Is there any proposition vile or ludicrous enough that the Tory mental gymnasts won't defend it?

Let's not pretend there's not a common human tendency to resort to absurd post hoc justifications for outrageous behaviour when it's our own, or perpetrated by those we support.

This tendency exists, and anyone who has ever even attempted to develop a rational worldview must have confronted their own tendencies to perform this kind of mental gymnastics routine.

Post hoc mental contortionism to defend the indefensible has been a feature of discourse for as long as any of us can remember, but in recent months there's been a constant stream of Tories willing to take the most absurd and demeaning positions to defend the outrageous behaviour of their political tribe.

There's never been a government full of people willing to absolutely demean themselves by defending the utterly indefensible.

The most obvious and glaring example that springs immediately to mind is the absurd story that Dominic Cummings engaged in a lockdown-defying 30 miles each way to the historic beauty spot of Barnard Castle in order to test his eyesight.

The idea that you'd conduct an eyesight test by packing your family into a car and driving them around the country is as absurd as the concept that undertaking such a reckless public-endangering test was an excuse to defy lockdown measures.

But a whole stream of Tories were herded onto social media to announce how convincing they'd found Cummings' explanation, and that it was 'time to move on'.

But the biggest absurdity of all came when Tory government minister Michael Gove told a right-wing radio interviewer that he too had conducted this kind of radically dangerous driving-eyesight test, which they both had a jolly good laugh about because deceiving the public with absolute bullshit is clearly some kind of lovely in joke for ex private school Tories to chuckle over.

On the subject of Michael Gove, he was at the centre of another one of these frenzies of Tory mental gymnastics when his wife posted a picture of his bookshelf, which proudly displayed the work of the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and the outrageous bible of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve.

It's not hard to imagine the absolute cacophony of outrage from the Tories had a figure from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn for example, been found with the work of racists and Holocaust-deniers on his bookshelf.

Yet the Tory reaction to Gove's bookshelf was to snap into ultra-defensive mode, and suddenly begin portraying Holocaust-denial as 'required reading actually' and even deriding critics of Holocaust-denial as Nazis!

Another Tory figure to have provoked numerous impromptu displays of Tory mental contortionism over the last few months is their beloved cult leader Boris Johnson.

When he skipped five consecutive COBRA meetings in the crucial early stages of the pandemic, the Tory mental contortionism circus pretended that it was supposedly perfectly normal (no Prime Minister in history before Johnson has skipped five COBRA meeting in a row during a national emergency), and that he was actually in the right to focus on other issues, despite skipping one of them to lark about with a Chinese dragon!

When Johnson publicly bragged about defying social distancing rules (and basic self-preservation) by shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then presented "take it on the chin" as the preferable option to "draconian measures" like ... erm ... actually attempting to contain the virus, the Tories put on their cognitive clown outfits again and utterly demeaned themselves by jumping through all manner of hoops to defend the ridiculous behaviour and reckless rhetoric of their cult leader.

Then there was the absolutely ludicrous Tory decision to completely sideline the government's own scientific advisers in order to replace the clear and concise slogan "Stay At Home", with a sequence of nonsense verbiage like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!".

Suddenly Tories were flocking onto social media to pretend that this absolute gibberish was perfectly clear and intelligible, despite the fact that if you'd said "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!" to anyone pre-2020, they'd have assumed you were having a stroke and called you an ambulance.

And now we've got the absolutely repulsive spectacle of Tories tying themselves in knots to actually defend monuments to slave traders.

When the people of Bristol took matters into their own hands, after six interminable years of political incompetence, to remove the statue of Britain's most notorious slave-trader Edward Colston, the Tories complained bitterly about the lawlessness and the vandalism.

But then when Tower Hamlets Council removed the statue of slave-trader Robert Milligan, in a completely calm, lawful, and safe manner, the Tories erupted in paroxysms of outrage again.

It turns out that the lawlessness and vandalism objection they started with was just a cover for their real objection, which is apparently that they just like statues of racists, because they get some kind of perverse dopamine kick out of the fact that other people find the memorialisation of Tory slave traders and Tory fascist sympathisers abhorrent and disturbing.

