Vital reading: The sickening campaign to silence Corbyn and the Left by exploiting victims of the Holocaust | The Canary
This is crucial reading. While This Blog has been sorting the information from the noise in the Ken Livingstone/Naz Shah controversy, our old friend Kerry-Anne Mendoza over on The Canary has exposed the overarching strategy of those who denounced them.
It is critically important that as many people read this as possible – particularly those who have been persuaded by the “Labour is full of anti-Semites” narrative being pushed in the mainstream press and by stooges in the social media.
It is time to speak out against the concerted and, loosely, coordinated effort to silence Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and critics of Israel, by smearing them as anti-semites. As a journalist who has been engaged in the Israel-Palestinian conflict since I was 20 years old, this tactic is nothing new to me. But I have never witnessed (in the UK at least) the kind of sustained and widespread attacks that have happened in recent weeks. For this reason, it’s time to put forward a powerful statement on why our team at The Canary refuse to be censored by this hypocritical and cynical smear campaign.
How it works
It appears that enemies of Jeremy Corbyn’s progressive plans for the Labour party have discovered some common ground. Blairites within the party and the media, along with their conservative peers and the pro-Israel lobby, all lose out if Corbyn succeeds. So, in short, they are seeking to take him out of play by hitting him where it is mutually beneficial – his long-standing criticism of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
The efforts to deliberately confuse anti-Zionism (criticism of the political movement to establish an apartheid Jewish state), and anti-semitism (the prejudice and persecution of Jewish people) are longstanding. Israeli advocacy groups within the EU have been attempting to formalise the bogus definition of anti-semitism since at least 2005. As Ben White reports for Alternet, as recently as March 30 this year:
Eric Pickles, UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust issues and chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, revived the discredited definition by publishing it on the government’s website.
By setting up this framework, such groups simply have to wait for someone to make a criticism of Israel – then launch their attack. Here’s how it works:
Some journalist or pro-Israel group seize on an anti-Israel statement (generally scouring social media accounts over years). They then release it as a shocking revelation. Pundits and political opponents then whip up some mock outrage until they can force a resignation or suspension – and so they go on repeating with each subsequent target.
In the case of Labour activist Vicky Kirby, the allegations of anti-semitism absolutely bear true. Her statements were despicable and indefensible. However, since then, the project has expanded to include any and all expressions of outrage at Israeli atrocities.
The treatment of Naz Shah is a case in point. The contemptible conservative blogger Guido Fawkes released a Facebook post that Shah published during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza. The post stated that the solution for the conflict would be to relocate Israel to the US as a 51st state. Is that emotive? Yes. Does it make a powerful political point? Yes. Israel receives more than $3bn every year in defense funding from the US, which it uses to enforce a brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine. Israel is an apartheid state, and it was certainly not considered racist to call for British occupiers to get out of the colonies of Rhodesia, South Africa and elsewhere – even those colonialists who had lived in the country for generations.
It is also worth noting that none of these come-lately crusaders against anti-semitism utter a word against Israel when its statesmen and women call openly for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
So let me be clear: anyone seeking to cloak their bigotry under the petticoats of persecution meted out to the Palestinians will find no sanctuary here.
For enemies of Corbyn and the progressive left to leverage this into a sickening smear campaign against all those who stand against prejudice – to abuse the memory of holocaust victims for their own political ends – is almost beneath our contempt. We denounce these appalling tactics in the strongest terms. They are repulsive and repugnant, and they have no place in our public conversation.
The Canary exists to confront anti-semitism. Not only anti-semitism, but all prejudice, whether based on race, sexuality, gender or anything else. Which is more than can be said for those promoting the campaign against Corbyn and the progressive wing of the Labour party right now. If you agree, make this stand with us. Call out prejudice wherever you find it, and let’s have the same policy for bullshit too.
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
The Canary is for the birds.
How could a ‘contemptible’ journalist such as Guido Fawkes publish something a public figure had shared on social media? What could he have been thinking in bringing it to public attention, when he might have suppressed it?
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The Corbynite websites and blogs are getting all agitated because they know this is the beginning of the end. People who voted in good faith for Jez last year are suffering more and more cognitive dissonance. The forthcoming leadership challenge doesn’t look like such a walk in the park for the left any more, does it?
