Does Jonathan Sacks really speak for "all Jews"?

After the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks hit the headlines by comparing Jeremy Corbyn's criticism of a tiny bunch of extremely rude Zionist extremists who had been abusing the Palestinian ambassador in 2014 with Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech, many people quite rightly asked what gave him the authority to make such a hyperbolic judgement, especially given that it was only last year that he was publicly praising an extreme-right, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, Enoch Powell-praising diatribe as "a good book".

As far as I'm concerned Sacks has every right to criticise Jeremy Corbyn (and anyone else for that matter) but he's left himself wide open to accusations of rank hypocrisy by promoting a book that praised Enoch Powell for his divisive xenophobic rhetoric one minute, then using the horrible spectre of Enoch Powell to launch a hyperbolic and politically partisan attack on the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn the next.

The response of the Jewish Chronicle to people criticising Sacks' comments was an extraordinary defence headlined "the trashing of Jonathan Sacks is a trashing of all Jews".

Now if anyone else was making generalisations about "all Jews" they'd quite rightly be criticised for anti-Semitism given that there is definitely no all-encompassing belief system all Jews adhere to, but the fanatically right-wing Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard (who once said "the left,in any recognisable form, is now the enemy") and the author of the piece obviously see themselves as arbiters of what "all but a tiny minority of Jews" think.

Now I'm certainly not going to argue that Sacks is a completely bad person. He's clearly served the Orthodox Jewish community very well over the years otherwise he would never have risen so high, he's lectured in moral philosophy which is a subject I'd surely enjoy discussing with him despite our obvious political differences, and he's done quite a bit of Interfaith work too which I approve of.

However, many of his views are problematic to say the least.

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his vehement opposition to gay rights? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews support Britain's gradual move towards gay equality?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to supporting the far-right, pro-settler Mizrachi Olami organisation that organises divisive Zionist marches through the occupied Palestinian settlement of Hebron? Or is it fair to argue that at least a significant proportion of British Jews oppose the illegal Israeli settlements and strongly disapprove of divisive Zionist marches where people chant "death to Arabs"?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his 2010 comments about secularism being to blame for "Europe dying" or his claim that atheists "lack family values"? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews support western secularism, and another significant proportion of British Jews who self-identify as atheists would be outraged at the allegation that atheists are somehow inferior parents to religious people?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his public recommendation of an extreme-right, xenophobic, anti-Muslim Enoch Powell-praising diatribe as "a good book"? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews strongly oppose the attempted gentrification of extreme-right, xenophobic, and bigoted ideas, and disagree with anyone who uses their public platform to recommend this kind of extremism as "good"?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it came to him helping to write a speech for the hard-right, homophobic, anti-abortion US Vice President Mike Pence? Or is it fair to say that an awful lot of Jewish people would be horrified that a senior British representative of the Jewish community would involve himself with such a divisive character?

I'm guessing that pretty much everyone reading this would agree that Sacks doesn't represent "all Jews" or even "all but a tiny minority of Jews" on at least one (if not all) of these issues ...

So how can it be correct to claim that he speaks for "all but a tiny minority of Jews" when it comes to his highly partisan attack on Jeremy Corbyn?

And how can it be correct to claim that people critiquing Jonathan Sacks' partisan hyperbole, pointing out his hypocrisy, or highlighting his other views are somehow guilty of attacking "all Jews"?

If any non-Jewish commentator was claiming the words of one Jewish person were representative of "all Jews", or deliberately othering and marginalising any Jewish people who choose to disagree with their personal view of what Jews should think as "a tiny minority", they'd quite rightly be castigated as anti-Semites. 

But somehow these kinds of warped generalisations are being passed off as fair commentary by the Jewish Chronicle!

