Ruth Smeeth, Lee Harpin and Margaret Hodge rush to defend Keir Starmer
JVL Introduction
James Schneider responds to the way in which Ruth Smeeth and Lee Harpin have sprung to Starmer’s defence in using the Berlin Holocaust memorial as decorative backdrop for his safe-pair-of-hands promotional video.
Inconsistency would be a generous way of describing their reactions.
Margaret Hodge is in a class of her own. She has also waded in and we reproduce a few tweets in response.
See our earlier report on the saga Starmer condemned by Jewish institute in Germany for exploiting Holocaust Memorial
Follow @schneiderhome
Interesting to see Ruth Smeeth and Lee Harpin spring to Keir Starmer’s defence over the use of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a backdrop for a social media video, with Harpin calling criticism an attempt “to manufacture a political row.” 1/9
A different line was taken in 2019 when Smeeth stormed out of a meeting of Labour’s MPs accusing the party leadership of failing to “even get the dates of the Holocaust right”.
She left the meeting in what looked like tears & briefed journos waiting in the corridor outside. 2/9
She was referring to a pamphlet, ‘No Place for Antisemitism’, that Labour published as part of member education.
I was the author & it was also my job to answer questions from the journos after the meeting.
At the back of the room, I worried: had I made a terrible mistake? 3/9
I pulled up the pamphlet on my phone and found the supposedly offending passage.
“Between 1941 and 1945… the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews.”
Correct, I thought, but I triple checked the historical consensus which takes 1941 as the start of genocide. 4/9
I’ll just explain to the journalists that Smeeth is mistaken, I thought, and it will be fine. They won’t write it up once I explain because they’d have to say she’s wrong.
Then proceeded one of the weirder exchanges I ever had when taking questions from a pack of journos. 5/9
Lee Harpin, then of the Jewish Chronicle, who I presumed must have known that I was right and Smeeth was wrong, led the questioning on the dates of the Holocaust.
I explained that “the policy of extermination began in 1941, which is why the academic consensus is 1941-1945.” 6/9
I went on to say that “of course, there were grotesquely discriminatory policies for the entirety of the antisemitic Nazi government, from 1933 onwards, but the commonly accepted time period for the Holocaust is 1941-1945.”
Harpin provided no alternative to the consensus. 7/9
So I was surprised to read him write:
“Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has launched a furious attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to launch a fightback over the party’s antisemitism crisis – accusing the leadership of bungling the dates of the Nazi Holocaust in campaign literature.” 8/9
His article suggests Smeeth was correct & Labour was wrong (using language like “later tried to claim” for our rebuttal), despite either him knowing that’s not the case or able to take five minutes to look it up.
Manufacture a political row indeed. 9/9
- • •
Plus a few tweets by and on Margaret Hodge
And finally, a tweet from Julia Bard
It is a pity that Ruth Smeeth did not come to the defence of the INF nuclear missile treaty when the Trump administration decided to destroy it.
Instead, she and four other Labour MPs joined in the attacks.
Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector wrote:
“By killing the INF Treaty based on flawed intelligence, the U.S. risks global annihilation.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/what-facts-how-politics-trumped-intel-in-nuke-treaty-pullout/
The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism
Yair Lapid
Israeli Foreign Minister
Does this make KS the lowest form of antisemitism
Can you ask those responsible for the AS Scam for a comment
We have it on reasonably good authority (leaked US embassy cables) that Smeeth was a US “asset” of some sort. Given her current position as CEO of Index on Censorship, a CIA/NED front where she is answerable to David Aaronovitch and Trevor Phillips, amongst others, I think we can assume that she still is, with knobs on.
The upside of course is that a public spat between hasbara trolls and CIA assets is such stuff as dreams are made of.
The death of irony has been reported many times, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it has genuinely expired this week.
Hodge and Smeeth (backed up by Harpin but not, interestingly, by Ian Austin) seem to be suggesting that antisemitism shouldn’t be politicised…. What an extraordinary U-turn!
Smeeth wrote this tweet – and if she had written it four years ago, substituting Corbyn for Starmer, we might all now have a kinder opinion of her:
“@Keir_Starmer has a proud record in fighting antisemitism. He visited the Holocaust memorial and spoke about it at the time. This attack is not only wrong, but completely disingenuous and deeply unfair. And attempts to politicise something that simply shouldn’t be.“
Hypocrisy lives on.
I think the Margaret Hodge tweet is very interesting. It’s a direct accusation that an organisation whose expressed intention is one thing (root out antisemitism) has another intention. She doesn’t state what this is and leaves it vague – ‘time to call them out for who and what they really are’. Again, interestingly, no one seems to have cornered Margaret and asked her to tell up: ‘Margaret Hodge, can you please tell us exactly who and what they really are?’ (!) And just as importantly, she says she is ‘fed up’ of whatever it is that she thinks this organisation has been doing. This suggests that she thinks that whatever it has been doing, it has been doing it for some time – and she’s thought this for some time too. Put all that together and you have quite a heavy accusation coming from someone who, as we know, has been regarded as a hero in the struggle to combat antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Further, the very fact that Margaret doesn’t say what she appears to want to say but leaves it vague is itself quite significant too. Why doesn’t she say?
And we might ask, is this one of Margaret’s off the cuff comments or did it come with approval from the leadership? Is the ‘fed-up-ness’ a collective viewpoint? We might imagine that the ruling group of the party and its advisers think they have done all they possibly can to put into place exactly what the leading Jewish authorities and institutions have asked them to do. They might think that they’ve even gone the extra mile in hunting down beastly people like you here at JVL and slung them out of the party. ‘And now, just because Keir didn’t actually mention the Holocaust when he was at the Memorial, you still have a go at us…what more do we need to do? what more can we possibly do? Perhaps you’re only doing this stuff because…because…because….’ (imagined thought-process of Lab Party leadership).
I think all this is significant because as far as I remember it’s the first time that anyone in or around the present opposition front bench, shadow cabinet etc, has voiced anything remotely like this. To me, it suggests at the very least a discomfort with some (not all, of course) of the attitudes and actions of those who have been at the forefront in…well…(as they see it) combatting antisemitism in the Labour Party.
In fact, there’s an overlap between the Hodge Accusation (as it will of course come to be known) and the Forde Report. If some people ‘weaponised’ antisemitism, if anyone combatting antisemitism has other motives other than pure push-back against antisemitism, we might ask, what motives did they have? what motives are they?
‘But what I do worry about is the fact that the non-Jewish world might believe that the CAA is representative of Jewish opinion.’
David Aaronovitch
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/all/i'm-neither-insulted-nor-offended-by-sir-keir's-berlin-video-44b6Xn8alsY6yemOfsQtN9?reloadTime=1658440282638
But he also includes a falsehood in the article:
“The CAA are entitled to their view, of course. It may well be that they do feel “insulted” and “offended” by those three seconds of video.
“They may well believe that Keir Starmer has done far too little to counter antisemitism in Labour’s ranks.
“But I am not insulted or offended, nor do I think that the actual video is somehow redolent of the days when a Labour leader could commend a blatantly anti-Jewish public artwork.”
And he says this despite knowing that Jeremy explained that he didn’t look at the mural properly and apologised as such, AND knowing full well that Jeremy didn’t commend it. And THAT tells you all you need to know!
And he is well aware of what Jeremy said at the time in response to Mear One posting that the council were going to paint over his mural, as was everyone else who falsely condemned Jeremy and smeared him – ie “Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller destroyed Diego Viera’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”.