[rad-green] Reopening Auschwitz – The Conspirac y To Stop Corbyn

https://www.medialens.org/2019/reopening-auschwitz-the-conspiracy-to-stop-corbyn/

*Media Lens          3rd December 2019*

Reopening Auschwitz – The Conspiracy To Stop Corbyn

Thoreau got it right:

‘Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the
new.’ (Thoreau, ‘Walden’, Penguin, 1983, p.68)

The same is certainly true of propaganda. We can laugh now at McCarthyite
paranoia warning of Soviet tentacles threatening every aspect of Western
life during the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced dozens
of anti-communist films with titles like ‘I Married A Communist’ and ‘I Was
A Communist For The FBI’. Large-circulation magazines were titled,
‘Communists Are After Your Child.’ Even children’s comics declared:

‘Beware, commies, spies, traitors, and foreign agents! Captain America,
with all loyal, free men behind him, is looking for you.’ (Quoted, Howard
Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ Harper Colophon, 1990,
p.428)

We can guess how future generations will view the current propaganda blitz
depicting Jeremy Corbyn as a threat to Britain’s Jews. Not since 2002-2003,
when sanctions-stricken Iraq, willing to allow months of no-notice UN
weapons inspections, was said to be a ‘clear and present danger’ to the
nuclear-packing US-UK, has the truth been so completely and shamefully
distorted.

The level of madness is breathtaking, even by ‘mainstream’ standards. In
July, the Sunday Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer claimed
<https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1149031265569390592>on LBC radio that
Corbyn ‘wants to reopen Auschwitz’. When the interviewer responded that it
was completely unacceptable to suggest that Corbyn was capable of such a
thing, Heffer replied:

‘I’m sure, in 1933, they had similar conversations in Germany: “the
Fuehrer’s never going to do that”.’

Jeremy Hunt, then Foreign Secretary, commented
<https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/exclusive-jeremy-hunt-accuses-corbyn-of-deeply-held-prejudices-against-jews/>
in
July:

‘When I went to Auschwitz I rather complacently said to myself, “thank
goodness we don’t have to worry about that kind of thing happening in the
UK” and now I find myself faced with the leader of the Labour Party who has
opened the door to antisemitism in a way that is truly frightening.’

Noam Chomsky summed up
<https://twitter.com/DCKennard/status/1147064458537263104> the shameful
nature of these remarks:

‘The way charges of anti-Semitism are being used in Britain to undermine
the Corbyn-led Labour Party is not only a disgrace, but also – to put it
simply – an insult to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust…’.

In the i newspaper, former Independent editor Simon Kelner focused
<https://inews.co.uk/opinion/jeremy-corbyn-jeffrey-epstein-anti-semitism-row-pronounciation-1312516>on
the way Corbyn had ‘mispronounced’ the name of the sexual criminal Jeffrey
Epstein, Prince Andrew’s former friend, in a TV debate: ‘He called him
“Ep–Schtine”,’
Kelner noted.

Along with ITV political editor Robert Peston (see below), Kelner did not
only dispense with the usual affectation of journalistic impartiality, he
*emphasised* his subjectivity in lending weight to an attack on Corbyn:

‘My reaction was a visceral one: it’s not something I can explain easily,
or even rationally, but a Jewish person does know when there is something
that sounds wrong, or perjorative [sic], or even threatening. It was as if
he was saying: “Are you aware this man is Jewish?”’

The idea, then, is that Corbyn – who has been subjected to relentless,
highly damaging attacks on this issue for years, and who has done
everything he can to distance himself from anti-semitism, taking a very
tough line on the suspension of allies like Ken Livingstone and Chris
Williamson from the Labour Party – was emphasising Epstein’s Jewishness in
a deliberate – or, worse – unconscious effort to smear Jews. Of course,
only a truly crazed racist would be unable to resist such a patently
self-destructive impulse on national TV. And yet, the outgoing Speaker of
the House of Commons, former Conservative MP, John Bercow, who is Jewish,
said during an interview  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVcWo-W60lU>with
British GQ magazine last month:

‘I myself have never experienced anti-semitism from a member of the Labour
Party, point one. And point two, though there is a big issue and it has to
be addressed, I do not myself believe Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic.

‘I’ve known him for the 22 years I’ve been in Parliament. Even, actually,
when I was a right-winger we got on pretty well… I’ve never detected so
much as a whiff of anti-semitism [from him].’

Our search of the ProQuest media database found no mention of Bercow’s
comment in any UK national newspaper.

Remarkably, in July 2018, The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish
Telegraph produced similar front pages and a joint editorial warning
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190630210319/https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/25/jewish-newspapers-claim-corbyn-poses-existential-threat>against
‘the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed
by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government’.

Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist and author who writes a weekly column
for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper,  commented
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-contract-on-corbyn-1.8192769>on
the smears last week:

‘The Jewish establishment in Britain and the Israeli propaganda machine
have taken out a contract on the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy
Corbyn. The contract was taken out a long time ago, and it was clear that
the closer Corbyn came to being elected prime minister, the harsher the
conflict would get.’

This echoed the view of Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived
the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and whose father was
a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Finkelstein said
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEX5OGmXLz4&feature=youtu.be>:

‘If Corbyn loses, a lot of people in the Labour Party are going to blame it
on those Jews who fabricated this whole anti-semitism witch-hunt hysteria.
And that *will *be a problem, which… you know what the bigger problem there
is? *It’s true!* Jews were the spearhead of this campaign to stop Corbyn.
And so, there’s going to be a lot of anger within the Labour Party – that’s
not anti-semitism, that’s factually based.’

Finkelstein added:

‘The British elites could not have gotten away with calling Corbyn an
anti-semite unless they had the support, the visible support, of all the
leading Jewish organisations. You have to remember that during the summer,
all three major British publications, for the first time in British Jewish
history, they all took out a common editorial denouncing Corbyn as an
anti-semite and saying that we’re now standing on the verge of another
Holocaust. They are the *enablers *of this *concerted conspiracy* by the
whole of British elite society to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’

As Levy observed, the campaign reached its climax in an article
<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ephraim-mirvis-what-will-become-of-jews-in-britain-if-labour-forms-the-next-government-ghpsdbljk>last
week in The Times by Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Mirvis
suggested that Corbyn should be ‘considered unfit for office’, adding:

‘I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very
soul of our nation is at stake.’

ITV’s political editor Robert Peston tweeted
<https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1199100648559665152>:

‘The Chief Rabbi’s intervention in the general election is without
precedent. I find it heartbreaking, as a Jew, that the rabbi who by
convention is seen as the figurehead of the Jewish community, feels
compelled to write this about Labour and its leader. I am not… making any
kind of political statement here.’

We responded <https://twitter.com/medialens/status/1199244872848412673>:

‘What kind of journalistic neutrality is it for ITV’s political editor to
use the fact that he is Jewish to support as sincere and even
“heartbreaking” a bitterly disputed claim attacking the Labour Party in
this way? In what universe is this impartial, objective journalism?’

The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted
<https://twitter.com/medialens/status/1199366409102471171>on the chief
rabbi’s criticism an astonishing 23 times in 24 hours. Kuenssberg retweeted
the following comment
<https://twitter.com/medialens/status/1199728825157984257>(screenshot here
<https://twitter.com/ComradeGeordie/status/1199932083113791488>) from chat
show host Piers Morgan in response to Labour shadow international
development secretary Barry Gardiner’s refusal to field further questions
on anti-semitism:

‘Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of this chump telling journalists what
questions to ask. They should all ignore him & pummel Corbyn about
anti-Semitism.’

Kuenssberg later apparently deleted
<https://twitter.com/fivefilters/status/1199764497197682689> this retweet.

Small glimpses of sanity were occasionally visible on social media. Glen
Oglaza, former senior reporter at ITN and ex-political correspondent for
Sky News, commented
<https://twitter.com/glenoglaza1/status/1199332045391925248>:

‘Don’t want to get involved in the #Labour #anti-semitism row, but worth
pointing out that the #ChiefRabbi is a lifelong Conservative supporter and,
in his own words, a “lifelong friend of Boris Johnson” Nuff said’

It was indeed ‘nuff said’. But, in fact, it was almost *never said* by
corporate journalists.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept was typically forthright in responding
<https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1199102681412976641>to Mirvis:

‘This is utter bullshit.

‘The British Conservative Party is rife with anti-semitism, while there’s
no evidence Corbyn is.

‘If you want the Tories to win, just say so. It’s incredibly dangerous to
keep exploiting anti-semitism for naked political and ideological ends like
this’

In 2014, during ‘Operation Protective Edge’ – the Israeli attack on Gaza in
which 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 299 women and 551 children
– Mirvis wrote
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11017072/Hamas-has-chosen-death-Israel-is-trying-to-choose-life.html>
:

‘There is no “cycle of violence” in Gaza. There is Hamas trying to
annihilate Israel, and Israel trying to defend itself…’

With hundreds of civilians lying dead, he added:

‘Israel has no desire to kill or injure civilians in Gaza. They are
potential partners in peace whose death only serves the interests of
Hamas’s PR war.’

And:

‘To measure the morality of war by the military might of each party, the
number of deaths or the amount of suffering on each side is not merely
misguided; it plays into the hands of a ruthless and calculating aggressor.’

