The Jewish voice. The BBC’s coverage of antisemitism charges against the Labour Party has been both unbalanced and uncritical

Letter in Guardian today headed Boris Johnson's record of bigotry, antisemitism and far-right politics. Too lengthy to replicate here but it is basically making the point that Johnson has shown, in writing in the past, his feelings and contempt for minority groups. They say We share the pain that many feel about antisemitism on the left and will hold the Labour Party to account. But we wholly reject Boris Johnson's cynical attempts to exploit our community's legitimate concerns to distract from his own disgraceful bigotry

A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for a far-right government that poses an existential threat to all minorities. As Jews, we understand that our fate is bound up with that of other minorities. We will only find safety through solidarity. We call on allies of the Jewish community to reject hate and vote the Tories out.

You really need to read the whole letter.

Signed by: Em Hilton, Campaigner, Jews Against Boris, Jolyon Rubinstein, Actor and writer, Miriam Margolyes, Actor, Eleanor Penny, Writer, Prof David Graeber Anthropologist, LSE and 19 others.

That was my point varian

You and your former colleagues might think this is bad Iam64 but if the Tories win this election - you ain't seen nothing yet!

If we are allowing a brief reach into our own election GG3 then I feel there's no doubt we will agree that a government led by Mr Corbyn is much more likely to help the 'poor' in our country than one led by Mr Johnson. I had a Christmas get together with former colleagues this week - we all agreed we could weep or get very angry in equal measure about the devastation of our public service. Enough - this thread isn't about that though it's so very topical today of all days.

Iam and GG3 I used the word ‘gullible’ on another thread.I’m still trying to work out if the general public are gullible or simply don’t have a clue.

If the majority elect them again Iam there must surely, be a majority who don't think they are "poor". I find that so much more worrying.

Just like our own country - poor government elected here by the majority.

growstuff I agree that many thinking Israelis do not support their government. Sadly more do and that is how this lot got elected.

gg3 he says what I know to be true.

Good link GracesGran. Thanks.

I think those who see the LP through a veil of antisemitism and believe all they read should watch this.

www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/822676358165389/

The reason I asked whether any male MPs have suffered the same kind of abuse is because other female MPs (eg Angela Eagle, Stella Creasy) have suffered the same kind of abuse.

Do not think for one moment I'm denying the anti-Semitic element to this, but it does seem odd that it seems to be mainly females who are the object of abuse. (Just thinking.)

I disagree that Israel is an illegal state, although I do believe that some of the activities of the current government are illegal.

POGS I am not going to work my way through all of that but if you are unclear as to why people have a problem with Joan Ryan, just watch The Lobby. It is available on YouTube and several other sites.
WWM2 is right. Your partisan attitude to a universal problem makes calm debate impossible. I haven't read the tweet you refer to nor seen it mentioned elsewhere. If true, and that is a big 'if' considering none of the previous allegations by the person concerned have been with regard to them involving Labour Members, then it is of course horrendous and would be one awful example. It would not of course prove that it was worse in Labour than in the population generally.
You cannot serious believe that the right wing press, owned by 5 nom dom Millionaires (or billionaires), or the neoliberal press owned by hedge funds or a Russian oligarch friend of Johnson, has been fair and balanced in its reporting of Labour and Corbyn.
TIG received donations from people with close connections to the Israeli government (this is a matter of record) but I haven't seen anyone seriously mentioning Rothschild or Soros. We would all like to see less racism and bigotry but it will not be reduced by pretending that it is a problem of the left and not with all of society. If it is greater anywhere it is of the right as the growing incidents in mainland Europe illustrate.

blogs.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-loss-of-land-1946-2000-unexplained-2/

Just to back up my Israel statement

www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/fifty-times-jeremy-corbyn-stood-with-jewish-people/

JC is and always has been a supporter of the Jewish People and staunchly anti racist. Israel is not a Race of people by the way - it is an illegal state.

pogs you have accepted in the past that hate crime is spread throughout society and in every political party.

I am firmly of the opinion that to simply identify one group as committing these crimes is to weaponise hate crime for a political purpose. It is the very worst of weaponising and only reflects on the user.