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How the Enoch Powell Corbyn smear spread from the New Statesman to the hard-right propaganda rags

If you ever needed an example of how 'centrists' and the hard-right work together in order to attack and undermine democratic socialism, look no further than the way coverage of the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' scandalous comparison of the lifelong anti-racism campaigner Jeremy Corbyn with the anti-immigrant fearmongerer Enoch Powell spread from the supposedly left-leaning New Statesman to the front pages of the hard-right propaganda rags.

Jonathan Sacks

Anyone who already knows who Jonathan Sacks should be familiar with his history of attending controversial Zionist extremist marches organised by the pro-settler Mizrachi Olami organisation, where chants of "death to Arabs" and vandalism of Palestinian property are commonplace. 

The same Mizrachi Olami organisation supports illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and organises marches through the occupied Palestinian settlement of Hebron, which is basically a much more extreme version of the sectarian Orange Order mob organising inflammatory marches through Catholic areas of Northern Ireland.

It's also worth pointing out that Sacks comparison between Jeremy Corbyn and Enoch Powell is more than a bit hypocritical given that he publicly recommended the anti-immigrant anti-Muslim Douglas Murray book "The Strange Death of Europe" as one of his best books of 2017, which contains glowing references to Enoch Powell, and chapter after chapter of xenophobic and anti-Muslim fear-mongering.

Is someone who attends extreme Zionist marches and promotes xenophobic Enoch Powell-praising books really in a position to smear a lifelong anti-racist campaigner with comparisons to Enoch Powell?

Origin of the smear

The origin of the hyperbolic comparison between Jeremy Corbyn and Enoch Powell was made in a New Statesman interview conducted by George Eaton, when Jonathan Sacks described Corbyn's "no sense of irony" comments about a specific group of rude and disruptive Zionist extremists with Enoch Powell's 1968 anti-immigrant "rivers of blood" speech.

Unsurprisingly the New Statesman ran with the smear as the headline for their article for its clickbait potential, but at no point did Eaton try to hold Sacks to account by questioning his justification for making such an extreme statement.

It's beyond doubt that Eaton know that the Corbyn "irony" comment was aimed at a small group of extreme Zionists who regularly disrupt meetings on the Israel-Palestine issue.

When Corbyn criticised them for having no sense of irony, they had been rudely berating and insulting the Palestinian ambassador.

On a previous occasion they turned up to an anti-genocide meeting to repeatedly shout "boring" at every non-Jewish genocide survivor who spoke at the event.

On another occasion the Zionist extremists turned up to disrupt a meeting that the anti-Corbyn pro-Israel Labour MP Wes Streeting was involved with, resulting in him calling them "rude yobs".

Interestingly nobody from the mainstream press attempted to misleadingly turn Streeting's criticism of the very same people as "rude yobs" into a criticism of all Zionists, or even all Jews as "rude yobs".

If these extreme Zionists are so exasperating that even an extremely pro-Israeli MP like Wes Streeting ends up calling them "rude yobs", perhaps criticising their sense of irony isn't quite as bad as "rivers of blood".

It's also worth noting that deliberately conflating Zionists with Jews is considered by many to be anti-Semitism because Zionism is a political choice, and not all Jews are Zionists (especially not the kind of extreme Zionists who habitually interrupt Israel-Palestine meetings to shout abuse at people that Corbyn and Streeting were criticising).

In their desperation to attack Corbyn by conflating a specific group of Zionist extremists with all Jews quite a few of Corbyn's fiercest critics have actually exposed themselves as being prone to anti-Semitic speech.

Anyhow, George Eaton didn't bother to point out any of this important context in the article.

Israeli apartheid

Despite failing to call Jonathan Sacks out on his hyperbolic smear, Eaton did attempt to challenge Sacks on the Israeli government's recent introduction of the Apartheid-style Nation State law. Sacks' response was absolutely dismal. Instead of criticising the racist Jewish-supremacism of the hard-right Israeli government, he made an evasive comment claiming ignorance of the significance of the law, followed by a second had assertion via his brother claiming that there was nothing Apartheid about the Nation State law, and that it was just "correcting a lacuna".

