Will honest Corbyn be brought down by Jews and MI5?

Jeremy Corbyn and his supported are far from convinced the Skrpials were poisoned by the Russians. The Labour leader thought it a good idea for Russia to be sent samples of the nerve agent to identify if it was their novichok that poisoned Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in spire-tastic Salisbury. Mindful of that, here’s Andrew Murray, chief of staff at Unite and an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, asking New Statesman readers: “Is the “deep state” trying to undermine Corbyn?”

The Labour Party supporting New Statesman had a question that might have been rhetorical.

The NS loves a conspiracy, so long as it think its readers will nod along with it. The highly plausible gets questioned, but the merely possible is accepted as likely. Only the other week, another Corbyn ally was just putting it out there that Israel had made Corbyn look like an anti-semite by, well, what, making him say things and hang out with Jew haters? “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” said Mark Serwotka, who leads the Public and Commercial Services union.

And neither, one supposes, is Murray, who rolls his eyes at MI5 and writes:

Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows? We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder…

Now, about that evidence…

Anorak

Posted: 20th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment

Stormy Daniels teaches Donald Trump that porn star sex is rubbish

What’s it like to have sex with Donald Trump? Until Melania goes full Princess Diana and reveals all, we can roll over and ask Stormy Daniels (aka Stephanie Clifford) about intercourse with The Don. “It may have ben the least impressive sex I’ve ever had,” is the lead quote on the Mirror’s front page. So there’s Trump in his ‘I’m Number 1 why Try Harder’ T-shirt possibly expecting new adventures with a professional shagger. Reading Stormy damn Trump brings to mind the tennis pro playing with the happy amateur. The pro knocks the ball over the net with spin, power and guile; the amateur hits a sublime return, his game improved immeasurably by the skill of his partner . I once played head tennis with a top footballer. With an equally hapless mate, I could manage 6 or seven headers. But with talent we got to 20, 30, 40… So, Donald Trump, what’s it like to have sex with a pro?

On page 7, we learn that Trump’s penis is “smaller than average” but not “freakishly small”. “He knows he has an unusual penis,” says Stormy T-Cup. “It has a huge mushroom head like a toadstool.” did little Mis Muffet sit on the engorged tuffet? “I lay there,” she says enticingly, “annoyed I was getting fucked by a guy with yeti pubes  and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart.” so much for the fantasy porn star level sex. Stick with the love doll, smut enthusiasts. You won’t get judged.

On page 10, Stormy’s lie-there-and-tell becomes “Donald stump”. In the Sun, we learn that Stormy’s tribute to gaming forms part of her book, Full Disclosure. Donald isn’t a “fun guy” in bed, the paper puns. We’re reminded there and in the Express that Trump denies the affair. She claims to have been paid “hush money”. And Trump reimbursed his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the money she received, $130,000. Yep. That’s what it allegedly costs to shag an angry woman who thinks you’re an inadequate loser. There’s a book in it – but not a token entitling the bearer to a discount on marriage guidance…

Anorak

Posted: 19th, September 2018 | In: Books, Celebrities, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment

Jeremy Corbyn sells Jews a dog covered in feathers

Just bought a new dog. It quacks a lot, waddles and is scared silly of pancakes and plum sauce. A Jewish neighbour popped over and said my dog was a duck. But the man at Jeremy Corbyn Dogs assured me it is a pedigree hound. And if Corbyn says the feathery quaker is a dog, it’s good enough for me. Which brings me to what else Corbyn says, chiefly that he’s not an antisemite and is, moreover, a “militant” enemy of Jew hatred. He knows what antisemitism is better than Jews. And there isn’t any in his Labour Party.

Some will debate this, of course. But they cannot see that anti-Semitism is a mere distraction. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told a fringe event at the TUC conference that the weird accident of Corbyn finding himself stood alongside Holocaust deniers, Jew killers and Jew haters, gaining endorsements from Nick Griffin and David Duke, and his inability to notice that a massive mural he liked depicting hooked-nosed bankers sat on the backs of their myriad victims was anti-Semitic could be parts of an Israeli plot to smear the Labour leader. As Serwotka said: “One of the best forms of trying to hide from the atrocities that you are committing is to go on the offensive and actually create a story that does not exist for people on this platform, the trade union movement or, I have to say, for the leader of the Labour Party.” Not content with running the media and the banks, and embodying Nazism, those Jews are now after the moraliser-in-chief: Jeremy Corbyn.

Vote Jez, then! You’d be quackers to let the bigots win!

But author Howard Jacobson thinks “Jeremy Corbyn is Unfit to be Prime Minister”. This is the speech he gave to the debate organised by Intelligence Squared.

Something tells me you’re expecting me to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite. There’s been a bit about it in the press, and I… well, you know…

But I’m not going to call him anything. He says he isn’t an antisemite, Hamas says he isn’t an antisemite, the white supremacist David Duke says he isn’t an antisemite, and that’s good enough for me.

Am I being ironical? Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m incapable of irony.

We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken. Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn’t. Whether that’s because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say. And – and – he doesn’t deny the Holocaust…

Mind you, he knows a man who does. In fact he knows a surprising number of men who do. That he denies ever having been in their company – until photographs turn up of him rubbing noses with them at the gravesides of mass murderers, offering to show them his belief systems if they’ll show him theirs – ‘Gosh, they’re the same size!’ – should come as no surprise. You can’t spend your whole life in the company of blood-libellers and holocaust-deniers and expect to remember them all by name.

If I may quote from Oscar Wilde’s missing play The Self-Importance of Being Jeremy- ‘To associate with one antisemite you don’t know to be antisemitic, Mr Corbyn, may be regarded as a misfortune, to associate with antisemites on a regular basis looks like a predilection.’

Look – when I think of the scoundrels I’ve hung around with, I know how easy it is to get people wrong, even when they turn up to meet you wearing hoods and holding burning crosses. And Jeremy – is it OK if I call him Jeremy? – has never exactly been what you’d call observant.

Take that mural he championed, showing bankers playing Monopoly on the naked backs of the world’s oppressed. You and I, ladies and gentlemen, would look at those greedy, grasping, hooked-nosed, syphilitic, Zionistic financiers and recognize them at once as straight out of the Julius Streicher I-SPY BOOK OF JEWS. But so innocent of antisemitic caricature is Jeremy, that he didn’t see anything remotely offensive. “I didn’t look closely,” he explained later. How many times does he have to say it, for God’s sake! I might have been there but I don’t think I wasinvolved. I don’t remember… I didn’t look closely….

If this reminds you of those who lived downwind of the chimneys of Bergen Belsen claiming never to have smelt anything out of the ordinary, I say you have suspicious natures. Corbyn is a busy man. Busy men must take emotional shortcuts. There’s an image of a bloodsucking Jew. It’s identical to the image of the bloodsucking Jew I already carry in my head. Snap!

Could there, I wonder, be such a thing as an inadvertent antisemite? Jeremy claims to be a peace-maker. A peace-maker brings warring parties together. Why then do we only ever see him taking Palestinians to tea? Could it be that he just can’t remember to ask the Israelis? “Oh, bugger, I’ve forgotten to invite the Jews again.”

Unless – perish the thought – it isn’t peace he wants after all, but the triumph of those he calls comrades and the destruction of those he doesn’t.

According to his supporters, Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. Just a question, but what is racist bone and how do you know whether another person has one? There are 64 bones in the human arm alone. Can one be absolutely certain that Jeremy doesn’t feel even the tiniest twinge of bone ache, somewhere between the scapula and the humerus, when he sees an alien figure such as I am, coming towards him on Islington Green, carrying the collected speeches of Benjamin Disraeli and humming My Yiddishe Mama?

And what are we to make – speaking of Corbyn’s unconscious – of his inability ever to disavow antisemitism without reminding us of his lifelong opposition to all forms of racism? Which is like answering the question ‘Are you a wife-beater?’ with an assurance that you always buy The Big Issue.