But they'll just keep on inventing one post hoc justification after another to defend what can essentially be boiled down to statue trolling.

The latest post hoc excuse is that they're simply defending history, but where on earth were they when their own party was using austerity extremism as an excuse to shut down 800 libraries, annihilate funding for museums, and trash public investment in history departments and history education at every level of the education system?

They clearly don't really give a damn about the nation's history, or they'd have raised concerns over the last decade of Tory historical vandalism, it's just the latest contortion required of them by the leaders of the CCHQ freakshow circus.

In a matter of months the Tories have proven themselves willing to excuse all kinds of nonsense and depravity, from pretending that driving a vehicle on public roads with failing eyesight constitutes reasonable behaviour, to vehemently defending Holocaust-denial as if it constitutes required reading. And from laughing off the actual Prime Minister mocking his own government's social distancing measures, to publicly eulogising slave-traders!

As a nation we've lumbered ourselves with the most inept and cultish government in British history, with piss-witted simpletons in almost every single crucial position, and no matter how badly they keep on screwing up, we're stuck with them for another four years thanks to their 80 seat majority.

There's very little we could do to rid ourselves of them, and the increasingly bizarre and contorted displays of mental gymnastics they're willing to perform to defend the outrageous words and actions of their own cult illustrates the fact that it simply doesn't matter how bad things get, they'll just spout total gibberish, and continue to get away with it.

They know the gibberish they're spouting is absolute bollocks. We know it's absolute bollocks. And worst of all they know that we know it's absolute bollocks.

But they also know there's basically nothing we can do about it, so they're actually getting a perverse kick out of doing stuff like defending the indefensible, excusing Holocaust-denial, and eulogising slave-traders, because they believe that a nation that elected an incompetent, bone idle bigot like Boris Johnson as their leader will never hold them to account for any of it.

Hopefully the British public with eventually grow tired of this lamentable Tory freakshow of mental contortionism, and get rid of them.

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Yet more biased coverage from the supposedly impartial BBC

If you want to get an idea of the astounding levels of bias in BBC broadcasting, just consider the disparity in coverage between their wall to wall negative coverage of Jeremy Corbyn attending a Holocaust event eight years ago in which the Jewish Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer presented a talk called "the misuse of the Holocaust for political purposes", and the absolute silence they've maintained on the fact that three senior Tories, including a government minister (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove), had meetings with the extreme-right white-supremacist fake news merchant Steve Bannon just last week.

Why is it that the BBC is so desperate to draw the British public's attention to an event that happened eight years ago in an attempt to link Corbyn to the views that were exrpessed there, but so keen to keep the British public in the dark about three of the main front runners to replace Theresa May as Tory leader all holding secretive meetings last week with an extreme-right fake news merchant who told the French neo-fascist Front National to wear their racism as a "badge of honour" and helped unify the swastika-waving "Jews will not replace us" Alt-right maniacs with the Trump campaign.

Defining anti-Semitism

Whether you agree with Hajo Meyer's claims of parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the treatment of the Palestinian people in Gaza, his statement obviously makes a complete mockery of the IHR definition of anti-Semitism that defines such comparisons as anti-Semitism.

If your definition of anti-Semitism is so warped that it actually categorises survivors of the Holocaust as anti-Semites for equating the suffering they endured in the past with the suffering of Palestinian people in the present, then it's obviously completely messed up, and simply intended as a method of repressing and silencing political criticism of Israel by redefining it as anti-Semitism.

Any definition of anti-Semitism that allows non-Jewish supporters of the Israeli occupation to silence and banish Jewish people who are opposed to the Israeli occupation from the Labour party clearly has nothing to do with combating anti-Semitism, and everything to do with policing political speech in order to prevent criticism of the Israeli government.

And anyone who thinks that Corbyn sharing a stage with a Jewish Holocaust survivor eight years ago is somehow far more newsworthy than three very senior Tory MPs colluding with a vile extreme-right fake news merchant just last week, well they must be absolutely cracked, mustn't they?

Why is the BBC so skewed?