So according to Sacks, a hotly disputed and vehemently debated Jewish supremacist law that strips Arabic of its official language status in Israel is just filling a space, not because he's thought about the issue himself, but because his brother told him so - but in the very same interview he's publicly accusing someone else of being "low, dishonest and dangerous"!

Spread

After the New Statesman article was published, the context-free "Enoch Powell" comparison was churnalised onto the front pages of the hard-right Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

You would have thought that the editor of a left-leaning political magazine would have been horrified that his article had been used as the basis of yet another right-wing effort to damage the appeal of democratic socialism by smearing Jeremy Corbyn, but you'd be wrong.

Eaton was so giddy with delight that his article was the basis of two front page Corbyn smears in the right-wing propaganda rags that he sent out a gloating Tweet about it. 

Presumably he eventually thought better of this outrageous gloating because the Tweet is now gone, but not before I grabbed a screen shot of it (see image).

Way-hay, my anti-Corbyn smear story has gone viral in the hard-right press is certainly not a great look for the editor of a supposedly left-leaning publication, but it is indicative of the way that the supposedly left-leaning 'centrist' types are often more than happy to work with the hard-right to undermine democratic socialism.

Left-leaning publications like the New Statesman, Guardian, Mirror, and Independent are significantly better than the right-wing propaganda rags because they occasionally give voice to democratic socialists, and often hold the Tory government to account on issues where most of the mainstream media turn a blind eye. 

However, they're also home to plenty of people who are more than happy to amplify the right-wing anti-Corbyn smear campaigns by lazily churnalising smears from the right-wing propaganda rags into their own articles, and even feeding new smears back to the right-wing press and then gloating about it like Eaton did.

Conclusions

Whether you agree with Corbyn or not on his democratic socialist policies, or his efforts to combat bigotry within the Labour Party, it's impossible to deny the way his criticism of a specific group of extremely rude and disruptive Zionist extremists has been misleadingly warped into a supposed attack on all Jews, and that Jonathan Sacks went even further by using these out-of-context remarks to accuse Corbyn of being worse than the likes of Nigel Farage, the vile xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, Boris Johnson, and other bigoted race-baiters in mainstream politics

Perhaps it's unsurprising that a guy who actually recommends a far-right book that promotes xenophobia, anti-Muslim sentiments, clash of civilisations type fearmongering, and the lionisation of Enoch Powell, doesn't see the likes of Farage and Leave.EU as problematic?

It's impossible not to note the hypocrisy of a man who one day publicises an anti-Muslim diatribe of a book that glorifies Enoch Powell, then the next uses a comparison with Enoch Powell to attack someone simply because they've got a history of arguing against the Israeli occupation and the brutal repression of the Palestinian people.

It's hardly surprising that a man who supports pro-occupation pro-settler movement in Israel would use his position to attack a vocal critic of the occupation, but what is truly shocking is that the journalist who interviewed him didn't just fail to call him out on this hyperbolic smear over some deliberately out-of-context remarks, but actually gloated when his uncritical interview was used as the basis for another round of anti-Corbyn front page smears in the right-wing propaganda rags.

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Margaret Hodge has completely lost the plot in her latest anti-Corbyn rant

Labour are once again ahead in the polls, and like clockwork Margaret Hodge has emerged to badmouth her own party in the most extraordinary manner. In this article I'm going to look at just some of the desperately cynical, wantonly offensive, and downright dishonest nonsense she spewed in her interview with Sky News.

Muddying the water

Hodge said a lot of off-the-charts nonsense in her interview, but I've got to start with the most cynical and dangerous of her assertions. In an effort to have a stab at Jeremy Corbyn she claimed that there's "a fine line between being pro-Palestinian, and being anti-Semitic".

This is blatantly untrue. One involves having a bit of basic human decency and expressing solidarity towards the victims of decades of brutal Israeli repression. The other involves being a disgusting bigot who hates Jewish people for no reason other than that they're Jews.