Because antisemitism isn’t quite a racism. It’s closer to a superstition: embedded in theology, shrouded in medieval irrationality, updated to suit leftist economics, and exhumed whenever a single explanation for all the evils of the world is sought. To talk of antisemitism as a racism is a contradiction in terms for Jeremy Corbyn, since in his eyes Jews are neither downtrodden nor exploited but are – as usurers, colonialists and conspirators – the very source and fount of racism themselves. Once hold Jews to be racist, and Zionism a racist endeavour, then no antisemite can ever be a racist himself. And any definition that says otherwise must be amended.

That’s the psychology: now the science. Corbyn’s political life has been determined by Newton’s First Law of Inertia which states that an object at rest will stay at rest, forever, as long as nothing pushes or pulls on it. In physics the something that might push or pull at it is another object in motion; in socialist politics it is a view contradictory to your own. Corbyn averts his face whenever he hears the word Jew, and rolls his eyes whenever he is asked a question, because he fears the chaos, otherwise known as a change of mind, that might ensue from accepting there’s another way of looking at the world.

I will spend my remaining seconds – I don’t mean in life, I mean of this speech – telling you why it matters to everyone, not just Jews, that a man so spiteful, sanctimonious and obdurate should never be allowed to do to the country what he’s been doing to his party.

Those who revere Corbyn see it as a virtue that he has never changed his views. Mr Chairman, it is only a virtue to stay faithful to one’s views if those views are worth staying faithful to.

To persist in a small erroneousness is the mark of a fool. To persist in a great erroneousness is the mark of a dangerous fool. The ideology in which Corbyn has been pickled for half a century was outworn by the time it reached him. It oversaw the death of millions. That the ideologies he opposes have scarcely done any better is not an argument for his. You don’t have to love the West to refuse the embraces of those whose sole ambition is to blow the West apart … especially if you want to call yourself a pacifist.

This should have been a golden summer for Labour. The nightmare that is Brexit, the hell that is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the out-of-season pantomime that is Boris Johnson – from all these Labour ought to have delivered us. But Corbyn did as much as anyone to make Brexit happen with his feeble non-support for Remaining – “I’m seven, erm, seven-and-a-half per cent in favour.”

That was one to get us to the barricades. The wrong man – ladies and gentlemen – the wrong man at the wrong time espousing the wrong causes.

I am nothing if not fair: people who are limited in everything but the pleasure they take in themselves are ten a penny in all political parties; they haunt the peripheries, like ghosts-of-the-Christmases-they-don’t-believe-in-past, backing losing causes, throwing tea parties for murderers, and looking saintly. Mr Corbyn’s misfortune was to be lifted from those peripheries, and dumped haplessly in the centre.

Not just for our sake but for his, will someone please have pity and dump him back.

Or maybe you’re going to vote for Corbyn, reason that Jew hatred is no big deal. Really..? You’re going to do that?

Anorak

Posted: 14th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment

Jeremy Corbyn, Ian Bone and what it’s like to attend a Far Left wedding

Victoria Freeman wanted to know a bit more about Ian Bone, the bloke who shouted at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s children. She found this report on the wedding of Andrew Burgin of Left Unity & Kate Hudson of CND. “I had to assure myself it wasn’t a parody,” she tweets.

Well, quite. the wedding had the lot, including – yep – Jeremy Corbyn… “On arrival there was a huge red on black hammer & sickle dominating the hall with Andrew & Kate embroidered on top”:

I googled Ian Bone & found his report on the wedding of Andrew Burgin of Left Unity & Kate Hudson of CND. I had to assure myself it wasn’t a parody pic.twitter.com/ACcVDFn0G9

— Victoria Freeman (@make_trouble) September 12, 2018

Anorak

Posted: 14th, September 2018 | In: Politicians | Comment

Labour: When is it right to vandalize a Holocaust memorial?

When is it right to vandalize a Holocaust memorial? Having debated the meaning of anti-semitism and if calling Jews ‘Nazis’ is righteous, Labour Party delegates will most likely be debating Jews and the Holocaust when Ewa Jasiewicz, 40, addresses a meeting of pro-Corbyn group Momentum at this year’s Labour Party conference. She’s earmarked to speak about the future of trade unions at a festival organised alongside Labour’s AGM.

Jasiewicz is the Times‘ “Warsaw ghetto vandal”, a British anti-Israel activist who decorated the site where 92,000 Jews were corralled and killed and from where a further 300,000 were sent to death camps. In 2010 Jasiewicz and Yonatan Shapira thought it wise, considerate and fair to daub the words “Liberate all ghettos” and “Free Gaza and Palestine” on one of the Warsaw ghetto’s original walls. They are quoted as having said Israel had “co-opted” the Holocaust to serve “agendas of colonisation and repression”. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre, said the graffiti was “tainted with anti-semitism”. More condemnation follows. It is a “new low”.  “This is exactly the kind of obsessive anti-Israel hatred and abuse of the Holocaust that is central to Labour’s problem of anti-semitism,” we read. A survivor of the ghetto, tells readers: “I too am critical of my government. Gaza is certainly not a likeable place. But to compare it to the Warsaw ghetto is the height of folly. I know .. I was there.” No word of support and praise for the graffiti is given. But Momentum clearly has no problem with it.

One day on and the Times has more Ewa Jasiewicz news: ‘In 2002 she called for “activists” to “do” the Israeli parliament or “a sophisticated politician bump-off” rather than targeting Israeli civilians. At the time Ms Jasiewicz was living in Jenin, in the West Bank.”

In a 2,700-word dispatch at the height of the second intifada, Ms Jasiewicz wrote that the son of the family she was staying with “went and opened fire on some Israeli civilians in a market somewhere a few months ago”, adding: “I don’t get why activists can’t go and do the Knesset [Israeli parliament] or something, or do a sophisticated politician bump-off like the PFLP?”

Ms Jasiewicz says her remarks were made “in a private email which ended up being published on the PalSolidarity website in 2002 as was the case at times with emailed reports on Israeli occupation activity back then”. Private emails are private. She calls her remarks “flippant”. And that’s an important thing: if you can’t say stupid, ugly things in private, when can you say them? She adds: “I do not and never have, advocated the harming of anybody and this was definitely not the intention of the comment in the email. I apologise for any harm or upset this has caused and I ask people to understand it in the context that it was written, both as a flippant comment in a private email and under conditions of a violent occupation.”

So how did the other big newspapers cover this story? The Guardian: not a word. Daily Telegraph: zippo. Daily Mail: nada. Is it because Ewa Jasiewicz doesn’t matter, her being just another social justice warrior with a media profile? One Times columnist offers a reason:

Where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour differs from almost all other major parties is that it now has supporters instead of spokesmen. The latter are diminishing, shrinking, dissolving away… The trouble, at least for Labour, is that their rise coincides with the near absolute evaporation of anybody else who might appear in public and make a coherent, Corbyn-friendly case about almost anything.

Which reminds me: anyone seen Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary? What is her view on Israel? Or is she just hoping nobody will have time to ask her if enough cheap to hire, mouthy and monocular pundits who aren’t standing to election can fill the media with their to-deadline chatter? that question to you, Owen Jonezzzzzzz…

Anorak

Posted: 11th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment

Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand Apple Already Manufactures In The US

Donald Trump is insisting that Apple should move its manufacturing over to the United States. The problem with this being that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand that Apple already does its manufacturing in the United States. Calling for Apple to do what Apple already does isn’t all that useful. What’s being missed is that Apple only assembles equipment in China. And that’s of trivial value so we don’t care where it is done:

Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that Apple should make products in the United States if it wants to avoid tariffs on Chinese imports.

The company told trade officials in a letter on Friday that the proposed tariffs would affect prices for a “wide range” of Apple products, including its watch.

Apple’s AirPods headphones, some of its Beats headphones and its new HomePod smart speaker would also face levies if the current package of $200bn in tariffs goes ahead as expected in the coming days.