Levy commented
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-contract-on-corbyn-1.8192769>on
Mirvis’s smear:

‘As opposed to the horrid Corbyn, Mirvis sees nothing wrong with the
continued occupation; he does not identify with the struggle for
Palestinian freedom, and he doesn’t sense the similarity between the South
Africa of his childhood, Har Etzion of his youth and Israel of 2019. That
is the real reason that he rejects Corbyn. The Jews of Britain also want a
prime minister who supports Israel – that is, supports the occupation. A
prime minister who is critical of Israel is to them an exemplar of the new
anti-Semitism.’

In contrast to the blanket coverage of the chief rabbi’s comments – it was
the lead story on the BBC News website for half a day – there was only
token notice given to the Muslim Council of Britain’s warning
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50561043> of ‘denial, dismissal
and deceit’ of ‘endemic, institutional’ Islamophobia within the
Conservative Party.

There was also virtual BBC silence in response to the blistering attack
<https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/25/stormzy-backs-jeremy-corbyn-in-election-as-he-slams-sinister-boris-johnson-in-blistering-attack-over-racial-slurs-11217759/>
on
Boris Johnson’s racial slurs by Stormzy, the British rap artist who was a
huge success at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. In an Instagram post
<https://www.instagram.com/p/B5TLV6PJKRh/> that has been ‘liked’ almost
300,000 times, Stormzy noted:

‘I think Boris Johnson is a sinister man with a long record of lying and
policies that have absolutely no regard for the people that our government
should be committed to helping and empowering. I also believe it is
criminally dangerous to give the most powerful role in the country to a man
who has said that the sight of a “bunch of black kids” makes him “turn a
hair”, compared women in burqas to letterboxes and referred to blacks [sic]
people as “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. I think it’s extremely
dangerous to have a man with those views as the sole leader of our country.’

He added:

‘I will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn… for me, he is the first man in a
position of power who is committed to giving the power back to the people
and helping those who need a helping hand from the government the most.’

A commenter said (forwarded to us via email, 27 November 2019):

‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the BBC are seriously compromised in
this election.

‘Yesterday, arguably *the* most influential black person in the UK,
Stormzy, launched a blistering attack on Johnson, calling him “sinister”
and deploring his history of racism. This has been shared tens of thousands
of times on social media. In the same post, he applauded Jeremy Corbyn as a
figure of trust.

‘The BBC have not covered this at all.’

In a letter to the Guardian, Professor Des Freedman of Goldsmiths,
University of London, commented
<https://www.dumptheguardian.com/media/2019/dec/01/media-bias-is-a-gift-to-the-conservatives>
:

‘Rigorous academic research shows that, in the first three weeks of the
election campaign, coverage of Labour in the press has been overwhelmingly
negative, with the Conservatives receiving consistently positive coverage…
The most powerful sections of the UK media are simply not prepared to let
citizens freely make up their own minds on Labour policies, nor to
scrutinise Conservative claims systematically.’

The Evidence – The Real Threat To Human Life

Our ProQuest database search of newspaper articles for ‘Corbyn’ and
‘anti-semitism’ shows how intensively the issue has been used to attack
Corbyn prior to the looming election on December 12:

September = 337 hits

October = 222 hits

November  = 1,620 hits

While opinions in effect declaring Corbyn a Nazi are widely reported,
opinions defending Corbyn by the likes of John Bercow, Gideon Levy, Norman
Finkelstein, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Michael Rosen
and others reach a comparatively small audience on social media but are
simply ignored by the establishment press reaching millions.

Exactly mirroring the fake claims justifying the 2003 Iraq war – also
universally presented as serious and fact-based – it turns out that claims
of an epidemic of anti-semitism within the Labour Party are completely
bogus. Israel-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summarised
<https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-11-27/chief-rabbi-mirvis-antisemitism/>a
recent survey published in The Economist:

‘It showed that those identifying as “very left-wing” – the section of the
public that supports Corbyn – were among the least likely to express
antisemitic attitudes. Those identifying as “very right-wing”, on the other
hand – those likely to support Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson – were three
and a half times more likely to express hostile attitudes towards Jews.
Other surveys show even worse racism among Conservatives towards more
obviously non-white minorities, such as Muslims and black people. That,
after all, is the very reason Boris “letterbox-looking Muslim women”
Johnson now heads the Tory party.’

Other surveys have strongly supported these conclusions, including an
October 2016 report
<https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/136.pdf> by
the Commons home affairs committee and a September 2017 report
<https://cst.org.uk/data/file/7/4/JPR.2017.Antisemitism%20in%20contemporary%20Great%20Britain.1504799735.pdf>
by
the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a Labour Party report
discussed here
<https://labourlist.org/2019/02/jennie-formby-provides-numbers-on-labour-antiSemitism-cases>
in
February 2019.

