuses-aliyah

[27]http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.658593 African-American family converts finally recognised as Jews in Israel; http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-threatens-to-deport-african-american-convert-to-judaism.premium-1.502204

[28]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/non-jews-should-be-forbidden-from-living-in-israel-says-chief-rabbi-yitzhak-yosef-a6957806.html

[29]http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.717948; http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/israeli-soldiers-compared-nazis-160509060134244.html; http://www.dw.com/en/idf-general-triggers-outrage-comparing-israel-to-europe-processes-of-90-years-ago/a-19244831

[30]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/05/israeli-military-chief-yair-golan-nazi-germany-comparison

[31]http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israeli-professor-rape-hamas-militiants-mothers-sisters-deter-terrorist-attacks-1457836; https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/bar-ilans-disturbing-defence-of-one-of-its-own/2014936.article; http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/event_at_nyc_college_with_israeli_scholar_who_said_only_rape_can_deter_palestinian_militants_postponed_after_protests/

[32]http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19992/sexual-violence-women%E2%80%99s-bodies-and-israeli-settler

[33]http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/.premium-1.613444

[34]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=idf+t-shirts+one+shot+two+kills&biw=1280&bih=623&site=webhp&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=zYhGVe7NOIG0sAGCrYGIBw&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ

[35]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/22/antisemitism-malia-bouattia-nus-muslim-anti-zionist

[36]https://web.archive.org/web/20121206052903/; http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/761C1063530766A7052566A2005B74D1; www.mefacts.com/cached.asp?x_id=10584

[37]http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/resolution-declared-zionism/

[38]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/peace-not-promoted-israel-boycott Here in Guardian letters Stephen Malnik boasts about permitting injured Palestinians into his medical centre in the town of Ashkelon which as Mr Malnik admits now contains “lots of Jews” and is subject to occasional rocket attack. No one is permitted to point out, in rebuttal, that prior to al-Naqbar, 11,000 Arabs lived in this town before being dispossessed by the violence of western colonists. http://www.alternativeinsight.com/Ashkelon_Speaks.htm See also ‘1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians’. Benny Morris (1990/1994)

[39]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/02/after-iran-nuclear-deal-its-everyone-elses-turn

[40]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/irans-jews-on-life-inside-israels-enemy-state-we-feel-secure-and-happy-a6934931.html; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5367892.stm; https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-jewish-problem-tehran/7089

[41]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/01/diane-abbott-smear-labour-antisemitism-problem-andrew-marr

[42]http://benjaminzephaniah.com/what-am-i-going-on-about/;   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/26/police-dont-work-for-us

[43]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-34218184

[44]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24614280

[45]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-24602113

[46]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/brussels-attacks-croydon-man-matthew-doyle-charged-tweet-confronting-muslim-woman-brussels-attacks-a6951711.html

[47]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34953096

[48]http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bishopbriggs-mosque-hit-by-arson-attack-hate-crime-syrian-refugees-arrive-glasgow-1529202

[49] Jones’s previous media work had included mention of the plight of the Palestinians. Then, after sustained pressure and harsh criticism from the Israel lobby, this suddenly changed. Instead, in the month following the bombing of Gaza, Jones’s column gave a priority to unspecified accusations of anti-semitism. This obviously functioned to overwrite the outrage caused by the Gaza civilian death-toll. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/11/anti-jewish-hatred-rising-antisemitism-meaning A year later, when there was a risk of commemoration of the Palestinian victims, Jones again instead wrote about alleged anti-semitism. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/26/antisemitism-left-racism-israel

[50]http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/3/20/9ho9joytgkhvcj4ip524ilmuynfa7x; http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1099/weapon-of-choice/

[51]http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-02-09/guardian-editors-hypocrisy-on-anti-semitism/

[52]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/06/george-galloway-accuses-bbc-over-question-time-set-up

[53]https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/how-guardian-told-me-steer-clear-palestine

[54]https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/palestine-is-not-an-environment-story-921d9167ddef#.moo9fko9d

[55] Jonathan Cook argues that Freedland’s anti-semitism statistics “were compiled by the Community Security Trust, a Zionist organisation that has a record of dubious political activity…the great majority were classified as ‘harassment’, a broad category that could include remarks against Israel.” http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-02-09/guardian-editors-hypocrisy-on-anti-semitism/

[56]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/18/oxford-student-left-antisemitic-university-antisemitism-jewish-progressive-politics; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/17/labour-condemns-antisemitism-oxford-university-labour-club-claims

[57]http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/22/students-threaten-break-with-nus-after-election-of-new-president

[58]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/safe-spaces-universities-no-platform-free-speech-rhodes; http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/13/cecil-rhodes-statue-row-chris-patten-tells-students-to-embrace-freedom-of-thought