The usual point of trade is to make us better off. So, if having tariffs to block trade makes us worse off – which is what price rises do – then why are we having tariffs? Well, the correct answer is because the President of the United States doesn’t understand this.

Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China – but there is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive. Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now. Exciting! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2018

But why would we want to do that?

The thing is that Apple already, pretty much, makes things in the US. What it doesn’t do is assemble them there. So, take an iPhone, say it costs $800. About 40% of that – $320 – is pure profit to the company. That’s added in Cupertino in California – yes, the recent tax changes mean that it is, not Bermuda, not Ireland. The expensive parts of the kit itself are the processors and the screens. The screens are made in Taiwan or Japan and no one else in the world knows how to make them – not even Apple. The processors are made in Texas.

All that’s left is the cheap stuff – a few wires etc – and the assembly. And we know how much that costs, about $10 per iPhone. And that’s the bit that’s done in China too. In terms of who adds the value and where then Apple already manufactures in the US. The only bit that’s done in China is that $10 worth of sticking it altogether. And why would we care at all where $10 of an $800 piece of kit is done?

As we started out saying Donald Trump doesn’t understand trade. His ideas about Apple just show this.

Tim Worstall

Posted: 10th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Technology | Comment

Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds are cosier than an otter’s pocket

News that Boris Johnson has been named an “adulterer” in divorce papers comes as a shock to anyone who wakes each day, quints at the sun and asks, ‘What the bloody hell is that?’ To the Sun Johnson’s penile adventures are an alliterative tale of of ‘Bonking Boris”, a “long-suffering wife” called Marina Wheeler and 30-year-old “Tory aide” Samira Mohammed. No, only joking. The alleged other woman is called Carrie Symonds, and she’s not wearing a burqa because we can see her face on the Mail’s front page.

In the Sun we see photos of Johnson in his garden. He’s drinking from a mug – a metaphor perhaps – and looking “grim-faced” at his phone. Both pictures are credited to Simon Jones, aka “Sun photographer Simon Jones”. Might they, you know, be staged? “Explosions aside, Boris is still The One,” states Trevor Kavanagh three pages on in the paper., not exactly discounting the idea that the Sun is presenting the philanderer in a good light.

The photos also appear in the Mirror, but it’s main thrust is not into Carrie Symonds, but Johnson’s Mail on Sunday column in which he said Theresa May had “wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution” and handed the trigger to Brussels. A few Tory MPs are lined up to say how revolting that is. Amid the “fury” the Mirror says it asked one Tory MP “if Mr Johnson had put a bomb under Mrs May’s leadership”. I see Tory MP Tom Tugendhat’s horrific tale of a suicide bomber who maimed and murdered many in the courtyard of his office in Helmland, and notice the bomb detonated below then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which killed five Tories, including one MP, and permanently disfigured many more.

But what’s that? “Show us the totty!” Ok. The Mail obliges with five phots of Symonds – a “fun-loving blonde”. She is “glamorous” – and what more speaks of glamour than shagging Boris Johnson; maybe finding a pre-loved glamour magazine in a bush? – a “Tory party cheerleader”who tweeted as her name rode high on the news cycle: “Sea otters have the thickest fur of all animals.” To say nothing of their pockets – an otter’s pocket being something Johnson finds irresistible.

Anorak

Posted: 10th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment

Iran’s fascination with local Enfield politics makes Joan Ryan a star in Tehran

How a reporter from Jew-baiting, Israel hating, Iranian propaganda channel and Jeremy Corbyn’s former paymasters Press TV managed to live tweet Labour’s vote of no confidence in Jew friendly Joan Ryan, Enfield North MP and chair of Labour Friends of Israel is down to “infiltration” says the Telegraph.

You might suppose the story would mention not only the Press TV hacks in the Labour members-only room defying a ban on media reporting but also Yasmine Dar. She’s just been voted onto Labour’s NEC, the governing body of the Labour Party. Dar, a councillor in Manchester, came first in the vote with an impressive 88,176 votes. As reported, she’s attended an annual celebration of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in Manchester. One Times writer notes:

Her speech was followed by a Q&A in which a rather notorious British academic carefully explained, among other things, that Hillary Clinton was a Zionist warmonger and that “80 per cent of the American media is owned by the Zionists”. Dar seemed to be sitting in the front row for this and there was no sign of dissent.

But, no. The Telegraph makes no mention of her. Beneath the headline: “Iranian activists infiltrated Labour and were able to vote in pro-Israel MP’s no-confidence ballot” – this infiltration was presumably facilitated by the cunning plot of joining the Labour Party and voting democratically – we get the facts.

Corbyn was paid £20,000 by the murdering Iranian dictatorship. So we’ve established that Blair and Corbyn are in the same boat, but Blair is better at negotiating his fee. https://t.co/hjI3dA5Gxz

— James Cleverly (@JamesCleverly) September 8, 2018

Ryan tells the Telegraph: “I’m horrified that they’ve infiltrated the Labour Party in this way and I think it needs to be investigated, because it is incredibly serious. I’m proud of my values, and I don’t expect to be the toast of the mouthpiece of the Iranian regime.”

‘Press TV – First for Jews’

Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, thinks it “impossible to fathom” how Press TV got in. “This disorder makes a farce of the proceedings and is not how the modern Labour Party should conduct its affairs.”

Ofcom revoked Press TV’s broadcast licence for airing the forced confession of tortured Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari.
This account is followed by @johnmcdonnellMP and @labourlewis. pic.twitter.com/1SHtCwu4Sy

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) September 7, 2018

The proceedings were nasty. The farce comes from banning the media. When pretty much everyone smart phone and a Wi-Fi signal, why bother? Let them film. Why should only Iranians desperate for party political news from Enfield get to see  the show? One source in Enfield said a few years ago only 15 or 20 people would have tuned up to such meeting; now it’s anything from 200 to 80million. She might not be famous in Edmonton, but Ryan is a mega star in Tehran. Allow for an ad break, and Enfield could be coining it in.

David Baddiel wonders what if Israeli media and not Press TV had been there:

Still not heard much from the Labour members who voted a no-confidence motion against Joan Ryan as to why Iranian TV was in the room. I feel we might have heard a little bit from them if Israeli TV had been in the room.

— David Baddiel (@Baddiel) September 8, 2018

Ha. Silly stuff. As Jeremy Corbyn knows, “Israeli media is always in the room.”

Anorak

Posted: 8th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Free speech loving Labour purges Israel supporters and censors the media as Joan Ryan is voted down

The purge is underway. As Jeremy Corbyn is labeled an anti-semite and the party twists and turns over its attitude towards Jews, Labour Party members called for a vote of no confidence in Labour MP Joan Ryan, The Enfield North MP, who just so happens to chair Labour Friends of Israel. She has been a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism in the ranks.

She lost the vote. Ryan called the 94-92 result “hardly a decisive victory”, adding in a statement: “It never occurred to me that Trots Stalinists Communists and assorted hard left would have confidence in me. I have none in them.”

Later she tweeted: “I fought the hard left to a virtual draw… This was about anti-Semitism in the Labour party and those of us who have stood by the Jewish community and said ‘enough is enough’. I made no apologies last night for that and I make no apologies now.”

You can see the vote on Press TV, which filmed and live tweeted the vote. Press TV is the Iranian State broadcaster banned from broadcasting in the UK since 2012. On it you used to be able to watch such presenters as George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley (this might be her discussing an anti-semitic mural with Corbyn) and, of course, Corbyn, the Labour Party leader who reportedly received up to £20,000 for appearing.

Just to be clear I will not be resigning. I am Labour through and through and I will continue to stand up and fight for Labour values. https://t.co/VEp2ZEDBrN

— Joan Ryan MP (@joanryanEnfield) September 6, 2018

Siddo Dwyer, chair of the Enfield North CLP,  plans to lodge a complaint against Press TV. He says: “No press was allowed to be in that room, nor members of the public, or registered supporters, you had to be a fully paid up member of the Labour party. Photo ID was taken as well as Labour party cards. Everyone was checked and double-checked, but the process isn’t bullet proof.”

