When a right-wing Murdoch propaganda rag decided to run another anti-Corbyn hatchet job the BBC and the Labour right-wingers rolled into action immediately to join forces.
Before the Times article had even been published BBC Newsnight were broadcasting an outraged interview with the right-wing Jewish Labour MP Louise Ellman to bolster the story.
The crux of the criticism was that back in 2010 Jeremy Corbyn had been involved in an event where one of the speakers compared the Israeli occupation of Palestine with the Nazi Holocuast (a comparison which falls foul of the IHR definition of anti-Semitism that Labour are under immense pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby to adopt into their disciplinary code).
In the Newnight interview the right-wing Labour MP Louise Ellman expressed her shock and outrage that Jeremy Corbyn had attended the event.
Nowhere in the entire segment did Ellman, (the bitterly anti-Corbyn) interviewer Emily Maitlis, or the Times reporter think to mention that the guy who made the Israel-Nazi comparison was actually a Jewish Auschwitz survivor called Hajo Meyer who compared the suffering of the Palestinian people to his own lived experience of the Holocaust.
An unbelievably brazen omission, but as we'll see, not the only ridiculously brazen omission of the segment.
The fact that the Murdoch-Labour right-BBC nexus sought to smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite just goes to show how shockingly unfit for purpose the whole IHR definition of anti-Semitism actually is.
If this warped definition allows non-Jews to police the language of Jewish people, and even Holocaust survivors, there's something catastrophically wrong with it (which is why it is the subject of such fierce debate, and why it's even been strongly criticised by the guy who actually drafted it).
Another example of a Jewish person who made Nazi references in relation to Israeli oppression was the late Labour politician and relentless peace campaigner Gerald Kaufman.
If the Labour right-wingers and pro-Israeli lobby had had their way back then, Kaufman would have been expelled from the Labour Party as a result of this speech in 2009.
Just think about it. Right-wing non-Jewish Labour supporters of the Israeli occupation like Stephen Kinnock are demanding harsh new anti-Semitism rules that would have seen the Jewish peace campaigner Gerald Kaufman unceremoniously kicked out of the Labour Party for expressing his own opinion.
How anyone can think it's acceptable for non-Jews to use accusations of anti-Semitism to thought police Jews is absolutely beyond me.
Returning to the absolutely atrocious BBC Newsnight segment and the other omission I referenced earlier, another thing the outraged Labour right-winger 'forgot' to mention about the event in 2010 she was so outraged about is that she was actually there for the entire duration of it.
Spewing synthetic outrage that Jeremy Corbyn was involved in an event that Ellman herself actually attended has to be one of the dirtiest, most opportunistic, and least honest bastardisations of the whole anti-Semitism debate so far.
So not only did we have the Murdoch-Labour right-BBC nexus obscuring the fact that the victim of their anti-Semitism witch hunt was actually a deceased Jewish Holocaust survivor, the outraged Labour right-winger also obscured the fact that she was actually there in person at the event she was howling faux outrage about.
The fact that she was actually there at the event also makes the first omission even more glaring because there isn't the slightest possibility of confusion over the identity of the man being smeared as an anti-Semite. She knew that he was a 90 year old (now deceased) Jewish Holocaust survivor and actually played along with it.
Amazingly the presenter Emily Maitlis went on to deliver a segment on the influence of "fake news" with a straight face later in the episode!
Nobody expects the BBC to get everything right all of the time, but this Newsnight segment was an absolute abomination of utterly biased reporting and the deliberate and cynical omission of crucial facts.
Here's a link to the BBC's complaints form
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Whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, it's easy to see that the state operated broadcaster casting the main political opposition as agents of a foreign power is the kind of extreme propaganda you'd expect to see in a tyrannical state like Russia, rather than a liberal western European democracy.
After a flood of complaints about their decision to red tint and alter a picture of Jeremy Corbyn and photoshop it onto a picture of the Kremlin, the BBC investigated itself and found that their decision to do that was totally "fair and impartial"!
This latest ruling is a truly Orwellian piece of propaganda which focuses heavily on Corbyn's hat, and completely ignores the glaring contradiction between their initial responses to the scandal, and the findings of this report.
The report tries to claim that it is supposedly "immediately apparent to viewers that the contrast and colour balance of the photo had been adjusted to create a stylised image but this was standard practice on the programme" but if we compare this excuse with their initial excuse we find a glaring contradiction.
Their initial excuse was that they'd used the same Kremlin background for the Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson, the whole thing falls to bits, because in Williamson's case they didn't red-tint or otherwise alter the image, and they positioned the picture of Williamson facing away from the Kremlin rather than merging him in to create a "stylised image".
So their current excuse that it's "standard practice" to manipulate photos to create "stylised images" is totally contradicted by the picture that they Tweeted out as their previous excuse!
To see the excuse morph from one thing to another like this is extraordinary, especially when one excuse clearly contradicts the other.
Even if you actually dislike Jeremy Corbyn, you'd have to be completely cracked to agree with the BBC's whitewash conclusion that there are supposedly "no grounds for regarding the contents of the item as less than impartial or fair to Mr Corbyn", especially given the blatantly contradictory excuses the BBC have pushed out to justify it.
Since Theresa May came to power in 2016 the Tories have accepted £800,000+ in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies, and the Tories have repeatedly obstructed Jeremy Corbyn's efforts to clamp down on all the Russian dark money flowing into the City of London, yet it's not Theresa May portrayed as a Putin stooge on the BBC, it's Jeremy Corbyn ... And what's even worse is that they actually expect people to be gullible enough to swallow their Orwellian claims that using this photoshopped image as their background was completely "fair and impartial"!