There is no "fine line" between decency and indecency, and this effort by Margaret Hodge to claim that there is, is nothing but a cynical effort to intimidate decent people out of expressing solidarity with the Palestinians for fear of being labelled a racist bigot for having done so.

Trivialising the Holocaust

After screaming vitriolic and defamatory abuse in Jeremy Corbyn's face Margaret Hodge was subjected to a brief disciplinary procedure which involved the sending of a few letters, an meeting, and her getting let off scot free for an offence that would have seen any ordinary Labour Party member hoofed out of the party for good.

In a desperate attempt to present herself as the victim, Hodge actually compared this disciplinary process to the horror of fleeing Nazi Germany.

Just try to imagine the absolute tower of self-righteous delusion a person would have to be sitting upon in order to imagine that trivialising the horrors of the Holocaust in order to pose as the poor victim of a flawed softball disciplinary process that let her off scot free for an offence that would have had any normal person in a normal job rightly expecting the sack.

By trivialising the Holocaust in this way Hodge has demonstrated that she's massively over-privileged and extremely disconnected from reality.

Entitlement

Let's not forget that this is the same Labour Party that attempted to rig the 2nd Corbyn leadership election by purging thousands of left-wing members for "crimes" such as once retweeting a non-Labour MP, voting for a different political party long before they even joined Labour, and even liking the Foo Fighters too much!

Hodge was let off scot free for what would probably have seen any ordinary person like you or I sacked from our jobs, but she didn't have a single word of criticism when thousands of ordinary people were being purged from the Labour Party for no reason other than they were likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in a leadership election!

Basically Hodge believes she should be allowed to do whatever she likes to bring the party into disrepute, because disciplinary processes, punishments, and expulsions are only for the little people.

Hypocrisy

In comparing Labour's softball disciplinary procedure to the Holocaust in her victim-pleading rant Hodge has accidentally revealed her own hypocrisy.

The pro-Israeli lobby have long argued that it's grotesque to compare stuff like the deliberate killing of scores of unarmed civilians (including medics, journalists, and children) in the vast open air prison camp of Gaza to Nazism or the Holocaust, even to the extent of smearing a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite just to have another crack at Corbyn.

But if comparing indisputable acts of brutality and repression to the actions of the Nazis is tasteless, then how on earth can it be considered reasonable to compare something as benign as an internal party political disciplinary process to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust?

Outright lies

By claiming that Jeremy Corbyn has overseen an increase in anti-Semitism Hodge wasn't just veering off into hyperbole, she was outright lying.

The evidence is absolutely clear that rates of anti-Semitism have fallen dramatically in the Labour ranks since Corbyn became leader.

The obvious explanation for this trend would seem to be that the massive influx of left-leaning socially liberal people into the Labour Party since 2015 has significantly diluted the pre-existing levels of anti-Semitism.

Let's not forget that back in 2005 Labour's top spin doctor Alistair Campbell masterminded grossly offensive poster campaign depicting a Jewish political rival as a pig and a Fagin character.

This was at a time when Hodge was an actual government minister, but somehow, she didn't speak out about this grotesque anti-Semitism right at the heart of the Labour Party and use it to attack the party leadership.

Now that anti-Semitism rates have fallen dramatically under Corbyn, and nobody at the top of the party is doing anything remotely as bigoted as running an anti-Semitic poster campaign, now she's persistently complaining about the issue?

Surely anyone with any sense at all can see that someone who turns a blind eye to the blatant anti-Semitism of her political allies can't possibly be making a fuss over the issue in good faith when it comes to her political opponents?

Rabid anti-Corbynism

Hodge attempts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's popularity by raising concerns about the "rise of populism" but completely gives the game away with her list of supposed populists.

She mentions Boris Johnson and Donald Trump first, with no negative description, but when it comes to Corbyn she says "the cult of Corbynism", thus revealing she's actually got more antipathy towards Corbyn's democratic socialist agenda than Boris Johnson's extreme-right ultranationalism, or the frightening and ideologically incoherent lunacy of Trumpism!