You misrepresent what the article states. It refers to people who store up these prejudicial uses of social media, wait for an opportune moment, then get it released via some media stooge – in this case, Paul Staines – in order to generate a controversy of the kind described in the article.
Now, why would a right-wing opponent of Labour like you want to do a thing like that?
I’m pretty sure readers will be able to work out a decent answer for themselves.
This is not the beginning of the end for Corbyn et al.
This is just wishful thinking on your part.
You and yours must be very afraid of our new Labour Party who wholeheartedly support our Chosen Leader.
If you think we cant see through all this then not only do you underestimate the steadfast support for our movement, but also underestimate our cognitive abilities to critically analyze the repugnant spew of propaganda you would like to call news etc.
Very well said Looby.
This a good and honest article from the Canary. Glad you put it up. I am a supporter of Zionism and have some Jewish online friends who are Zionists and they like me, are appalled at Israel’s actions. Zionism was simply a search for a homeland in which Jews, historically persecuted, could go to find sanctuary. As an ideology it was not shared by all Jews, but neither was it ever intended as a malignancy. The conversations I have been reading seem to overlook the origins of the Zionist beginnings in favour of what it has become in the hands of the apartheid extremists who have taken over it.
I’ve edited out the rest of your comment but will act on it as soon as I may.
Mohandeer: I am not sure you and your friends fully understand zionism.
At least, that variant of it which was established by Herzl at the First World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
Herzl and his fellow zionists wanted to promote anti-jewishness in Europe in order to encourage jewish-only aliyah or migration to Jerusalem (Zion).
I know there was a group called Labour Zionists but they never opposed the racist employment policies of the kibbutzim movement, did they?
They never opposed the Jewish National Fund either, did they?
They all knew full well that what they were engaged in had to result in the full and total ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians (or Arabs, as they called them then).
Their attempt almost succeeded in 1948 when the full force of zionist terrorism fell on the unwitting Palestinians, driving half their population – 750,000 – from Palestine.
Let me repeat that: the zionists drove out half of all Palestinians from Palestine.
For Palestinians, 1948 was an utter disaster, what they call today The Nakba.
Members of the left-wing version of zionism understood what was going on.
On one occasion when I was chairing a meeting at which Ilan Pappe was the principal speaker, he mentioned that he had been interviewing former members of the Haganah who had participated in the ethnic cleansing in 1948.
According to Pappe, they all understood exactly what they had been engaged in – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – but had justified it on the basis that the zionist entity which would emerge would be far more progressive and a much more left-leaning regime than many thought possible.
As we – and they – now know, they were completely misguided in their assumptions.
The zionist state today far more resembles the nazi state than anything else.
Perhaps that was what “national socialism” was meant to be like?
I’m not sufficiently briefed on the history of Zionism to know whether John’s comment is accurate, so I’m allowing it and hoping that others will validate it (or not).
this is linked indirectly to John Mann’s questions regarding Mein kampf.
To my understanding Hitler was a student artist and shared sleeping on a clothes line with other homeless hobos in his younger days. the person who was the house owner charged for the ‘ privilege of hobos draping themselves over a rope slung between two walls.
his hatred of jews is purportedly traceable to this experience since the line owner was of jewish descent.
it also explains the well known phrase ” I could sleep on a clothes line”.
its also worth knowing that in germany prior to the nazi party and hitlers era of power it was normal for non- germans to be treated as inferiors so if true hitler’s younger days would conceivably have been excessively abhorrent.
however hitler was probably prone to exaggeration as are most political advocates.
A friend of mine suggested that ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was an anti-Semite because he had been beaten by a Jewish man in a pub brawl, the incident leaving his face scarred. I haven’t researched that, but if both his story and yours are true, then Nazi attitudes were shaped by responses to individuals, rather than the Jewish people as a whole.
A first class article Labour is a party of two half’s one half Tory and the other a down to earth party thats working for the country and its people its time to sort the problem out the likes of John Mann should be de-selected and someone that represents the aspirations of there constituents tbe selected, The Party as become a gravy train for parasites.
Look at jfjfp.com
This explains how Guido Fawkes doctored Vicky Kirby’s quote and how other dirty tricks were played.
“Antisemitism:…It’s a trick, we always use it”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nex-oSKPX2w
There’s no business like Shoah business.
I find your pun in poor taste.