Perhaps the Press TV reporter is a Labour Party member? After all, it only cost £3 to join, and look at the mayhem you can cause.

And isn’t banning Press from political meetings foolish? It’s almost impossible to implement. But Labour HQ showsw us its clean hands and says: “Filming of local Labour Party meetings is not permitted, and Enfield North will be reminded of this fact.” Only a few days ago, Labour was stating its commitment to ‘free speech’. Admittedly, it was hard to hear the noble cry over Corbynistas calling for Israeli musicians, speakers, actors, artists, medics, scientists and politicians to be no platformed.

Meanwhile, here’s an argument for an uncensored media from Press TV. See if you can spot the lie:

We have documented an amazing amount of Jewish support for Jeremy Corbyn over the past week.

Both at the #NEC debate on #IHRA and at the Enfield North #JoanRyan vote.

The idea that @jeremycorbyn is unliked by British Jews is void of reality. https://t.co/1E3HnC5hgs

— Press TV UK (@Presstvuk) September 7, 2018

Anorak

Posted: 7th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Labour updates Macpherson: hating Jews doesn’t make you a racist

If you can be an unwitting racist, is Jeremy Corbyn’s obsession with Jews and his friendships with those who want them dead a hate crime? Is Corbyn’s Labour Party institutional racist? In 1999, the Macpherson Report into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence by a racist gang and the botched police investigation left us with two legacies. First we got to know what is meant by ‘institutional racism’. Sir William Macpherson defined it:

“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

And in that we got the second legacy: you could be an ‘unwitting racist’. If the injured party thinks it’s racist, then it is racist. Anything that happens to an Asian person, say, can be self-defined as racially motivated. Lord Macpherson demanded that police mark a crime as racist where the incident “is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person, rather than their own conclusion”. The result is that anything can be racially motivated if you think it is. You can have racism without racists.

If racism can be unwitting, perhaps we’re all racists and at some point become “infected” by racist thoughts? Racism was recast as no longer being about real power and police; it became subjective, a study in what lurked within individuals. The State was in the clear. Don’t look at the police. Look at yourself and investigate your fibre. Racism became a moral matter. Depressing stuff, for sure. To see racism everywhere and in everyone and everything was a low view of humanity. And it stuck.

Which brings us to anti-Semitism. Labour is all for unwitting racism – but not if you’re a Jew. Labour has after much agonising adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s international standard definition of antisemitism. Try not to call Zionists – people who believe in a Jewish homeland – Nazis (a conniving slight of the lowest stripe) or label Israel a “racist endeavour”. Labour noted that it’s decision must not “undermine freedom of expression on Israel or the rights of the Palestinians”. Labour loves freedom of expression so much it wants to make misogyny a hate crime, punishing people for what they think.

It’s odd, no, how racism has caveats when it’s about the world’s one Jewish state but for everything and everyone else it can be assumed. Corbyn had wanted to include a 500-word explainer to one and all – including you Jews – that it must not be “regarded as anti-Semitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact”. He’s never said that about any other country. Israel is exceptional. It’s backers – oh, those shadowy ‘Zionists’ who run the media and the banks (whoever can they be talking about? clue: ask the Jew haters) – are uniquely barbaric. Even after the Holocaust, Jews never learn.

So Corbyn sought a definition of antisemitism that allows people to be antisemitic and get away with it. While other minorities gets to see racism in everything, Jews are not allowed to see racism in anything – even when it’s staring them in the face.

Anorak

Posted: 6th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

In full: David Remnick’s memo to New Yorker staffers about the Steve Bannon interview

This is David Remnick’s memo to New Yorker staffers about the decision not to interview Steve Bannon at the magazine’s yearly festival. Remnick is the magazine’s editor who intended to interview former Breitbart Media chairman, former Trump aide and former chief White House strategist Bannon before a live audience at a festival of ideas. Remnick had “every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation”. Even if thrice-divorced Bannon is yesterday’s man, it sounds great. I’d never heard of the Festival before now but count me in.

But other notable guests – Jim Carrey, John Mulaney, Patton Oswalt and Judd Apatow – said they’d withdraw unless Bannon was given the elbow. The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz  tweeted: “I love working for [the New Yorker] but I’m beyond appalled by this … I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too.” She provided a New Yorker email address.

To which Remnick said: screw you. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let’s expose the enemy with our wit and democratic values. It’s a Festival of Ideas not a bloody dinner party. And in any case, it’s rude to invite someone and tell them they’re not wanted. Nah. He kiboshed the whole thing.

So Bannon wins. He might have been irrelevant, an opportunistic rabble-rousers, but now banned he becomes a man of substance. And he’s issued a statement: “The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation. In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.”

THE MEMO:

In 2016, Steve Bannon played a critical role in electing the current President of the United States. On Election Night I wrote a piece for our website that this event represented “a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Unfortunately, this was, if anything, an understatement of what was to come.

Today, The New Yorker announced that, as part of our annual Festival, I would conduct an interview with Bannon. The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him. Some members of the staff, too, reached out to say that they objected to the invitation, particularly the forum of the festival.

The effort to interview Bannon at length began many months ago. I originally reached out to him to do a lengthy interview with “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” He knew that our politics could not be more at odds — he reads The New Yorker — but he said he would do it when he had a chance. It was only later that the idea arose of doing that interview in front of an audience.

The main argument for not engaging someone like Bannon is that we are giving him a platform and that he will use it, unfiltered, to propel further the “ideas” of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism. But to interview Bannon is not to endorse him. By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity. Ahead of the mid-term elections and with 2020 in sight, we’d be taking the opportunity to question someone who helped assemble Trumpism. Early this year, Michael Lewis interviewed Bannon, who made it plain how he viewed his work in the campaign. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” Bannon said. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” To hear this was valuable, as it revealed something about the nature of the speaker and the campaign he helped to lead.

The point of an interview, a rigorous interview, particularly in a case like this, is to put pressure on the views of the person being questioned.

There’s no illusion here. It’s obvious that no matter how tough the questioning, Bannon is not going to burst into tears and change his view of the world. He believes he is right and that his ideological opponents are mere “snowflakes.” The question is whether an interview has value in terms of fact, argument, or even exposure, whether it has value to a reader or an audience. Which is why Dick Cavett, in his time, chose to interview Lester Maddox and George Wallace. Or it’s why Oriana Fallaci, in “Interview with History,” a series of question-and-answer meetings with Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini and others, contributed something to our understanding of those figures. Fallaci hardly changed the minds of her subjects, but she did add something to our understanding of who they were. This isn’t a First Amendment question; it’s a question of putting pressure on a set of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President still in office.

Some on social media have said that there is no point in talking to Bannon because he is no longer in the White House. But Bannon has already exerted enormous impact on Trump; his rhetoric, ideas, and tactics are evident in much of what this President does and says and intends. We heard Bannon in the inaugural address, which announced this Presidency’s divisiveness, in the Muslim ban, and in Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville.What’s more, Bannon has not retired. His attempt to get Roy Moore elected in Alabama failed but he has gone on to help further the trend of illiberal, nationalist movements around the country and abroad.

There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns. I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind. There is a better way to do this. Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.

— David Remnick

Bannon should write Remnick a thank you note for making him ‘great’ again.

Anorak

Posted: 4th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Don’t panic: gamblers are deserting Corbyn’s nasty party

The Guardian’s headline is suggestive: “Antisemitism row ‘risks chances of Labour government’.” Jew hatred only increases doubt that the electorate will vote Labour and so get Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10. How fair we are, eh. Racism should obliterate the combatant’s chances of winning the popular vote.

Bookmaker William Hill is offering odds of 4-1 on Corbyn becoming Prime Minister after Theresa May. Given that the respective leaders of one of the Conservatives or Labour are shoo-ins for the top job, 4-1 is remarkably generous – all the more so when you realise you can get 5-1 on Boris Johnson, current leader of his TV’s remote control and little else (even his shorts seem to be working independently).