[59]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/20/labour-peer-lord-levy-warns-he-could-quit-party-over-antisemitism

[60]http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/22/police-investigate-london-synagogue-break-in

[61]http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/132553/rabbi-reveals-stamford-hill-synagogue-brawl-was-sparked-party-dispute

[62]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32007767; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11488480/Watch-Mob-launches-anti-Semitic-attack-on-Stamford-Hill-synagogue.html; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3006382/Drunken-mob-20-thugs-shouted-kill-Jews-stormed-synagogue-north-London-smashing-windows-attacking-worshippers-inside.html

[63]http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-anti-semitism-row-attempt-to-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-leadership-len-mccluskey_uk_57266218e4b0d6f7bed60632; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/01/it-is-a-smear-to-say-labour-has-an-antisemitism-problem-claims-j/

[64]http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85c207c4-ea01-11e5-888e-2eadd5fbc4a4.html#axzz47pCYawnS

[65]https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-finkelstein/american-jewish-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda Finkelstein goes on to cite his own experience of being smeared by Freedland “Incidentally, when my book, The Holocaust Industry, came out in 2000, Freedland wrote that I was ‘closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’. Although he appears to be, oh, so politically correct now, he didn’t find it inappropriate to suggest that I resembled the Nazis who gassed my family. We appeared on a television program together. Before the program, he approached me to shake my hand. When I refused, he reacted in stunned silence. Why wouldn’t I shake his hand? He couldn’t comprehend it. It tells you something about these dull-witted creeps. The smears, the slanders – for them, it’s all in a day’s work.”

[66]https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/liberal-guardian-print-pro-genocide-ad

[67]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-Guardian-Farringdon-Therapy-Group/dp/1859847846/279-1453820-9568459?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

[68] Former Ambassador for Israel Alon Liel stated “We created the South African arms industry… When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money… there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel

[69] Socialist historian Keith Flett wrote to the New Statesman at the time with information that the Observer had been inverting its anti-war postbag, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/157085

[70]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/14/manchester-richard-leese-cautioned

[71] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/mp-simon-danczuk-arrested-after-estranged-wife-karen-taken-to-hospital-in-spain-a3321301.html; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/31/labour-mp-simon-danczuk-suspended-over-explicit-text-message-allegations

[72]http://www.whathappened.website/DEC2496-031.htm; https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112810217.html; http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/whats-wrong-with-the-bbc-today-1315367.html

[73]http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/feb/08/greens-brighton-catastrophic

[74]http://www.brightonhovelabour.com/tags/portslade

[75]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10856352; http://politiken.dk/indland/politik/ECE1061397/revisor-skat-frikender-thorning-i-skattesag/

[76]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/25/green-party-leader-natalie-bennett-trying-to-be-honest

[77]http://www.somersetlabour.co.uk/candidates/tim-daniel/; http://www.somertonandfromelabour.org.uk/local-contacts

[78]http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/07/labour-play-ed-miliband-strengths-back-hilt

[79]https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ian-flintoff-1a3b2111; https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/728319

[80]https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=o-KTVveUOYjW8Afg2bPIBw&gws_rd=ssl#q=Michael+Hudson+Chairman+of+Chairman%2C+Sleaford+and+North+Hykeham+Labour+Party%22+

[81]https://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/05/10/not-so-famous-faces/

[82]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2347947/Poll-Ed-Miliband-confused-Bert-form-Sesame-Street.html

[83]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/31/a-short-history-of-food-and-antisemitism; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/01/the-nazis-germany-and-lazy-equations

[84]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html

[85]http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/10/national-daily-newspapers-lose-more-than-half-a-million-readers-in-past-year

[86]http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/23/mail-guardian-mirror-traffic-as-telegraph-abc

[87]http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/national-newspaper-abcs-march-2015-sun-sales-decline-unaffected-second-full-month-without-page-three

[88]https://next.ft.com/content/f5be593a-51b5-11e6-9664-e0bdc13c3bef

[89]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/26/corbyn-urged-to-show-leadership-in-tackling-antisemitism-within-labour-wes-streeting-labour

[90]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/28/momentum-vice-chair-jackie-walker-pressure-resign-antisemitism-row-jewish-labour-movement

[91]http://www.jta.org/2013/12/26/news-opinion/world/dutch-rabbi-confronts-jews-with-ancestors-complicity-in-slavery

[92]Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, 1983), 14, 23-25. cited on http://www.rense.com/general69/invo.htm

[93] See for example the work of ‘old Guardian’ columnist George Monbiot (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/11/mawkish-maybe-avatar-profound-important; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities) and the review of Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ referring to the ‘sixty million and more’ victims of slavery, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/fiction.tonimorrison