EHRC v. EHRC
JVL Introduction
In a brief elegant analysis, Jamie Stern-Weiner cites the EHRC against itself showing a serious inconsistency in its reasoning.
It matters.
In order to find Ken Livingstone guilty of ” unlawful anti-Jewish harassment” in his defence of Naz Shah, it had to argue that his statements were not protected by Article 10 of the European Convention, the right to freedom of expression, because under Article 17 the offence was so egregious as to lose Art 10 protection.
But the EHRC itself argued in a subsequent case that Art 17 could only apply in the case of ‘extreme beliefs’ – of the order of belief in ‘racial superiority’, for example – while Shah’s circulation of an anti-Israel cartoon manifestly didn’t meet this threshold.
Stern-Weiner wonders at the brazen hypocrisy of it all…
This article was originally published by Jamie Stern-Weiner's blog on Thu 29 Jun 2023. Read the original here.
EHRC v. EHRC
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Good analysis as always by Jamie Stern-Weiner. We all know that the EHRC’s Report and conclusions were dictated by political exigencies. The find of racial harassment was made first and then there was the torturous attempt to justify it.
How can arguing for a political position that anti-Semitism was being weaponised or that a cartoon isn’t anti-Semitic be harrassment on the grounds of race? This would mean in practice that freedom of speech itself was being proscribed.
It is no accident that the Commissioner who drew up the report, Alasdair Henderson seems to support the far-right. See the Guardian’s ‘EHRC board member under scrutiny over social media use – Alasdair Henderson ‘liked’ post describing words misogynist and homophobe as ‘highly ideological propaganda terms’
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/30/ehrc-board-member-under-scrutiny-over-social-media-use
the article states that Henderson
‘also liked a tweet decrying “offence-taking zealots” who accused Roger Scruton of antisemitism, Islamophobia and homophobia, and one by Douglas Murray, who once called for Muslim immigration to Europe to be banned.’
Scruton was a fascist and founder of the Salisbury Review. Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society and Gatestone Institute wrote a book The Strange Death of Europe based on the White Replacement Theory that is anti-Semitic to the core. See e.g. the chant of marchers at the Charlottesville demonstration ‘The Jews shall not replace us’.
It is highly unfortunate that Corbyn and much of the left has been so content to treat the EHRC report as inviolate.
Good article by Jamie Stern-Weiner. Nice to see arguments supported by footnotes.
If the media ever demanded that the lobby work to these standards – or did so itself – we’d have a few less problems
It’s not just that the two cases of alleged “harassment”, cited in the EHRC headline conclusions, were objectively legitimate expressions of opinion – but that the LP itself took action in these two cases. Livingstone was suspended and hounded out of Labour, while Pam Bromley was explicitly expelled for describing the AS moral panic as a “smears”. The only individuals “harassed” in these episodes were Livingstone and Bromley themselves.
What isn’t being mentioned in these discussions, is that the EHRC doesn’t even address antisemitism as such – only the LP’s faulty handling of complaints about antisemitism. Never once does the EHRC report examine whether these complaints had any merit – although there are a number of indications in the substance of it (contrasting with the headline conclusions) that they did not.