The other things that stands out is that seven Tories are seen as having a better chance of replacing Theresa May in Number 10 than the towering figure who can replace Corbyn: Keir Starmer.

Is William Hill alone? Let’s see what Paddy Power is offering:

Granted the question is skewed towards who will replace May. The odds on her being toppled from within are 1-3 (Corbyn is at 2-1). So you’d expect more Tories to stand a better chance than anyone from Labour becoming the next PM. However, May hasn’t gone. There is no leadership challenge. And the odds on Corbyn becoming the next PM are 6-1. One year ago Corbyn was favourite to become the next Prime Minister. He’s drifted.

Back in the Guardian, the aforesaid headline is rooted in the opinion of a former Labour MP. Look out for Ivor Caplin being trashed on twitter by Corbyn fans in 3…2…

Caplin, a former defence minister under Tony Blair who chairs the Jewish Labour Movement, tells the paper:

“It’s been depressing for members of the Jewish community, but not just for us, for members of the public as well, because they want to see the Labour party as an effective opposition to this shambolic Tory government, and particularly on Brexit, the NHS, schools.. I think that, for Labour, it is a very dangerous position to be in. It will affect any chance of a Labour government…

“I went to a CLP [constituency Labour party meeting] in deepest east Sussex the other week. A lot of them were very concerned about how we had got into this position. They weren’t saying it was smears. And a majority for them had voted for Jeremy to be leader.”

Interesting. Move away from the nastiness and toxicity on social media and you see people seeking not the weakest point in an opponent’s argument but the strongest. These people want to understand the other side’s argument before engaging with it. This is out of kilter with the mood around Corbyn, in which his monocular supporters cast any opponent as either mentally negligible or malicious. Caplin adds:

“In some constituencies, the constant aggressive nature of some people is wearing on activists and that is not right. One of the founding traditions of the Labour party is we are able to have different views but walk out and go for a drink afterwards, because that is what Labour is about. It is not about aggressive, nasty behaviour.”

If the bigots win the day, then Labour is spent. If you can’t engage with an opponent without branding them too old, too thick, too Jewish, too immoral, too racist (if they express concern over immigration) and discount them as a fascist for voicing any opinion not aligned to your own, you’re not ready for the big debates. You’re not fit to govern.

Anorak

Posted: 1st, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment

Corbyn is the anti-Semitic Prime Minister you voted for

Is Jeremy Corbyn a racist? He is if he you look at what else he said at a London conference convened by the Palestinian Return Centre in London in 2013. The conference was marketed by the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military arm – they’re the group that want all Jews dead and who Corbyn has called his “friends”. Ok, ok, move on ,already. We know all about the mural, the iffy mates, Press TV and the report whitewashed and wrapped in ermine. Borrrr-ing! On this occasion Corbyn was irked by comments directed towards the Palestinian ambassador in response to a speech he’d made. Corbyn responded by saying Jews, sorry, Zionists heckling the ambassador suffered from two problems: “One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either. I think they need two lessons, which we can help them with.”

Did he man Zionists or did he mans Jews? Do you smell something nasty or not? Nothing of it, said Labour, holding its nose. Corbyn was using the word Zionist in a political way. It was a word employed in “the accurate political sense and not as a euphemism for Jewish people”. Phew! He’s not othering British Jews. Corbyn was not billing Jews as the enemy within, a people loyal only to Israel, a country he sees as the epitome of all Western ills and the ultimate enemy. Jews are not, in terms employed by the Left to demonise Israel and make the Jews not worthy of the Holocaust (but maybe deserving of another  one; those uniquely barbaric sods never learn), Nazism’s fifth column.

And then he said this:

“[In the early 20th century], the progressive leadership in London of the trade unions and the Labour Party… was actually Jewish trade unionists and Jewish people in the East End of London. It was Zionism that rose up and drove them into the sort of ludicrous positions they have at the present time.”

That sounds a lot like anti-Semitism. British Jews used to be good. All of them. Now British Jews are bad. All of them. He didn’t mean Zionist in any political sense at all; he meant Jews.

Jews and the Left were once of a single mind and purpose. They joined forces at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to fight fascists in London’s East End. That was then. Now Labour has nothing in common with Jews, who do not hold English values. Born and bred British Jews are foreign and hold only the possibility of civilised humanity. This was Corbyn the tribalist, middle-class Jew hater of a type we know too well, who sees “large fat foreign” Jews, as the author Graham Greene did, a writer who opined for The Spectator in 1939: “How the financial crisis has improved English films! They have lost their tasteless Semitic opulence and are becoming – English.”

Are you still uncertain as to whether or not Corbyn is a racist? One Guardian writer said Corbyn’s words were “unquestionably anti-Semitic”; another said they were “anti-Semitic and unacceptable”. Both are right. That Corbyn is still in with a chance of being Prime Minister is depressing: how can a bigot lead the country? The conclusion must be that for too many people anti-Semitism is no big deal. It’s only the Jews, a Biblical people remarkable for having survived persistent persecution. This leaves Jews to form their own conclusion: grandma was right. The oldest story is back. Keep a bag packed under the bed and rely on nobody else to fight your battles. They always come for us.

Anorak

Posted: 31st, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Sadiq Khan blimp looks like Manchester United’s Mourinho

Watching the Donald Trump baby blimp fly over London as the US president visited us, his fans had an idea. Why not get a blimp and fly it over London? And why not make it the likeness of a leading politician? It was a bold, innovative and original idea. And so the creative minded Trumpers have bought a blimp of London Mayor Sadiq Khan. It’s dressed in a yellow bikini, to make his absurd decision to ban a ‘Beach Body Ready’ advert in 2016.

Sadiq Khan sees the balloon and quips: “If people want to spend their Saturday looking at me in a yellow bikini they’re welcome to do so – I don’t really think yellow’s my colour though.”

The thing is that it looks a lot like Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho.

Karen Strike

Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: manchester united, Politicians, Sports | Comment

Bono joins forces with the EU to irritate everyone

Minted tax-exile Bono, aka Paul Hewson, aka the stately Mr G21, has not been wasting his bath time. He’s thought up a new way to irritate everyone: the U2 singer will wave the EU flag on stage when the band begin their European tour in Berlin. It’s “provocative”, says Bono in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

“I’m told a rock band is at its best when it’s a little transgressive: when it pushes the bounds of so-called good taste, when it shocks, when it surprises,” he writes. “Well, U2 is kicking off its tour in Berlin this week, and we’ve just had one of our more provocative ideas: during the show we’re going to wave a big, bright, blue EU flag.

With a rebel yell, Bono will wave the EU flag that pokes a finger in the eye of those elitist, conformist swine in Catalonia, Greece and Portugal. Waving the flag of those lands’, let’s call them the oppressors is, says Bono, a “radical act”, something akin to buttering your bread only on one side and taking one bottle into the shower.

Stop Press: In other news, the EU plans to keep the same flag after Brexit, with the UK’s star being adopted by planet Bono.

Anorak

Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: Celebrities, News, Politicians | Comment

Green Party attacked over prospective leader’s rapist father

The Green Party has issued a statement on the sentencing of David Challenor, 50, father to the Green Party equalities spokesperson Aimee Challenor. He has been convicted of torturing and raping a 10-year-old girl in the loft of the family’s home in Coventry. Aimee is transgender, having been born a boy and transitioned at age 16. Those are the facts all media shares.”The Green Party was not aware of any of these allegations until the case concluded and Mr Challenor had been sentenced,” says the statement. Which seems a bit remiss.

David Challenor

It continues:

Mr Challenor has not held any elected positions in the Green Party although Aimee appointed him as her election agent for the General Election in 2017 and local election in May 2018.

But he was a member of the Green Party until his sentencing. The Party did know who he was. And reports say those  appointments to help his daughter took place after his arrest. Again, the Greens seem a little less than thorough when it comes to checking things.