Yes hate crimes exists, yes we can find traces of it throughout every political,party.

Your posts would be taken more seriously if you recognised this fact and were not so politically biased.

Maybe, but many Israeli citizens don't support their own government. I'm not convinced that this has much to do with foreign relations with Israel, although Corbyn's support for a two-state solution to Palestine has been conflated by some on the left as an excuse for hating all Jews.

Jewish people in the UK really worried about the prospect of a Labour Government? Very few I suspect until a their Rabbi wound them up.

Jewish people in Israel worried then possibly yes as a Labour government has suggested it will suspend arms sales.

As a matter of interest, have any of the male Jewish MPs experienced anti-semiticism?

Jaycee

You say-

"The point people are making is that this is the result of relentless smearing by a right wing press and an Establishment that will do anything to stop a Corbyn government as many of them have admitted.
It is very sad that people have been worried when they have taken what they have read at face value."
--

It is not the case it is the right wing press or BBC that has formed my opinion of what I take at ' face value'!

I listen, watch and prefer to make my opinions by hearing and watching 'the horses mouth' in the form of Labour MP's, Labour councillors etc. who have openly spoken of antisemitism and the rise of harassment /intimidation by since the Jeremy for Leader / Momentum/ Labour Party took over the Labour Party.

I have raised this before but it sums up the problem Labour has within the party between those who believe in the words and voices of those affected and the conspiracy theorists who deny any problem and continually use the word 'smear' to block any prospect there is a truth to be accepted.

hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2019-02-20/debates/993F895E-D215-4773-A464-1A6320523B0E/AntisemitismInModernSociety#contribution-634CAEE1-6E1B-436F-B871-3EAA16D6EDA4

Lucian Berger

' Why are we joined here for this debate? It was almost a year ago that I shared with the House my family’s history and experience of antisemitism through the centuries. My mother’s family were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. I spoke about the more than 100 members of my family aged from four to 83 who were murdered by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibór, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.

What has happened since that last debate? It pains me to say this and share with the House that we have gone backwards, as we have heard from hon. Members’ contributions. We have not seen the progress we should have seen over the course of the past 11 months. On a ​personal level, I have in the past year alone seen a further two people convicted: one from the far-right, imprisoned after he threatened to kill me, convicted under counter-terrorism legislation, and another just before Christmas, a former member of the Labour party convicted of harassment. That takes my tally to six or seven individuals, depending on how you interpret it, convicted of antisemitic-inspired hate crimes and threats.

And there is a significant amount of antisemitism that might not reach the criminal threshold but that has surfaced. I have been subjected to thousands of messages of antisemitic abuse and hate, and I want to reflect on what I have seen in just the past week and share with the House the range of terms I have seen; they range from the ridiculous to the truly disturbing. There might be a small minority who think I am a “Zionist lizard” or that I am responsible for Eurovision taking place in Israel. It is sadly all too common to be addressed as “an evil little witch” or a “murderous Zionist.”

Abuse is only part of the problem. Arguably more concerning, as we have heard already, is the rise of insidious antisemitic conspiracy theories: that I am an agent of Mossad, that I am a traitor to my country, that I am paid directly by Benjamin Netanyahu, based purely on my Jewish background. The comments underneath my posts on social media are filled with individuals calling me the MP for Tel Aviv or asking whether a Member of Likud can stand for election in our country. And just yesterday an individual who says they are a member of the Labour party and with the hashtag “JCforPM” in their bio—they have been on Twitter for an extended period and have hundreds of followers, so this is not a bot that has been created—said:

“shame on Luciana Berger, A Zionist Bitch, I hate her, I hate her baby, her Israel.”

Elsewhere an official Labour-affiliated group, Young Labour, announced that the departure of my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) would mean that “Palestine Lived” and then proceeded in bullying the Jewish chair of Young Labour, while influential Twitter users have wished “good riddance” to “Israel’s fifth columnists.” They have called myself and hon. and right hon. Friends “the Israel stooges party”, “the Israeli apartheid democratic front” and so on. Others have alleged that the Rothschilds and George Soros will declare their backing for the new Independent Group. I share all this because this is what is happening in our country, from people across the country, during the past week and today in particular.

