Jonathan Cook puts the EHRC report in political context
JVL Introduction
Cook’s analysis here is framed by two conclusions :
“First the commission’s headline verdict – though you would never know it from reading the media’s coverage – was that no case was found that Labour suffered from ‘institutional antisemitism’”.
This finding is one that no one in the media, Jewish leadership organisations, or the new Labour leadership wants to highlight.
Second is what Cook identifies as the commission’s own flawed approach in compiling the report rather than the media’s misrepresentation of the report – in particular what he refers to as a “seemingly desperate effort to find examples of Labour party ‘agents’ who were responsible for the ‘problem’ of antisemitism.”
Now read on…
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's blog on Sat 7 Nov 2020. Read the original here.
It is the equalities commission, not Labour, carrying out political interference
Loading article text…
I just did a search re Pam Bromley so as to ascertain how much MSM coverage her suspension got at the time, and it doesn’t apear to have received very much. But in the process I came across the following article in the Lancashire Telegraph from April 2019 in which it says the following:
A COUNCILLOR suspended from the Labour party over alleged anti-Semitic comments made online has been reinstated after an investigation.
Cllr Pam Bromley, who represents Whitewell on Rossendale Borough Council, was suspended in April last year over Facebook posts following a complaint from The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism,.
Cllr Bromley, who is not up for re-election on May 2, has sat as an Independent since her suspension and is expected to be readmitted to the council Labour group later this year.
So initially it says that she has been reinstated, but then a bit further on it says that she ‘is expected to be readmitted to the council Labour group later this year.’ Does that make sense?!
So anyway, it says that she had been sitting as an Independent councillor since being suspended, so I checked out the council’s website and, as such, found the page relating to her, and it has her as an Independent.
And it’s kind of ironic that the two comments the EHRC draw upon are BOTH critical of Jeremy! That said, she is/was totally wrong, as there was nothing on this planet that would have stopped the smearers from smearing Jeremy (as SHE herself does in effect) until they had finished the job of bringing him down AND – as it now appears – ejecting him from the party.
The EHRC says the use of tropes is one of two “types of antisemitic conduct by Labour Party agents [which] contributed to our finding of unlawful harassment by the Labour Party”. The report says: “This means using written or verbal phrases or images that suggest antisemitic ideas or stereotypes. Examples that we found included referring to the idea that Jews are part of a wider conspiracy, or are responsible for controlling others and manipulating the political process, including the Labour Party. For example, referring to Jewish people being a ‘fifth column’.”
The expression “fifth column” was coined in the Spanish civil war, when four fascist military columns were converging on Madrid and it was claimed a right-wing “fifth column” inside the Spanish capital was ready to rise against the Republic. Whatever overtones the EHRC seeks to impose on it, the term has a quite definite principal meaning which doesn’t immediately refer to Jews at all. Though no date is available for Bromley’s social media gobbet, a fifth column was active in the Labour Party throughout Corbyn’s time in office.
Many in the parliamentary Labour Party and the party bureaucracy were openly supplementing and assisting the anti-Corbyn political offensive from the Tories and the media. This “fifth column” is abundantly evidenced by the leaked 860-page report with which EHRC was supplied (but seems to have ignored) as well as by the “chicken coup” which forced a second leadership election.
“Corbyn’s champions always blame a supposed ‘Blairite’ fifth column for his travails”, wrote Guardian columnist Matthew D’Ancona on 12 February 2017. Bromley seems to be deploying an expression which in itself is devoid of antisemitic overtones, and using it consistent with its ordinary usage. For the EHRC to class it as a trope and treat it as the most damning evidence of harassment strains credulity. Her Rothschild comment may suggest Bromley harbours anti-Jewish prejudice, but that doesn’t mean every metaphor she uses is a trope. For the EHRC to treat her use of the term fifth column as a claim that Jews are trying to take over the Labour Party is a very stretched reading indeed.
It is (yes!) ironic that the very next paragraph of the report deals with the other head of harassment. This is under the heading “Suggesting that complaints of antisemitism are fake or smears”. Someone at the EHRC is an attentive student of Torquemada, for whom the heretic’s denial of the indictment was a further independent manifestation of heresy.
Nothing of what Bromley says about “bogus AS accusations” reflects one way or the other on legitimate and genuine complaints. The immediate target of her criticism in the highlighted tweet is “Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party” whose failure to respond to bogus accusations she regards as having facilitated the “witch-hunt”. By referring to genuine complaints, the report itself implicitly recognises that there are bogus accusations (its Bromley trope is probably one of them). Many of the specific complaints made by the JLM in its opening submission to the EHRC were convincingly refuted in detail in the official submission from Jewish Voice for Labour (refutations the EHRC has chosen not to mention in its report).
The EHRC has adopted from the JLM submission the term “hostile environment” to describe the supposed effect of Bromley’s online effusions. Here again the EHRC seems to be setting up its own trope shop. Hostile environment is the Home Office policy which continues to wreak so much havoc among black British citizens deprived of their nationality, forced out of work, made destitute, deported and denied the compensation they merit. The idea that a Rossendale borough councillor created comparable conditions inside the Labour Party from her own laptop could (though Labour members are no longer allowed to say so) be a slight exaggeration.