It's no surprise that Hodge is such a vehement opponent of Corbynism given that she was the beneficiary of a £1.5 million tax-dodging scam via a Liechtenstein-based fund. 

If anyone is likely to oppose Corbyn's determination to clamp down on the tax-dodging of the mega-rich it's someone who participates in that kind of thing.

Excuse me, who are the cultists?

In insultingly dismissing everyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn as a "cult", Margaret Hodge is simply showing how out of touch she is with the wishes of the Labour Party membership.

People don't support Corbyn because they see him as some kind of infallible idol but because he represents a genuine alternative to the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served the mega-rich and the political class do well over the last four decades at the expense of the rest of us.

the reality is that a lot of people are drawn to Corbyn because of his principles and policies (stuff like renationalising the railways, sticking up for workers, combating tax-dodging, stopping arms sales to despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia) but wish he was a bit better at forcing the point home. 

Hodge really doesn't seem to realise that the vast majority of British people have absolutely had it with self-serving political elites flogging off our national assets to their mates on the cheap, gutting our local communities, trashing our wages and working conditions, and imposing ruinous austerity dogma on the nation in order to make the poor and ordinary shoulder the entire cost of the bankers' bailouts, lavishing handouts and tax breaks on corporations and the mega-rich, and fiddling their expenses all the while to maximise their own personal gains.

The reality is that it's the Westminster establishment club and their lackeys in the mainstream media who are living in a cult, but because they have little or no concern for ordinary people.

They're content in their cosy little ideological echo chamber full of reassurances that strict adherence to the orthodox neoliberal ideology is still an unquestionable article of faith, and that anyone who actually listens to what the little people want must be the mad, bad, dangerous, extremist with the cult following!

Irresponsible journalism

One of the most disturbing things about the interview is the complicity of the interviewer, who instead of actually questioning any of the dishonest, deluded, and borderline deranged nonsense Hodge was spouting, actually nodded along like it's the received wisdom!

Maybe you could give the journalist a break for being too taken aback by the outlandishness of it to interject during Hodge's extraordinary Holocaust hyperbole, but failing to point out the fact that she was outright lying about anti-Semitism having increased under Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary failure.

Isn't it the least we can expect from journalists that they actually hold powerful establishment figures to account when they lie, rather than acting as their enablers and mouthpieces?

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Jeremy Corbyn should demand an apology from Chris Grayling over his defamatory comments

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the Tory government minister Chris Grayling told an absolute whopper of a lie about Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly the Today programme presenters didn't think to call Grayling out on his lie, they just left it there, further rotting away the BBC's own shockingly degraded reputation, as well as his.

The lie Grayling resorted to was a claim that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" in Tunisia.

Here are the actual facts:

• At the invitation of the Tunisian Prime Minister in 2014, Jeremy Corbyn attended a remembrance ceremony for the victims of an Israeli terrorist atrocity (the 1985 bombing of the Palestinian government in exile in Tunis that was even condemned by Margaret Thatcher at the time).

• The event was not a "funeral" in any way shape or form because nobody was buried there on the day Corbyn visited.

• None of the eight terrorists who carried out the Munich attack are even buried in Tunisia, let alone in the graveyard Jeremy Corbyn visited (five are buried in Libya, two in unknown graves after being assassinated by the Israelis, and one was last seen in hiding in 1999).

• There is no evidence that the Black September members who were buried in the graveyard in 1992 were "terrorists" or Munich "plotters" as alleged in the shockingly dishonest Daily Mail front page that kicked off this latest anti-Corbyn smear campaign. 

• If Israel did have any evidence whatever of their involvement in the Munich plot, then perhaps they should have arrested them and put them on trial, rather than carrying out an extrajudicial assassination?