In the Labour party, my political home for nearly 20 years until I resigned from it on Monday, I have seen obfuscation, smears, inaction and denial every step of the way. We had a debate in this House following the unprecedented event of a minority community in our country, the British Jewish community, taking to Parliament Square outside this place to say enough is enough when it comes to antisemitism. It was not a demonstration against National Action or Tommy Robinson; it was against the Labour party, a political movement that is supposed to pride itself on the values of equality for all and anti-racism against all.

Yet what has happened in the wake of that unprecedented event in our country and in the wake of the debate in this House that took place just a few weeks later? Mr Speaker, you could not make up the catalogue of ​events that has shamed the Labour party since that happened: the countless individual cases, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) has alluded to already, that have been dropped or have not been responded to. In the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day this year, we learned of members of the Labour party in high-profile positions, a number of them councillors and one a Welsh Assembly Member, who had made antisemitic comments and had as their sanction a “reminder of the rules”. That was somehow a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism. We have heard the audio recording of a member of the Labour party’s highest governing body, the national executive committee, accuse 70 British rabbis of being Trump fanatics rather than addressing their very serious concerns about antisemitism. We had to fight for months to see the international definition of antisemitism with all its examples accepted and adopted by the Labour party, and even with a last-minute attempt to dilute it.

We had the summer of antisemitism, when not a day went by without another story in the British press about antisemitism in the Labour party and about its leader’s connections to the issue. One in particular, which caused gross offence, was the claim that British Jews do not get irony. We were told that the Leader of the Opposition was present, but not involved, at the laying of a wreath for the individuals who orchestrated the Munich attacks and the murder of the Israeli athletes. The commitment to meet a deadline to deal with high-profile cases has been deliberately missed, and the party is withholding details of physical threats to MPs, including myself. Just last week, the leadership of the parliamentary Labour party held members in contempt despite their reasonable request to answer 11 straightforward questions and to respond to serious concerns about antisemitism, which was ignored.

This is a shameful record, let alone from a leadership and a political party that seek the highest office in our land. That is why I have arrived at the sickening conclusion that the Labour party is institutionally antisemitic in its processes, its attitudes and its behaviour. We ignore this at our peril. Colleagues have referred to the figures. We have seen a 16% rise in the number of incidents since 2017, and behind every one of those incidents is a person who has been affected.'
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Of course to some MP's such as Luciana Berger, Margaret Hodge, Ruth Smeeth, Joan Ryan and the many voices who backed them are nothing more than are 'smearing' the Leader and the party and will never be taken at ' face value'.

It does not require the right wing press/BBC to expose the issue, it does however require being open minded to the fact it is from within the party the accusations have flown.

That should be 'as in other parties or in comparably sized organisations ... '

Iam64 No one, literally no one, on this thread has denied that there are Jewish people who have become scared of the Labour Party.
The point people are making is that this is the result of relentless smearing by a right wing press and an Establishment that will do anything to stop a Corbyn government as many of them have admitted.
It is very sad that people have been worried when they have taken what they have read at face value.
What people have asked for is examples of specific incidents that have not been firmly dealt with and evidence that those incidents are greater (or even as many) as in other parties or other comparably sized parties.
It is not reasonable for a man who has fought racism and bigotry his entire life to be pilloried in such a cruel way.
It is not the people defending him who are in denial as they are frequently and openly asking for evidence and specific incidents. There have been none supplied and only generalised allegations which are the easiest thing to make. No matter how many links of people who actually know the man or Jews who are supportive are put up, these are obviously not read as not one has received a direct response.
Propaganda works by being relentless and continual repetition. It has gone on for years and it cannot be undone easily or quickly but it is unfair of people not even to give the man a fair hearing and listen to alternative views.

Growstuff This is from his very right wing ex boss at the Telegraph
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-johnson-prime-minister-tory-party-britain

This is a letter sent by Jews from outside the UK who have seen what is going on here.
Are they in denial too?
denouncingthesmear.weebly.com/?fbclid=IwaR13y6DPd5af3QSFenW1Hst5D-ob4umT2PZxvHw1uJswVrKsmQN3-bjSCA