Tag Archives: Al-Jazeera

Jewish NEC member suspended by Labour on eve of party conference

Suspended: Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi with the RMT Union’s Mick Lynch.

This is unfortunate timing – for the Labour Party.

It has suspended Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, recently elected to the party’s National Executive Committee, on suspicion of having broken party rules nearly a year ago.

Why wait so long – until a significant event in the party calendar – if it’s a serious allegation? Doesn’t this correspond with the claims in the Al Jazeera documentary series The Labour Files about the party’s factional use of the disciplinary system?

Members of Jewish Voice for Labour, for whom Ms Wimborne-Idrissi is media officer, seem to think so:

This suspension along with a flurry of other eve of conference expulsions and suspensions bears out the evidence presented in the Forde  Report and the Al Jazeera programme, The Labour Files: The Purge, about the Party’s factional abuse of the disciplinary system.

Furthermore, the notion that the Action Plan, introduced in response to the EHRC investigation, has solved all problems has been shown to be travesty.

On Thursday afternoon Naomi received a Notice of Allegation and Administrative Suspension which charged her with having “spoken at an event run by proscribed organisations”. That event took place almost a year ago at the 2021 party conference. Why has this moment been chosen to suspend her from membership?

Naomi’s NEC candidature was backed by 13 different groups and many individuals who came together to campaign for the #Grassroots5 slate. Other members who have been charged with the same offence have not been suspended pending investigation. Why has Naomi been singled out for suspension? This action and its timing seem calculated to prevent her taking up her role as an NEC member representing constituency party members at the NEC AGM scheduled for Tuesday Sept 27.

We note that extraordinary numbers of other members, included elected CLP delegates, have been suspended or expelled just in time to prevent their participation in conference.

Naomi and JVL have campaigned powerfully and consistently against the misuse of allegations of antisemitism against the pro-Palestinian left. Naomi is the only directly elected Jewish member on the NEC. Approaching 60 Jewish party members have been investigated for “antisemitism”. Many Jewish members have resigned feeling that Labour is an unsafe place for non-Zionists.

How does this disproportionate targeting of Jews fit in with Keir Starmer’s talk of ‘”tearing out antisemitism”?

Could there be another factor in this carefully planned timing? Naomi’s suspension came hours before the airing of the first in a series of #LabourFiles documentary programmes revealing the extent to which staff and politicians on the right of the party worked behind the scenes to undermine and defeat those on the left. Programme Two on Saturday 24 September will include evidence of the abuse experienced by “the wrong sort of Jews”.

We deplore the misuse of disciplinary procedures to purge the party of left-wing activists who have always represented a strong strand in Labour.

We call for

  • the immediate lifting of Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi’s suspension
  • an end to the arbitrary and factional interventions by the party apparatus
  • implementation of the recommendations in the Forde Report including effective action against the racism and Islamophobia exposed so graphically
  • the restoration of the whip to Jeremy Corbyn.
  • Conference to review all decisions to ban proscribed groups.

Of course, there has been a fuss on the social media. Here’s Ms Wimborne-Idrissi herself:

And others have also chimed in:

That last tweet is pretty damning all by itself!

Expect absolutely no comment from Keir Starmer’s Labour and no effort to offer justice to all the Jewish people his party has wronged.

Source: On the suspension of Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi | Jewish Voice for Labour

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As the Labour conference starts, here’s the documentary the party – and media – don’t want you to see

Al Jazeera timed this well.

The day the Labour Party conference began, the Middle East news channel uploaded a new documentary, The Labour Files, to YouTube.

Here’s the promotional blurb:

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit uncovers the true story behind the “crisis of anti-Semitism” that engulfed the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. It made him appear unfit to govern and led to a crushing electoral defeat.

An analysis of internal party documents, social media data and covert recordings reveals how senior Labour officials used the party’s procedures to undermine support for Jeremy Corbyn and to silence debate about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

The files also show how pro-Israel groups ask the party to distance itself from the Boycott Divest and Sanctions campaign, a protest movement that seeks to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, and how – in response – the Jewish Board of Deputies was assured that Labour would “never accept attempts to exceptionalise and deligitimise Israel.”

Part of the documentary concerns alleged links between the husband of Labour MP Stella Creasy – Dan Fox – with the far-right English Defence League (EDL). You’ll be able to watch the video below but before you do, in the name of balance, here’s Ms Creasy’s statement about this aspect of it:

This tweet seems to have pre-empted the statement, though:

Here’s the programme:

The documentary has provoked a large amount of commentary on Twitter – much of it criticising the mainstream news media for ignoring it:

Another Labour Files documentary appeared two days previously. Here’s the blurb for The Purge:

An investigation based on the largest leak of documents in British political history. The Labour Files examines thousands of internal documents, emails and social media messages to reveal how senior officials in one of the two parties of government in the UK ran a coup by stealth against the elected leader of the party.

The program will show how officials set about silencing, excluding and expelling its own members in a ruthless campaign to destroy the chances of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Britain’s prime minister. Candidates for key political roles were blocked and constituency groups suspended as the party’s central office sought to control the elected leadership.