This isn't even the first time the BBC has been caught photoshopping images of Jeremy Corbyn to make him look bad. In the run up to the 2017 General Election they photoshopped him into a picture with Osama Bin Laden, and after the Trump election they photoshopped a Trump "Make America Great Again" baseball cap onto his head.
Each time they create anti-Corbyn photoshop propaganda like this they generate more complaints and controversy, but they keep on doing it, and then keep on completely absolving themselves of blame like petulant children.
The more people complain about their transparent bias that we're all being made to subsidise through our TV licences, the more biased propaganda they feel inclined to put out, and the more Orwellian the excuses they come up with to defend the petulant contrarianism of their producers.
If they'd even vaguely admitted that the background was poorly considered and politically biased, or that there was a significant discrepancy between their treatment of the Tory defence secretary and Jeremy Corbyn, then we could perhaps believe that they intend to learn from their mistakes and recommit themselves to political impartiality.
But given their whitewash the conclusions are obvious. If a state funded and supposedly impartial broadcaster can look at such a transparently biased editorial decision and conclude that they did absolutely nothing wrong, that's an open declaration that they see no problem with the dissemination of blatant anti-Corbyn propaganda.
Furthermore it's clearly an open invitation to BBC politics producers to continue disseminating anti-Corbyn propaganda, safe in the knowledge that no matter how obviously biased it is, any BBC investigation will be another total whitewash.
This whitewash is an open declaration that the BBC intends to continue disseminating anti-Corbyn propaganda, and they have absolutely no intention of admitting that this is what they've been doing, or that it is wrong.
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A little over a month ago the Tory party took a £30,000 donation from the wife of a former finance minister in Vladimir Putin's government. The donation was in fact a bribe to buy personal access to the Tory defence minister Gavin Williamson, and this is far from the only donation the Tories have taken from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies. They've raked in over £800,000 since Theresa May became Prime Minister, and over £3 million since 2010.
The obvious question these donations raise is what are these Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies buying with these donations. People don't just hand over vast sums of money for nothing, so they must be expecting some returns on their investments.
One possible answer is the way the Tories have steadfastly obstructed moves to introduce so-called Magnitsky powers to bar Russian officials from the UK if they're suspected of war crimes, human rights abuses, or crimes against humanity, and to stem the flow of Russian dark money that is flowing into the City of London.
Blocking and overturning Magnitsky powers has been described as Vladimir Putin's top foreign policy objective, so when the Tory party took the unprecedented step of halting a committee meeting on the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill in order to avoid consideration of Magnitsky powers on February 27th, just three weeks after taking a £30,000 bung from the wife of a known Putin associate, it's hard to draw any other conclusion isn't it?
And now, despite this damning evidence against the Tory government (money trail and incriminating behaviour), the mainstream media are uniformally attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench in the wake of the Salisbury nerve agent attack as if they're the Russian stooges!
Corbyn has been condemned for "political point scoring" for pointing out the huge flow of money from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies into Tory party coffers, his concerns about the Tory blocking of Magnitsky powers have been routinely ignored, he's been attacked on the front pages of the right-wing propaganda rags as a "Kremlin stooge" and Putin's puppet", and the supposedly impartial BBC made up a huge backdrop portraying Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of Russian agent!
These kinds of partisan attacks are to be expected from the right-wing propaganda rags, but when the BBC state broadcaster is spewing the kind of biased, reality-reversing pro-government propaganda you'd expect to see in Putin's Russia, questions really need to be asked.
Aside from the incredible bombardment of reality-reversing propaganda portraying Corbyn as the "Russian stooge" when the money trail points clearly and undeniably at the Tory party, another interesting question comes out of all of this.
If one of Putin's top foreign policy objectives is preventing Magnitsky powers, and the Tory party were gladly doing his bidding by brazenly obstructing political efforts to introduce these Magnitsky powers in Britain, why on earth would they jeopardise their main objective by launching an unprecedented chemical weapons attack on British soil against a retired spy they released from prison years ago?
Of course it's possible that the Russians are so arrogant that they think they can get away with carrying out a chemical weapons attack deep in NATO territory, but even the most rudimentary Russian consideration of the likely outcomes of such an attack would surely have raised the probability of Magnitsky powers being imposed in retaliation.
Of course I'm not arguing that Russia didn't carry out the attack because I'm not privy to the chemical analysis, or any of the intelligence material on the case. To make such a judgement without firm evidence would be to wander off into bonkers conspiracy territory.
However, given the fact that Putin is usually a very smart operator, I think the question of why he would green light such a brazen attack on British soil is a pertinent one, especially given the way the Tory government were pliantly doing his bidding just a few weeks ago by obstructing efforts to impose Magnitsky powers in the UK.
The other pertinent question is why almost the entire UK media has rounded on Jeremy Corbyn to misleadingly present him as some kind of Russian stooge when he's the one who has been pushing hard for Magnitsky powers, and completely let the Tories off the hook for their extremely dubious donations from Russian sources, followed just weeks later by their deliberate obstruction tactics to undermine the implementation of Magnitsky powers.
There's clearly something dreadfully wrong with the BBC that they're ignoring this compelling evidence against the Tory government and running the kind of flagrant pro-government, anti-opposition propaganda you'd actually expect to see in Putin's Russia.
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