Under enormous pressure from the mainstream media Jeremy Corbyn has actually issued an apology for attending the event eight years ago because, in his words, views were expressed there that he didn't "accept or condone". However absolutely no pressure whatever has been applied to Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Michael Gove to apologise for colluding with a bigoted extreme-right fake news merchant just last week.

There are several big reasons for this staggering disparity. The first is Corbyn and Labour's naive attempts to actually deal with the anti-Semitism allegations by conducting inquiries, consulting, debating, and expelling those who are found guilty of anti-Semitism.

One might have imagined that this is the correct type of approach, but in the modern media environment it's demonstrably not.

Witness the way the Tory party has simply stonewalled all calls for an investigation into rampant anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks. Despite pleas for an urgent investigation by the Muslim Council of Britain and the senior Tory politician Sayeeda Warsi, they simply ignore the problem, and the story barely appeared in the news, let alone dominating headlines for week, after week, after week like the Labour anti-Semitism row.

The moral of this disgusting story is obvious: When dealing with the mainstream press, outright denial and stonewalling of complaints is infinitely less likely to generate headlines than actual efforts to deal with contentious issues. Therefore the paradoxical situation is created whereby attempting to deal with the problem rather than ignoring it is categorically the wrong approach.

Another major cause of this disparity in coverage is the fact that so many anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are prepared to use anti-Semitism as a weapon to attack the reputation of their own party, and to brief the press against their own leader (even though the evidence shows that rates of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party have dropped significantly since Corbyn took over), while Tory MPs insist on turning blind eyes on allegations of anti-Muslim bigotry and the rising prevalence of extreme-right white supremacist and ultranationalist hate speech in the Tory ranks (aside from the honourable exception of Sayeeda Warsi).

A third significant reason for the continued mainstream media fixation with Labour anti-Semitism while examples of Tory anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and collusion with extreme-right white supremacists get a total free pass is "mainstream media "groupthink".  

A lot of well paid mainstream media hacks recognise that stories that damage Labour align with the mainstream media "groupthink" that Corbyn must be stopped because he represents a threat to the four decade neoliberal orthodoxy most of them have benefited from very nicely indeed. They also understand that criticism of the Tories runs absolutely counter to that underlying agenda of protecting the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy at all costs.

A fourth reason is the shockingly right-wing bias of the print press in the UK, which is so right-wing skewed that even a liberal publication like the Guardian that fears democratic socialism and promotes centre-right liberalism (of the Blairite & Lib-Dem kind) is considered by many to be too left-wing.

Given that many journalists, including TV broadcasters are intensely workshy churnalists who much prefer to lazily parrot bilge from hard-right propaganda rags rather than do anything resembling investigative journalism or cogent analysis of their own, it's hardly surprising that the BBC's political output has an unmistakably right-wing bias. 

Conclusion

Whether you agree with these attempts to explain the mainstream media's astoundingly biased coverage or not, surely you've got to accept that their efforts to smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an "anti-Semite" for comparing his lived experience of the Holocaust to the suffering of the Palestinians simply in order to have a political dig at Jeremy Corbyn represents a repulsive new low for the BBC and the rest of the anti-Corbyn mob?

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There is no "moderate" centre ground when it comes to fascism

It's extremely concerning how the political right (and an alarming number of self-declared "centrists") have taken to using "antifa" as an insult, as if being opposed to fascism is some kind of moral degeneracy.

When it comes to extreme ideologies like fascism (street thuggery, dictatorship, genocide, white supremacy, violent oppression, eugenics, anti-Semitism ...) you're either opposed to it, or you support it.

There is no moderate centre ground when it comes to fascism. No matter how much you might wish for it, there simply isn't a convenient fence for right-on handwringers to sit on.

When it comes to fascism the only sensible position for anyone other than fascists is on the anti-fascist side. This is because if the fascists gain power they'll eliminate all opposition starting with the leftists and the anarchists before they move on to eliminating the democratic socialists, liberals and traditional conservatives. 

If you have any political opinions other than fascism (or pig-headed apathy about all political issues and a willingness to adopt total subservience to your political leaders in order to save your own skin if fascists ever come to power) then you have a responsibility to be antifa.

