If anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour Party, why are the accusers having to lie about it?

This morning (November 1), I woke up to an email from a friend, as follows: “Mike just letting you know this lot on Twitter appear to be targeting individuals who have donated to your crowd fund.”

“This lot” would be a new name on the fake anti-Semitism bandwagon, JVLWatch on Twitter (joined September 2017). I have no doubt that the same old liars are behind it, though.

Who knows – they may even be connected with the right-wing ‘anti-Semitism’ troll that Skwawkbox has exposed for promoting a fake anti-Semitic Twitter account and then inventing a biography for the same nonexistent person. Read about it here.

You may be aware that This Writer has been falsely accused of anti-Semitism, and I have launched a crowdfunding campaign to take my accusers to court for defamation.

JVLWatch appears to be attacking people who are contributing to my JustGiving site, who happen to be members of Jewish Voice for Labour.

For example:

The claim refers to a comic strip I wrote for a small-press publication called Violent! which I created in 1999. Violent! was a tribute to the 1970s comics legend Action. I created a series for it entitled Hard-Boiled Hitler.

The strip parodies Hitler’s career using themes common to superhero comics – but there I part company with JVLWatch, whose authors have either never read the story or are deliberately trying to mislead the public.

In HBH, Hitler is the recipient of superhuman abilities in a similar manner to that of Captain America – but he steals the syringe containing the serum that gives him these powers and shoots up in a filthy toilet. A superhero? Perhaps not!

The scene referenced in the tweet, in which “Hitler punches through gas clouds, using the Nazi phrase to justify aryan supremacy & extermination of Jews” is, of course, nothing of the sort.

It may interest you to know that The Sun and The Sunday Times tried to use this strip as justification of their claim that I was an anti-Semite, to the press regulator IPSO. After reading my response, the regulator dismissed the claim out of hand.

Here’s what I wrote:

“I find it interesting that the representative mentions the humorous – yes it was! – comic strip I wrote, ‘Hard-Boiled Hitler‘. From the way it is mentioned, I would have suggested that nobody involved with The Sunday Times has read it, or they would have realised that it in no way supports Hitler or the Nazis, and is in no way anti-Semitic.

“The whole idea was to ridicule the man, his ideas, and the political party that promoted them – and to warn that, unless the people are vigilant, it can be easy for such people to gain power, no matter how silly they really are.

“I was going to raise the issue of anti-Semitism in the strip: The intention was to have veiled references to something going on in the background – as I recall, the Allies had no idea what was going on for most of the war – until I reached an appropriate time in the narrative for the liberation of a concentration camp. Then, I think the appropriate metaphor is, the other shoe drops – it would have become apparent that, while this ridiculous character was behaving in the ridiculous ways chronicled in the previous episodes, he had also been carrying out the genocides for which the real Hitler is justly infamous.

“The point would have been that even the most clownish of people may be capable of the most heinous of crimes. Nowadays I would connect that to the behaviour of real people in power at the moment, around the world, but I wasn’t as politically-motivated at the time. Unfortunately, the series was cut short by the premature death of the artist.

“Nobody who worked on it considered it to be anti-Semitic – if it was, one might as well suggest that every war comic published since 1945 was anti-Semitic too, because most of them don’t even mention the Holocaust. How could they miss out something so central to our understanding of that conflict? But of course they are not. I have no reason to believe that any of the readers considered it to be anti-Semitic either – certainly nobody ever contacted us to express such concerns.

“I am therefore drawn to the conclusion that The Sunday Times – and anybody else who wants to use the strip to support their position – is rather desperately scrabbling for anything that can be reinterpreted to support its claims, in the hope that people seeing the strip after being exposed to the publication’s interpretation of it will be influenced to accept those claims.”

On that last point – shall we find out?

Below is the episode of Hard-Boiled Hitler  containing the image JVLWatch mentioned: The Orator. Did it show him punching through gas clouds, “using the Nazi phrase to justify aryan supremacy and extermination of Jews” – or did it portray him as a flatulent git?

You decide:

No anti-Semitism there – it’s simply a swastika-smashing send-up.

So JVLWatch – and all those who join it in accusing the innocent – are a gang of liars.

And the best way to teach them the error of their ways is to do exactly what they don’t want.

So, please, if you haven’t donated to the crowdfunding page before (or even if you have), please visit it and give what you can. Attempts to mislead the public in this way are nothing less than evil.

Visit our JustGiving page to help Vox Political’s Mike Sivier fight anti-Semitism libels in court

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