And here’s the programme:

I present it without any comment of my own. Make up your own mind.

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Accusation games: It’s all falling apart for the knee-jerk “anti-Semitism” accusers

Momentum’s former vice-chair, Jackie Walker: Does she look like an anti-Semite now? [Image: Andy Hall for the Observer].

Isn’t it funny how these people are starting to be pulled into the light, when they thought they could play their dirty little accusation games from the shadows.

It’s like a game of aggressive-Zionist join-the-dots now; Shai Masot leads to Labour Friends of Israel, and from there on to the Jewish Labour Movement and who knows where.

This Writer has to wonder whether this conspiracy – and it is a conspiracy, have no doubt about that – would have been rumbled if, for example, people like myself hadn’t objected to the claims of anti-Semitism when they were levelled at Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn last summer.

I was warned off, you know. Good friends told me to be very careful of what I was saying, because the people I was accusing are “very dangerous indeed”.

Maybe they are, but facts have a habit of getting out. And while my articles back then produced a strong opposing – verbal – reaction from certain of our favourite figures and organisations (including a few of the kind of ad hominem claims mentioned below) there have been no bullets or bombs (yet).

They also seem to have got people thinking.

When Jackie Walker (mentioned in the Mondoweiss article quoted below) was accused at the Labour Party Conference, it seems more alarm bells started ringing.

And now we have the Al-Jazeera investigation (why not BBC? Why not ITV? Why not Channel 4 or the British mainstream print media?) that revealed Shai Masot and his little network of … I think they’re being called “infiltrators”.

It is time to root out every last one of these operators.

Anybody who has been involved in the anti-Semitism witch-hunt within the Labour Party last summer needs to be pulled in and checked out. That includes Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes blog. It includes John Mann, who accused Ken Livingstone. Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who gave evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee when it was accusing Mr Corbyn, would be worth questioning – as would every member of the committee itself, as their performances in the evidence sessions made it clear that they had already made up their minds before asking a single question.

Some of them might have nothing to do with it – perhaps all of them. But that has yet to be demonstrated.

What about Jackie Walker’s accusers in the Jewish Labour Movement – and, for that matter, in Momentum?

What about the national newspaper writers and editors who reported each story?

The list of possible suspects gets ever-larger, and is likely to grow even further, if these people are contacted and questioned in a thorough manner.

The issues here are serious. We are being told that agents of a foreign country have infiltrated our institutions and undermined our foreign policy with false accusations against our politicians and political figures.

As the extract below shows, the trail leads back at least as far as Mark Regev – and he is Israel’s ambassador to the UK.

At the very least, this is a major diplomatic incident.

So why is the Conservative Government refusing to take the necessary investigative steps?

While an Israeli operative’s efforts  to “take down” Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, may appear to be the biggest scandal to arise out of Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary The Lobby, what became clear to me throughout the four-part series was that the primary function of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and other pro Israel groups in the UK working with the Israeli embassy was smearing Palestinians and their supporters with charges of anti Semitism and other nefarious ad hominem claims.

Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, the left wing of the Labour party, called this “a constructed crisis for political ends”.

Evidence of this runs throughout the four-part series. Mark Regev, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, at a private meeting held during the annual Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last September, advises key activist leaders of Labour’s pro-Israel contingent on strategy and talking points:

“Why are people who consider themselves progressive in Britain, supporting reactionaries like Hamas and Hezbollah?  We’ve gotta say in the language of social democracy, I think, these people are misogynistic, they are homophobic, they are racist, they are anti-Semitic, they are reactionary. I think that’s what we need to say, it’s an important message.”

Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel, is captured saying in conversation at Labour’s annual conference that anti-Semitism is “the defining narrative actually now”. Defining narrative of what? The Labour party? Or the LFI’s strategy of taking down the leftwing branch of the party?

[Ella Rose] reveals a trajectory of what could be perceived as a strategy of accusation (of anti semitism), a gotcha focus with the objective of trapping people, as a means of one-upsmanship so as to advance the profile of the Jewish Labour Movement on the right flank of Labour, aligned with the faction of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The suggestion by critics that anything untoward is taking place is angrily rebuffed. Labour’s right flank postures itself as the real victims– for being accused of falsely accusing! For example, Michael Foster, a generous Jewish donor (£700,000) to Labour, last summer accused Corbyn supporters of behaving like “Nazi stormtroopers”, and was suspended by the party for the abuse, leading to yet more glaring Blame-Corbyn headlines in the British press.

As for those targeted, the bigger fish the better, beginning with Jeremy Corbin, of course, and his supporters in Momentum, like Walker. Labour party members are targeted for re-education programs through Labour Party trainings on anti-Semitism, and if you slip up you’re subject to an inquisition with the threat of being thrown out of the party, loudly and publicly with the press cheering it on.

Source: ‘Constructed crisis for political ends’: anti-Semitism claims are prime weapon for UK Israel lobby, Al Jazeera shows

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