Innocent until proven otherwise, of course. But some of the reporting seems to be targeting innocent Aimee as much as her disgusting father and the slapdash Greens.

Aimee Challenor, 20, planned to become the party’s deputy leader. The Guardian says ‘she had had no idea about the crimes but was withdrawing from the race to prevent the election process becoming “dominated by what my father has done”.’

She too has issued a statement:

“I did not know about the full details of the crimes my father has been found guilty of until very recently. It is also very difficult to believe that a parent can be guilty of such abhorrent acts. That might be hard for you to understand, or to believe, but it is the truth. I was taken into care a few years ago and have also lived in independent supported housing. There were sustained periods where I did not live in the family home.

“But I cannot be held responsible for the actions of my father. I am not to blame for his behavior. Yes, he was my election agent. This was one of a number of ways I was seeking to reconcile my relationship with my father after coming out of care. On reflection, I can understand that it was unacceptable for me to appoint my dad as my election agent when he had been arrested. I can now understand the potential risks of that decision. For that I am sorry.”

The Times is a little less sympathetic, saying “she had used her father as her election agent even though he faced charges of raping and torturing a 10-year-old girl”. Readers are told “Aimee lived with him in a small two-up, two-down house”. Why mention the size of the family home if not to cast aspersions? And this:

On both occasions she appointed her father as her election agent, legally responsible for running her campaign, even though he had been accused of or charged with the crimes, which were reported to police in late 2015. By the time of May’s elections he had a trial date.

Candidates’ election campaign leaflets are legally required to include the name of their agent or promoter. Challenor’s leaflets for both campaigns, seen by The Sunday Times, did not show her father’s correct name, instead giving it as “Baloo Challenor”.

Baloo, a character from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, was a nickname used by Challenor’s father in his work as an assistant Scout leader and volunteer with children’s gymnastics. He used his proper first name on the election nomination forms as Challenor’s agent.

The Mail is doubting, headlining the story: “Top Green Party star quits the party after hiring her father as her election agent despite knowing he was about to stand trial for rape and torture of a child.” The story begins:

“A transgender politician campaigning to be deputy leader of the Green Party hired her father as her election agent – despite knowing he was facing trial for the rape and torture of a child.”

Aimee Challenor’s gender is given top billing. She has condemned his “abhorrent crimes”, as anyone sane must. But the story of a depraved crime is being given a whiff of conspiracy. And over in the Sun, it’s pornographic: “ATTIC OF HORRORS Inside grotty torture den where sick rapist whipped girl, 10, and gave her electric shocks while dressed as a BABY.” Want to see where a child was tied to a beam, electrocuted and raped by man wearing an adult nappy? Maybe not.

Want to use a man’s sick crimes to cast a shadow of an innocent woman? Go ahead…

Anorak

Posted: 27th, August 2018 | In: News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment

NBC announces death of Senator John McCain with mating human dolphins

NBC solemnly announces death of Sen. John McCain.

Wait for it. pic.twitter.com/xAqZ3HtvHa

— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) August 26, 2018

RIP John McCain (August 29, 1936 – August 25, 2018). Victor in six elections to the US Senate, McCain was the US navy pilot who crashed twice. He was was on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal when his A-4 Skyhawk jet caught fire. He was hit by shrapnel by the plane’s exploding bombs. The accident cost 134 men their lives. He was shot down during the Vietnam War, bayonetted, beaten badly and held for five-and-a-half years as a prisoner in inhuman conditions at the infamous Hoa Lo prison. The admiral’s son survived months in solitary confinement and torture. When he ran for Congress in Arizona, he told a journalist who accused him of not being local:

“Listen pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things… The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”

And on CNN…

Anorak

Posted: 26th, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Strange But True, TV & Radio | Comment

Pound Falls On Brexit Fears – The Solution Has Already Happened

It’s entirely possible to be concerned about Brexit, the costs and pains of leaving the European Union. I think anything is worth the joy of doing so but am aware that not all share that view. However, there’s less to worry about when the pound falls because everyone thinks that it’s going to be more terrible than we all thought it was yesterday. Because the pound falling is the very cure for it all being more terrible than we thought it was going to be yesterday.

Thus Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, says that a Hard Brexit has become more likely. The pound falls – this is good, this is the correct reaction to, the solution to, a Hard Brexit becoming more likely:

Sterling dropped against the dollar in early Friday trading after Bank of England boss Mark Carney said he believes the chances of a no deal Brexit are “uncomfortably high” and warned the government needs to do all it can to avoid leaving the EU with no agreement in place.

Contained within that reaction to the news is the solution to the news:

The pound declined on the currency markets in the wake of Mr Carney’s comments, falling below the $1.30 mark, but had recovered by early afternoon.

Mr Carney said that if a no-deal Brexit were to happen, it would mean disruption to trade and economic activity, as well as higher prices for a period of time.

Well, yes, a Hard Brexit would make Britain’s trading position more difficult. The cure for that is a lower pound:

Sterling went as low as $1.2975, or down 0.3%, following the comments, while British government bond prices rose.

Britain would be forced to revert to trading under World Trade Organisation rules it fails to reach an agreement on the terms for its exit from with the EU in March 2019.

WTO rules would mean that British exports would face tariff barriers when exported into the EU. That makes it more difficult to export and presumably, prices having this sort of effect, mean that we’d export less.

So, what do we want to happen in such circumstances? We’d like some method of making our exports cheaper even though they face those tariff barriers. A decline in the value of the pound does that nicely, it makes our exports cheaper. That is, a fall in the value of the pound is the cure for a no deal Brexit and the imposition of WTO barriers to our exports. The cure is in the very reaction to the news.

It’s worth pointing out that the pound has fallen, since the referendum vote, by more than we would need to compensate for a no deal Brexit. The reaction to the possibility has already taken place.

Tim Worstall

Posted: 24th, August 2018 | In: Money, News, Politicians | Comment

Forget Muslims – we want Boris Johnson to attack Jews

When Boris Johnson criticised Denmark’s absurd decision to ban the wearing of the burka in a to-deadline article for the Telegraph, he went on to liken women wearing the niqab to “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”. This, said many, was Johnson “fanning the flames of Islamophobia”. We’re with Johnson on his view that it’s wrong to tell “a free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear in a public place when she is simply minding her own business”. Denmark’s move to ban an item of clothing follows burqa bans in France, Austria and Belgium. The problem is that he’d ask a constituent visiting him at his MP surgery to to remove her veil – “If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecturer looking like a bank robber then ditto: those in authority should be allowed to converse openly with those that they are being asked to instruct.”

Reactions are many:

“They are absolutely demonising, misogynistic, hurtful comments and they are fanning the flames of Islamophobia. As a result, the thugs who are already snatching the headscarves of Muslim women will feel empowered that someone who is part of the establishment, who has been our foreign secretary, is giving them licence.” – Imam Qari Asim, an imam who sits on the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, in The Times.

“We’re still waiting for that to happen, which is not lost on a community that still feels vulnerable … My own congregation are increasingly reporting Islamophobic abuse, from having their headscarves removed to facing racist chants.” – Finsbury Park imam Mohammed Mahmoud.

Naz Shah – yep, her – wants the Conservative chair, Brandon Lewis, to send Johnson for mandatory equalities training. Shah, who once called for all Jews for be deported from Israel (she later went on a “journey” and apologised) is Labour’s shadow equalities minister. She calls Johnson’s comments “ugly and naked Islamophobia”.

An extract from Naz Shah’s letter

And:

“Muslim women are having their burkas pulled off by thugs in our streets and Boris Johnson’s response is to mock them for ‘looking like letter boxes’. Our pound-shop Donald Trump is fanning the flames of Islamophobia to propel his grubby electoral ambitions.” – David Lammy MP.