Inaction when it comes to fascism is clearly implicit support for fascism, but promoting the ridiculous, but increasingly popular false equivalence that those who oppose fascism are "just as bad" as the fascists themselves is even worse. It's worse because it implies that to oppose fascism is morally repugnant, when in reality smug indifference to fascism is the real moral degeneracy that people should be worrying about.

Even if the number of people alive who still remember the horrors of the Second World War have dwindled, we still have countless recorded testimonies that the brutality of Hitler's Nazi regime was enabled by the indifference of millions of ordinary people.

It was the self-serving indifference of the people who just quietly got on with their lives as their neighbours and work colleagues were dragged off by the fascists who allowed the political purges and then the Holocaust to happen.

Britain has a long tradition of resisting fascism (the battle of Cable Street, WWII, opposition to the National Front in the '70s and '80s, ridicule of the BNP & EDL ...) but nowadays many of the descendants of those who made incredible sacrifices to beat fascism during the Second World War are actually more likely to share content from extreme-right hate groups like Britain First on Facebook and whine piteously about how nasty the Antifa leftists are, than they are to do like their grandparents did and actively resist the horrors of fascism.

In fact we've no excuse at all for inaction, or for mindlessly spewing the ridiculously dangerous trope that to oppose fascism is as bad as fascism itself.

Back in the 1930s nobody knew the appalling scale of the horrors that fascism would inflict on Europe but the British working classes came together in solidarity to beat Oswald Mosley's fascist blackshirts into submission. Nowadays we've got access to an enormous mass of information about the horrors that are possible when desperate people succumb to the lure of fascism, so we've no excuse at all for not being anti-fascists.

So next time you hear anyone smugly condemning those who stand up against fascism as being "just as bad", remember that they're condemning all anti-fascists, including previous generations of your family who made such sacrifices in the fight against fascism on the continent. 

They're essentially saying that your grandparents/great-grandparents were just as bad as the concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany because they actively, and in many cases violently, resisted fascism.

By making this ridiculous argument they're placing themselves on a mythical centre-ground where inaction and pseudo-liberal handwinging in the face of violent swastika waving white supremacists intent on dictatorship and genocide is morally superior to active resistance and condemnation!

It's long been said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing". And it should be obvious that all that is necessary for the triumph of fascism is for right-wingers and sickeningly smug so-called "centrists" to go around spreading the incredibly dangerous notion that to actively oppose fascism is as bad as fascism itself.

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Sean Spicer: A man of boundless ineptitude

The United States has suffered some pretty appalling governments in its history, but surely none of them can compare to the multiple displays of abject incompetence that the Trump administration have packed into their first three months.

Things started badly with Trump's tantrum over the fact that Obama's inauguration crowd was bigger, Spicer's lies and Kellyanne Conway's excuse that Spicer's lies were not lies, but actually "alternative facts", and then they just got worse and worse from there.

There was the resignation of Michael Flynn for outright lying that he hadn't been in contact with Russians; the introduction of Trump's profoundly unconstitutional Muslim Ban and his deranged attacks on the US judicial system when it was ruled unlawful; the bizarre spectacle of the Trump and his administration lying that he'd been spied on by Obama and the British intelligence services; the debacle of Trump's failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act; and countless examples of Trump Tweeting about whatever gibberish he'd just been watching on Fox News propaganda channel.

When it came to Trump's decision to attack Syria and lambaste Barack Obama for having not attacked Syria earlier, his rhetoric was massively undermined by his own Tweet history (see image).

The August 29 2013 Tweet that demanded that Obama seek Congressional approval before attacking Syria was especially damning in light of the fact that Trump didn't bother to seek Congressional approval for his own attack on Syria.

Sean Spicer then weighed in to defend Trump's attack on Syria by claiming that Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons, which looked suspiciously like an act of Holocaust denial from a member of a regime that was propelled into power on the back of the so-called Alt-right white supremacist neo-Nazi movement.

Spicer's Holocaust denial sparked outrage, prompting a hasty apology, but during his televised apology he literally said that the objective of Trump's attack on Syria was to "destabilise the region"!

Whether Spicer's "destabilise the region" comment was a Freudian slip in which he admitted the truth about Trump's agenda, or just a case of "mis-speaking" as our American cousins say, it's an astounding display of incompetence.

Imagine being such an incompetent blabbermouth that you'd somehow contrive to deny the Nazi Holocaust, and then state that the objective of your President's military action was to destabilise the Middle East during your apology!

Now imagine being such a stubborn, fact-averse narcissist of a President who is so lost in a cloud of Fox News propaganda that you refuse to even consider how much of a total arse your press secretary is making you look!

I do feel a slight twinge of sympathy for Spicer given that defending the constant stream of outright lies and mutually contradictory gibberish that Trump comes out with has to be one of the hardest jobs imaginable, but then I remember that he's only there because he wants to be there, and that he could easily step aside if he had any awareness of a. the sheer impossibility of the job he's tasked with or b. his own bumbling ineptitude.

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Theresa May's gift to the pro-Israeli lobby

I've written various articles before pointing out Theresa May's autocratic and authoritarian hard-right tendencies. I've written about her open contempt for the concept of human rights, her utter disdain for free speech, her attacks on the concept of fair and open justice, her undermining of the right to privacy; her promotion of economic apartheid schemes that blatantly discriminate against people based on their gender and their incomes; and her use of divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Theresa May's latest authoritarian crackdown is another attack on freedom of expression. Under the guise of clamping down on anti-Jewish bigotry she is planning to outlaw all kinds of political criticisms of Israel and make it very much easier for the pro-Israeli lobby to smear their political critics as anti-Semites.

Criticism of Israel ≠ Anti-Semitism

Theresa May's policy is to adopt a new definition of anti-Semitism as drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of outlawing the bigoted abuse of Jewish people, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism that Theresa May is keen to adopt into UK law goes an awful lot further than protecting Jews from abuse.

Several of the IHRA example definitions of anti-Semitism blatantly conflate political criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. This kind of deliberate muddying of the water can only be seen as yet another attempt to silence Israel's critics by labelling them as anti-Semites.

The definitions

The IHRA definitions that Theresa May wants to write into UK law can be separated into three different types; reasonable, debatable, and unacceptable.

Reasonable

"Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion."

Only the worst kind of bigot would attempt to argue that it should be acceptable for people to call for the killing or harming of Jews.

"Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews."

Of course it is wrong to blame all Jews (or the concept of Judaism) for the crimes of individual Jews, just as it is wrong to blame all Muslims for the crimes of Islamist terrorists, or to blame all white people for the crimes of white supremacist extremists like Anders Breivik or Thomas Mair.

If the IHRA definition stuck to clear and incontrovertible definitions like these, few would complain if it was adopted as a standard definition of anti-Semitism.

Debatable

Unfortunately the IHRA definition contains debatable definitions of anti-Semitism that would become problematic if adopted into UK law. One example is an a poorly-worded attempt to define Holocaust denial.

"Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)."

While Holocaust denial is extremely distasteful, and very often motivated by anti-Jewish hatred, this definition is problematic because it clearly relies on the idea of one true knowable version of historical events.

The big problem is the use of the word "scope" because it implies that the true scale of the Holocaust is a known quantity when it isn't. In 1953 Gerald Reitlinger estimated the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust at 4.2 - 4.5 million; Raul Hilberg estimated the number of deaths to be 5.1 million; The Encycolpedia of the Holocaust estimated between 5.59 million and 5.86 million; Jacob Lestschinsky's estimate was 5.9 million; and the Technical University of Berlin estimate is between 5.29 and 6.2 million.

Given the variable estimates into the scale of the Holocaust, any attempt to criminalise people for denying the "scope" of the Holocaust should really include a detailed description of where the cut-off point actually lies.

For example, would belief in Gerald Reitlinger's lower estimate of 4.2 - 4.5 million victims make a person guilty of "denying the scope of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany"? If not, where exactly is the cut-off point?

The official adoption of such a lax definition of Holocaust denial by the UK government clearly be problematic because who gets to say what is and isn't a reasonable estimation of the "scope" of the Holocaust?