In 2002-2003, credible evidence
<https://www.medialens.org/2003/outrageous-omissions-how-the-press-has-buried-the-truth-of-iraqi-disarmament/>from
former UN weapons inspectors arguing that Iraq had been ‘fundamentally
disarmed’ of 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction by December 1998 was
almost completely ignored by the corporate press – it just didn’t fit the
establishment narrative. The same is true of the above highly credible and
consistent reports – they are simply not part of the discussion.

If we are serious about offering a moral calculus, then we should, of
course, include the fact that Johnson would certainly support Trump in any
future racist wars against Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea, whereas Corbyn
would not. Does it matter to journalists, to the public, that we might
elect a leader who would make it more difficult for the US to kill, injure
and displace hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people? How does
that concern rank alongside Brexit, the fact that Johnson is a jovial
fellow, or the fake claims of anti-semitism? We need only glance at
Johnson’s track-record for evidence of the threat.

Since November 1, ProQuest finds 24 newspaper mentions containing the words
‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘Yemen’. Only one of them, in the Independent, focused
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-arms-sales-weapons-turkey-saudi-arabia-syria-caat-tory-ministers-a9186181.html>on
Johnson’s destructive role in the conflict:

‘The government has signed off nearly £2bn worth of arms sales to
repressive regimes in the two years since the 2017 election, official
figures show.’

These regimes include Saudi Arabia, ‘which has been widely condemned by the
international community for its offensive in Yemen’ and ‘benefited from
£719m in UK licences for bombs, missiles, fighter jets, sniper rifles,
ammunition’.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said:

‘As foreign secretary, Boris Johnson played a central role in supporting
the terrible Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen, which has created the worst
humanitarian crisis in the world. Tens of thousands of people have been
killed, but the arms companies only see it as a business opportunity.’

In 2017, defending the US-UK destruction of Libya in 2011, Johnson crassly
commented  <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-41490174>that the Libyan
city Sirte could be the new Dubai, adding, ‘all they have to do is clear
the dead bodies away’. Johnson also voted
<https://www.theyworkforyou.com/divisions/pw-2003-03-18-118-commons/mp/10999>for
the devastating 2003 Iraq war.

By contrast, The Times reported
<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-manifesto-jeremy-corbyns-key-policies-explained-5tp72twb0>
:

‘Labour is pledging to put human rights and international law at the heart
of foreign policy, in keeping with one of Jeremy Corbyn’s longest held
passions. As well as attacking “failed military interventions”, the
manifesto promises a War Powers Act to give parliament a legal veto on
military action.’

And:

‘Arms sales to Saudi Arabia would be suspended immediately after criticism
of the country’s role in the civil war in Yemen.’

But even these horrors are trivial – we don’t use the word lightly –
compared to Johnson’s Trump-like stance on climate collapse. Johnson, a
notorious climate denier, has ‘Almost always voted
<https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10999/boris_johnson/uxbridge_and_south_ruislip/votes#environment>against
measures to prevent climate change.’ In 2015, Johnson wrote an article
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190109214720/https:/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/weather/12060976/I-cant-stand-this-December-heat-but-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-global-warming.html>in
the Telegraph titled: ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing
to do with global warming’. Johnson endorsed the completely discredited
view that ‘it is all about sun spots’.

The reality is very different. Professor Tim Lenton at the University of
Exeter, lead author of a recent article
<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0>in Nature warning of
‘existential threat to civilisation’, said
<https://www.dumptheguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/27/climate-emergency-world-may-have-crossed-tipping-points>last
week:

‘We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of interrelated
tipping points. The simple version is the schoolkids [striking for climate
action] are right: we are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the
climate system under way, or very close.’

Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, concurred
<https://www.dumptheguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/27/climate-emergency-world-may-have-crossed-tipping-points>
:

‘The prognosis by Tim Lenton and colleagues is, unfortunately, fully
plausible: that we might have already lost control of the Earth’s climate.’

Most recently, Johnson refused even to participate in a Channel 4 leaders’
debate on climate change, instead sending his father and MP Michael Gove,
who were turned away. BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted a
defence and a humorous discussion on this no-show, but no criticism. We can
only wonder at her response, and that of the rest of the establishment
press, if Corbyn had refused to participate in a debate on a key area of
vulnerability, instead sending his dad.

If we can see beyond the propaganda, it is quite obvious that it is Johnson
who offers, and who has already offered, a very serious threat to human
life, not Corbyn. Voting for Johnson will likely have deadly consequences,
not just for the traditional victims of US-UK firepower, but for *all of
us *as the last hopes of averting climate collapse rapidly slip away.

DE and DC

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcyCkGqW3G49fdKBRAMBrq_8zH_e6FFY2zXT2%2BKv0A4yFA%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>