Nothing to do with Jews, then. Right? No. Because on Twitter, Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy is introducing Jews:

Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy wonders about Jews

Why bring the Jews into it? Is the argument that Jews get more protection? Are Jews too powerful? Is it supposed Jewish privilege he’s wafting into the debate? What’s Guru-Murty’s point? The language around anti-Semitism has become nuanced, vague, deceptive and downright dishonest. Would a criticism of a Jew’s kippah or a woman’s sheitel (a wig be worn by very religious married Jewish women) be anti-Semitic? Is it racist to call orthodox Jews living in North London ‘Stamford Hill Cowboys’? We live in a time when many anti-Semites don’t like to make their hatred too explicit. You’re left looking for the verbal wink. And you get to the point where comparing a woman in a burqa to a letter box is presented as anti-Muslim – an assault on all Muslims and the religion of Islam – and not a lazy joke about an item of clothing worn by a relatively few Muslims.

It always comes back to the Jews

Over on the BBC, it’s all about Jews. On Newsnight – ” In-depth investigation and analysis of the stories behind the day’s headlines with Evan Davis -we get this:

Always the Jews. They always bring it back to the Jews… pic.twitter.com/q3gmYY33wJ

— Anorak (@TheAnorak) August 7, 2018

A crass comment about women in burqas and you “have to ask” a question about Jews? To the knowing, sensitive and caring everything is about those pesky Jews, a group now portrayed as underserving of that ultimate 21st accolade: victimhood.

Anorak

Posted: 7th, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Jeremy Corbyn copies and pastes his commitment not to exterminate British Jews

“I will root antisemites out of Labour – they do not speak for me,” says Jeremy Corbyn, whose “friendship” with those who would see all Jews dead is finally riding high on the news cycle. Having spent an age denying accusations of anti-semitism in Labour (and rewarding those who agreed with him), Corbyn says Jew hatred is rife in Labour but it’s got sod all to do with him, its leader.

Jez does not “for one moment accept that a Labour government would represent any kind of threat, let alone an ‘existential threat’, to Jewish life in Britain, as three Jewish newspapers recently claimed.” There is no threat to Jews from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Zis ist vy he now tells readers of der Guardian zat Juden vill not be forcibly deported and / or shot:

That is why I want to make it absolutely clear that any government I lead will take whatever measures are necessary to guarantee the security of Jewish communities, Jewish schools, Jewish places of worship, Jewish social care, Jewish culture and Jewish life as a whole in this country.

As Jews sleep easy in the knowledge that a British Government led by Corbyn (as seen on Press TV!) will not seek to exterminate them, let no-one deny that the Labour leader is deeply commited to protecting Jews, including many of the wrong kind of Jews (see ‘Zios’, ‘baby killers’, blood-munchers, confident Jews, Tories, ‘Jew-Nazis’, Trump-ists, Jew bankers enslaving the other races, the uniquely barbaric Jews who never learn, Jews in the mainstream media and possibly the bloke with the drum at the front of Spurs’ Yid Army, although he might be Greek). Jeremy is not just trotting out any old guff. He means it. Just as he meant it when he said it on April 24 in the Evening Standard.

In today’s Guardian

In April’s Standard

“I am not antisemitic” says Jeremy Corbyn over and over and over. And if you don’t believe him, you can read his words and ask his friends…

Anorak

Posted: 4th, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Treason charges should apply to those excessively loyal to the European Union

Or so the claim is from David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP, that those excessively loyal to the European Union should be charged with treason. Some of us Leave types would say that this could be a little extreme but there’s merit to the idea – then we’ll recall who it is suggesting it:

British people undermining the country through “extreme EU loyalty” must be tried for treason, a Tory MEP says.

David Campbell Bannerman has been accused of “putting the knife into free speech” after demanding the revival of an archaic law to prosecute strong allegiance to the EU.

The background here is a report out today suggesting that the offence of treason itself should be brought up to date. The current law dates from the time of Edward III and isn’t exactly attuned to modern circumstances. For example, none of the varied jihadis and terrorists have been charged under it even though they were quite obviously taking up arms against the Queen and her army. So, logically, change the law so that people like the Beatles can be charged with something which carries a significant sentence. Like life in prison, not the current maximum 10 year stretch.

David Bannerman, who represents the East of England constituency, was responding to a new report by the Policy Exchange think tank calling for an overhaul of treason laws. The Treason Act 1351 remains in force in the UK, but no longer provides secure ground for prosecuting terrorists who conspire to attack the UK, the group said.

Campbell Bannerman’s addition is that this should apply to those who would undermine the British state by excessive accordance with the EU’s wishes. And there’s certainly a theoretic possibility of such being treason, of course there is. If we pass a law stating such and such, then you conspire with foreign powers to undermine that law then arguably that really is treason. Despite it being fun to dream of hanging Peter Mandelson it’s unlikely that anyone has quite reached that stage as yet though.

All most fun and arguably entirely correct as well. Then we recall who it is that is making the suggestion:

Campbell Bannerman was a former Conservative Special Adviser to Northern Ireland Secretary Patrick Mayhew in the 1990s, before defecting to UKIP in 2004, and writing the bulk of their 2010 manifesto as Deputy Leader, which advocate limiting immigration down to 50,000 people a year, and included a five year freeze on permanent settlement.

Campbell Bannerman returned to the Conservatives in 2011, and has been an MEP for the East of England since 2009.

I was working for Ukip back then as a press officer. I saw that manifesto creation process – saw, sadly, some parts of the manifesto. We had to take it down rather swiftly – C-B had posted it up on the internet before anyone else had read it – because it was littered with truly bad ideas. Having met the man a number of times I don’t take this as an aberration either.

So it is with this idea of extending the definition of treason. I’m entirely minded to agree with it but considering the source there must be some appalling problem with it even if I can’t, as yet, work out what that problem is.

Tim Worstall

Posted: 29th, July 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment

Billy Joel: Trump and the rise of magical Nazis

Finally someone has had the guts to stand up and say it: “Nazis aren’t good people.” Well done, Billy Joel:

Billy Joel: I wore Star of David onstage to tell Trump “Nazis aren’t good people” https://t.co/0tvV5NkqMm pic.twitter.com/HtyO2t8WcR

— The Hill (@thehill) July 24, 2018

Joel told CBS News that the president’s comments after a woman was killed last August when a suspected white supremacist struck a crowd of counterprotesters with a car “enraged” him.

“The president said, you know, ‘There’s some good people on that side …’ No, Nazis aren’t good people,” Joel told CBS in an interview that aired Sunday.

Anorak

Posted: 25th, July 2018 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Life imitates Scarfolk: Civil Service tells parents to shoot rabid children

“Wow! This has made my week,” says Richard Littler. “This is from the government’s *own* publication about the history of government communications. They mistakenly included a Scarfolk poster which encourages the killing of children. Clearly, nobody thought it was too extreme.”

The original Government pamphlet

UK Government says ‘shoot yer kids’

“You can download your own copy of this Scarfolk/UK government ‘collaboration’ from the government’s own site: quarterly.blog.gov.uk/download-a-pdf… (Hurry before they realise!).” They did realise that the fictional town of Scarfolk created by Richard as “a dystopian satire of the 1970s that somehow leaks into and reflects on current affairs” had become Government approved. And chances are whoever compiled the collection realised, too. The image has now been removed.

The advice to shoot your children appears in the July edition of Civil Service Quarterly. Produced by the Cabinet Office ‘A century of government communications’ , the publication tells us that top-down communiqués have “helped to shape modern Britain and have themselves been shaped by the changing media landscape and changes in society”.

We are warned:

In an era when the spread of social media and the proliferation of digital information sources makes us question the very nature of news and what constitutes a ‘fact’, it is worth remembering two things. First, we have been here before: communications can, often deliberately, distort and mislead. A royal proclamation in 1688 specifically referred to tackling the spread of ‘false news’ (echoing the ‘fake news’ of today). And, second, at their best – honest, open, informative and effective – communications can help to shape, improve and even save lives.