Aside from the lax wording of the definition, there's also the question of whether criminal prosecution is really the right way to deal with people who are wrong about the scope of the Holocaust. In my view the best approach is to confront Holocaust deniers with the facts and evidence (of which there is an awful lot). If they then refuse to accept the evidence, universal criticism and ridicule are probably better solutions than prosecution and/or imprisonment.

Unacceptable

"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor."

The first point to raise about this definition is that this is a clear non-sequitur because the cited example bears no relation to the original definition. Whether you believe Israel is a racist state or not, a claim that Israel is a racist state clearly doesn't deny anyone the right to self-determination at all. It's just an opinion.

The second point is that it's hardly unreasonable to argue that Israel is a racist state. Israel is a state that grants citizenship based on ethnic origin* and distributes land to new citizens that has been stolen from the Palestinian people (the illegal settlements in the occupied territories). Additionally there's also the discriminatory treatment towards non-Jewish Israeli citizens to consider.

It's actually difficult to argue that Israel isn't a racist state, but if Theresa May gets her way then anyone who questions the ethnicity based Law of Return or complains that the discriminatory treatment of non-Jews in Israel is racist could find themselves being prosecuted for anti-Semitism.

"Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is a stain on humanity. Only the most cold-hearted Israel apologist could refuse to be appalled at the regular assassination of children, the killing of peace activists, chemical weapons attacks on school buildings, the obstruction of humanitarian aid shipments, the bombardment of civilian areas, the destruction of Palestinian homes and property, mass imprisonment without trial, and the general attitude of Israeli exceptionalism when it comes to issues like human rights and international law.

Although comparing people to Nazis is hardly a sensible way of trying to win your opponents over to your side of the debate, the idea that anyone who does so should be condemned as an anti-Jewish bigot or risk criminal prosecution is absolutely ludicrous.

Thought crime and the thin end of the wedge

If Theresa May gets her way and these poorly-worded definitions of anti-Semitism are adopted into UK law, then she will have created categories of political thought crime.

It doesn't matter whether you think that Israel is a racist state or not, or whether (like me) you think that Nazi comparisons are unhelpful at best, the idea that these political opinions should be labelled as anti-Jewish bigotry or liable to prosecution is unacceptable.

If the government sees fit to dictate what people are allowed to think and say about Israeli politics, how long before they see fit to begin dictating what people can say about British politics? How long before Theresa May decides that certain criticisms of the Tories or their policies becomes a criminal offence? How long before Theresa May decides that, for example, describing the Tories' systematic abuse of disabled people as "modern day eugenics" should be a criminal offence?

Lack of opposition

Very few people will dare to criticise the official adoption of these weak, poorly-worded and dictatorial definitions of anti-Semitism by the UK government because they will be afraid of the backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby who have every interest in conflating political criticism of Israeli policy with the bigoted abuse of Jewish people.

Jeremy Corbyn has already shied away from criticising Theresa May's efforts to conflate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Jewish bigotry. It's perhaps understandable that he's adopted such a weak position given the inevitable barrage of mainstream media hysteria he would provoke by trying to argue that it's wrong to officially conflate political criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry in this way.

Theresa May's links to Israel

Theresa May has been involved in the powerful pro-Israeli lobby group Conservative Friends of Israel, and she was one of the many Tory MPs to abstain on the 2014 Parliamentary vote to recognise the Palestinian state.

In attempting to push through this poorly-worded and highly partisan definition of anti-Semitism that deliberately muddies the water by mixing up political criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry, she's demonstrating her bias once again.

When Theresa May was installed as Prime Minister after the failure of David Cameron's reckless EU referendum gamble, Conservative Friends of Israel described it as "an exciting new chapter in the UK-Israel relationship", and her efforts to deter and intimidate political criticism of Israel by officially conflating it with anti-Jewish bigotry is clearly a huge gift to the pro-Israeli lobby.

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* = The Israeli Law of Return automatically grants Israeli citizenship to any Jew, spouse of a Jew, the children of a Jew and their spouses, and the grandchildren of a Jew and their spouses, provided that the Jew did not practice a religion other than Judaism willingly.