In light of these basic facts, Grayling's accusation that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" is clearly highly inaccurate and defamatory.
Even by the utterly debased standards of British political discourse, you can't just accuse people of attending the funeral of terrorists with no factual justification whatever.

And even considering Grayling's stupidity, you would have thought that he would have learned the lesson that baselessly slandering your political opponents is an unwise move after Ben Bradley's mega-viral apology Tweet over the Czech spy nonsense (still the most viral Tory Tweet of 2018 by far!).

In my view Jeremy Corbyn should instruct his lawyers to offer Chris Grayling the chance to avoid legal action by making a public apology for his defamatory statement (perhaps in the form of a Ben Bradley type "please retweet" apology from an official Tory party account) and a significant donation to a Israeli-Palestinian peace organisation.

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Normalising extreme-right hate-mongers is a disgusting new low point for the BBC

One the day that the extreme-right fanatic Daren Osborne was convicted over the Finsbury Park terrorist attack, the BBC Newsnight team took the outrageous decision to invite one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised and inspired him for an interview about the attack.

The prosecution presented Osborne's web browsing history as evidence in the Finsbury Park trial, and that evidence showed his fixation with the extreme-right hate group Britain First, and with the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley Lennon). It also turned out that Osborne had copied out 'Tommy Robinson' tweets and left them on the dashboard of the van he used in the terrorist attack.

The BBC Newsnight team then decided to invite Tommy Robinson onto the show to make excuses, distance himself from the extreme-right fanatic he helped to radicalise, and spread even more of his extreme-right propaganda.

The interviewer Kirsty Wark was so weak that she even allowed Robinson to go completely unchallenged when he grossly misrepresented the peaceful Al Quds Palastinian Solidarity march as "a terrorist march", claim some kind of BBC conspiracy to cover up this so-called "terrorist march", and use this conspiracy as justification for Osborne's terrorist atrocity.

Wark and the Newsnight team were so shockingly unprepared for the interview that they allowed Robinson to deny being a hate preacher without countering his claim with anything from the mountain of evidence that he is (with this horrific hate-inciting video for example).

Anyone who thinks that this move was editorially justifiable should have a think about how Tommy Robinson and his ilk would have reacted had Newsnight invited an Islamist hate preacher onto the show on the the very same day one of the people they had radicalised was convicted for carrying out a deadly terrorist attack.

Just imagine the wave of outrage if the BBC had used the conviction of an Islamist terrorist as an opportunity to give a fanatical Islamist hate preacher a platform to spread even more Islamist propaganda, and even actually make excuses for the attack.

Amazingly the BBC's decision to hand Tommy Robinson a massive platform to make excuses and spread even more of his vile extreme-right views and conspiracies has elicited hardly any outrage at all.

It's just somehow taken for granted that the BBC would use the conviction of an extreme-right terrorist to actually help to promote one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised him!

Newspaper columnists are not writing outraged pieces about it because to them it's perfectly normal that the BBC would actively promote a man who inspired an extreme-right terrorist attack.

If we think back a few years to that time the BBC invited the BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time and the massive controversy that caused, it's clear that something has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Only a few years ago it was a highly controversial move to invite the leader of a far-right political party onto the BBC, even though Griffin was the leader of a political party that had bagged almost a million votes at the 2009 European Parliament elections, and he had no proven connections with deadly terrorist attacks at all.

But now things have changed so much that it's considered completely fine and uncontroversial to invite an extreme-right hate preacher onto the BBC on the very day one of his followers was convicted for carrying out a deadly terrorist attack!

If we look at the appalling decision to invite Tommy Robinson onto the BBC to spread extreme-right propaganda in the context of what was considered highly controversial less than a decade ago, it's beyond doubt that extreme-right politics has been embraced by the mainstream media to such an extent that people have become thoroughly normalised to it.

The only conclusion to draw from this horrific editorial decision is that the BBC is now actively working to promote and normalise extreme-right fanaticism.

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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.