Adding:

As we continue to listen, we are more likely to act appropriately on what people are telling us about what they need – and earn their trust – if we understand the public we serve. The Civil Service’s ambition to be the most diverse and inclusive employer in the UK by 2020 supports this aspiration.

Excellent communication that people trust is essential to a properly functioning democracy. That trust, built on the dialogue between public and state, is the touchstone of modern government communications.

It’s all about trust.

Detail from James II’s 1688 proclamation “to restrain the spreading of false news”

“I have never seen the government move so quickly in my life (and certainly not because of me)!” says Richard. ‘From my announcement of their error to them deleting and editing the documents was about 5 mins.”

Richard adds: “On the last page of Discovering Scarfolk (2014), I warned about the dangers of a Scarfolk-based, apocalyptic cult infiltrating the civil service… You’re welcome.”

The original Government pamphlet

Discovering Scarfolk – 2014

To prevent unnecessary bloodshed, Scarfolk Council has issued the following cease and desist letter to HM Government:

“The Government has tried replacing the Scarfolk poster with something patriotic. Is this some kind of photoshop challenge?”

Now updated – don’t shoot yer kids; shoot Germans instead

But it’s not gone. You can download the original pamphlet here.

Anorak

Posted: 21st, July 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Strange But True | Comment

No anti-racist should vote for Corbyn’s Jew hating Labour

Funny, no, how so many self-styled anti-racist campaigners on the Corbyn Left have no problem with Jew baiting and Jew hatred. Might it be – and this is just a wild theory – they are anti-Semites? Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge noticed that Labour’s new anti-Semitism guidelines mark the Jews out as special. Whereas other races get to know when they are being attacked, when it comes to Jews, Corbyn’s Labour knows better.

Labour did adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of anti-Semitism. But it made a few tweaks. Corbyn’s Labour says it is not necessarily anti-Semitic to say Jews are more loyal to Israel than the UK. Jews are all Israelis, then – the country Corbyn and his fans hates above all others. And saying Jews / Israelis / Zionists are like Nazis is only bad if “anti-Semitic intent” can be proven. Not content with goading living Jews, Cobyn’s Labour attacks the dead ones too, especially the 6 million Jews murdered by actual Nazis. His Labour makes the murdered deserving of genocide. It is revolting. But the Left can’t see it – or doesn’t want to.

Under Labour’s rules criticising a Muslim, a woman or a transsexual requires no proof of intent to label the speaker a bigot? Labour adheres to the Macpherson definition of racism: an act perceived by the victim to be racist is racist. Unless your a Jew in which case: prove it. Macpherson is a bizarre rule that necessitates the ability to read minds and judge another’s thoughts. It can make you an unwitting racist. It’s an absurd, anti-democratic ruling that makes us all potential racists. But Labour supports it. Criticise the London mayor, a Muslim, and you are Islamophobic, says Labour. Abuse the Windrush Generation and you are a racist, says Labour. But go for a Jew and Labour says its all about free expression and free speech.

Why is it different for Jews? Labour says it’s about freedom of speech, the need to be able to criticise Israel, which, after all, is one of its pet hobbies and a cornerstone requirement of being a caring and sensitive Corbynista. Fair enough. But why aren’t Muslims or blacks treated the same way? Why is freedom of speech vital to Labour when it comes to lambasting Jews and the world’s one Jewish State but unimportant when criticising Islam? Why-oh-why are Jews singled out? Is it because, you know, Labour is a haven for anti-Semites?

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour turn things upside for Jews. So here’s a message for those contortionists.

Dame Margaret, the MP for Barking, wrote in The Guardian that she “confronted Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament and told him to his face what I and many others are feeling”.  Labour was “so distrusted by the Jewish community, we are the last people on earth, at this time, who should think about amending a widely accepted definition of anti-Semitism.” No Jew should vote Labour. I’d like every Jewish MP to become an independent. The idea that voting for a Jew and thus helping Corbyn become Prime Minister

To Corbyn’s Labour, Jews are ok to demonise. They are the useful Other, the uniquely barbaric enemy within against which everyone of a sound mind and good morals can rail and mass.

The BBC reports:

Labour MP Margaret Hodge faces “action” by the party after reportedly swearing at Jeremy Corbyn and calling him an “anti-Semite”. A spokesman for the Labour leader said what had happened was “clearly unacceptable between colleagues”.

Sod the Jew hatred in Labour. Just clamp down on anyone who dares to speak out. So much for freedom of expression…

Anorak

Posted: 20th, July 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment

Nigel Farage duped by anti-refugee photshop

Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and now LBC radio opinion jock, says the photo above is an “insult” to “victims of sexual abuse and rape in Malmo”. He adds for good measure: “These people are sick.” Which people is a little unclear when it’s pointed out that the photo is clearly a fake to all but the most monocular tweeters and was taken in Saskatoon, Canada, back in September 2015.

In 2017, a Syrian refugee told local media about her plight: “We lived five years within the war there, so it’s too hard for us to talk again.  It’s always the same story. People die every day by different ways, but they die every day.”

Also in 2017, the BBC did a “reality check” in claims that Malmo is the “rape capital of Europe”.

The BBC:

Reality Check verdict: Malmo, along with other urban centres in Sweden, has one of the highest levels of reported rapes in proportion to population in the EU, mainly due to the strictness of Swedish laws and how rape is recorded in the country.

The rate of reported rapes in Malmo has not dramatically risen in recent years and has in fact declined from its peak in 2010, before the recent large increases in refugees.

It is not possible to connect crimes to the ethnicity of the perpetrators as such data is not published.

In 2017, Donald Trump told an audience:

Here’s the bottom line: We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. (Applause.) You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden? Who would believe this? Sweden? They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.

And what of the alleged victim’s identity? The Local noted:

The number of rapes reported to authorities in Sweden increased by 10 percent in 2017, according to new preliminary figures from the country’s National Council on Crime Prevention (Brå)…

The number of sex crimes reported in Sweden increased by eight percent (1,600 reports), with the number of reported rapes in particular increasing by 10 percent – 663 reported rapes more than 2016 and reaching a total of 7,230.

What can we learn from the stats?

Mid Sweden University Criminologist Teresa Silva told The Local that the statistics should be treated with care.

“We always have to be careful with analyzing reported crimes. We don’t know from the reported crime statistics whether the crime has actually occurred more, or if it’s just that people report it more. They are always tricky, you have to think beyond the statistics themselves. Years ago these kind of crimes, sex crimes, were not spoken about and had stigma attached to them.”

“So what do these stats not tell us? Detailed characteristics of the victims for example – we don’t know their demographic and social profile, or if more immigrants are reporting these crimes after becoming more integrated in Sweden and aware that they can report them.”

Police do not record the ethnicity of either criminals or victims. But there is a problem. How bad is it and how much of it is down to refugees? In January 2018, The Times wrote:

Statistics published last week revealed the percentage of women who reported being victims of sex crimes rose from 1.4% in 2012 to 4.1% in 2016. In 2014 a study on the geography of outdoor rape in Stockholm found two-thirds of the suspects were non-Swedish citizens.

“Our government declared itself the world’s first feminist government, yet they have quietly abandoned women,” [Paulina] Neuding said. “There is mounting evidence that large-scale migration of men from extremely patriarchal cultures is limiting women’s freedom.”

And the police? In January 2016, Swedish police and media were accused of covering up a spate of sexual offences involving young migrants at We Are Sthlm, a free summer youth festival in Stockholm. When truth gets censored and mangled, you only see what you want to see. Andrew Brown notes:

…the Stockholm police failed to report the sex assaults at the festival for fear of worsening ethnic tensions. And it was understood by all parties that this would lead to an electoral advantage for the Sweden Democrats…

So teenage girls were systematically assaulted and robbed by gangs of young foreign men because too many powerful people found their suffering was inconvenient. The result of this cover-up will be far more damaging than the truth could have been.

Such are the facts.

Anorak

Posted: 15th, July 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment