Unkillable myths: Corbyn’s Labour Party and antisemitism

Unkillable myths: Corbyn’s Labour Party and antisemitism
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
9 February 2023

“I’m afraid Jeremy only has himself to blame for the situation he’s in because of his failure to apologise for what happened in the Labour Party, when he was leader, on antisemitism,” Labour MP Liz Kendall said, speaking alongside Jeremy Corbyn MP, on ITV’s Peston earlier this month.

“What apology – because maybe he’ll do it now – what apology would you want from Jeremy?” presenter Robert Peston asked. “A full and frank apology, which has never happened,” Kendall replied.

The idea Corbyn has never apologised for antisemitism in the Labour Party is widespread in the media and Westminster. Discussing the topic last year, James Ball, who is, incredibly, Global Editor at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tweeted “Saying sorry for doing something immensely shitty shouldn’t be all that difficult, it’s just that Corbyn literally never apologised for anything.” And in their 2021 book Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire state “Starmer’s first act as leader was to do what Corbyn never could” – apologise for antisemitism.

Back in the real world, if you type “Corbyn apology antisemitism” into Google the second result that comes up is a December 2019 Guardian report titled Corbyn Apologises For Antisemitism In Labour Party. The third result is a March 2018 PoliticsHome report titled Jeremy Corbyn Issues Apology For “Pockets” Of Anti-Semitism In Labour Party. Corbyn also did a video in August 2018 saying “I’m sorry for the hurt that’s been caused to many Jewish people”.

The “Corbyn has never apologised” line is one of many myths that has refused to die about antisemitism and Corbyn’s Labour Party, irrespective of the historical record.

On Peston, Corbyn said he had apologised repeatedly, before arguing “evil as antisemitism is, the scale of it within the party was grossly exaggerated”, which Kendall visibly took exception to.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering some of the claims made at the time. A July 2018 front page editorial jointly published by the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph newspapers warned a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life” in Britain. A month later Marie van der Zyl, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told an Israeli TV news show that Corbyn had “declared war on the Jews”. Writing in the Express in 2017 Stephen Pollard argued “Labour is now the party of bigots and thugs, where Jew haters are cheered”, while Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer, appearing on LBC radio in 2019, said Corbyn “wanted to re-open Auschwitz”.

The same year Margaret Hodge MP told the media she had obtained “over 200 examples [of antisemitism], some vile, where evidence suggested they came from Labour.” However, according to the Guardian, the Labour Party General Secretary later confirmed “investigations had found those complaints referred to 111 reported individuals, of whom only 20 were members.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2019 Survation poll, commissioned by Professor Greg Philo for his co-authored book Bad News For Labour, found of the respondents who had heard about the topic “on average people believed that a third of Labour Party members have been reported for anti-semitism” when “the actual figure was far less than one per cent.”

As with many issues, the Fourth Estate played a crucial role in the so-called ‘antisemitism crisis’. Philo and his co-author Dr Mike Berry noted the results of four focus groups they held showed “the media and the extensive coverage that the story has received feature very prominently in the reasons that were given” for higher estimates of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Furthermore, a 2018 analysis of British media coverage of antisemitism published by the Media Reform Coalition “identified myriad inaccuracies and distortions in online and television news including marked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered.”

“Overall, our findings were consistent with a disinformation paradigm,” the authors concluded.

Looking at the coverage of the debate on whether Labour should adopt the contentious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the authors highlighted how there was a high number of inaccurate reports from the Guardian and BBC.

For example, in July 2018 Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland referred to the “near universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism”. In contrast, a quick look at the IHRA’s own website shows that by July 2018 their definition had been adopted and endorsed by just nine countries.

In July 2019 BBC Panorama broadcast Is Labour Antisemitic?, which had a big impact on the debate. The programme related how Ben Westerman, a member of the party’s Disputes Team, was sent to investigate reports of antisemitism in the Wallasey Labour Party in 2016. According to Westerman, at the end an the interview with a party member he was asked “Where are you from?” and “Are you from Israel?”, both of which he refused to answer. However, Al Jazeera Investigations undertook the journalism that the BBC should have done, and broadcast the audio of the interview in their 2022 The Labour Files documentary (which, naturally, has been ignored by the mainstream media). It turns out the interviewee, unfamiliar with the interview process, asked Westerman “What branch are you in?”, which he refused to answer.

It should be noted Corbyn is not alone in thinking the incidence of antisemitism in the Labour Party was overstated for political reasons. Geoffrey Bindman KC, Jewish Voice For Labour, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, public figures such as Mariam Margolyes and Alexi Sayle, and three-quarters of Labour members in a March 2018 Times/YouGov poll are among those who agree with Corbyn’s analysis.

Indeed, the Forde Report, which was commissioned by Keir Starmer, noted “some anti-Corbyn elements of the party seized on antisemitism as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn… thus weaponising the issue” (Forde says Corbyn supporters did this too).

Moreover, the polling evidence seems to contradict the “antisemitism crisis” narrative.

“Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party” an October 2016 Home Affairs Committee report on antisemitism found “there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.”

A 2017 YouGov/Campaign Against Antisemitism poll found “Labour party supporters are less likely to be antisemitic than other voters”, such as Tory and UKIP supporters. Similarly, a 2017 report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR), which analysed polling data, concluded “the political left, captured by voting intention or actual voting for Labour, appears in these surveys as a more Jewish-friendly, or neutral, segment of the population.”

To be clear, there was a problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. At the same time the evidence strongly suggests the level of antisemitism in the party was overstated for political purposes. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

In short, the evidence points to Corbyn being the victim of one of the most successful smear campaigns in British political history.

This personal onslaught significantly weakened him and the broader Labour Party, delegitimised him as a political figure, and sapped energy and support from the wider Corbyn movement.

It wasn’t a conspiracy; rather undermining Corbyn’s leadership was the shared agenda of the centre, right-wing and much of the bureaucracy of the Labour Party itself, the Tories and nearly all of the British press. Also, it’s likely the MP for Islington North’s pro-Palestinian politics didn’t endear him to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the apartheid-implementing Israeli government both organisations supported.

Frustratingly, some prominent voices on the left caved in to the pressure. Asked in 2018 why antisemitism was “endemic in the Labour Party” by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani didn’t question whether it really was “endemic” but answered “I think there are a few explanations”.

And after Corbyn stepped down as leader, at the 2020 Jewish Labour Movement’s Labour Party leadership hustings the chair asked “Do you regard it as antisemitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact?” To which, shamefully, the Corbynite candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey MP, immediately replied “Yes”.

Of course, in many ways Corbyn was merely the vulnerable figurehead. It was the hundreds of thousands of Corbyn-supporting Labour members, and the millions of people who voted Labour in 2017 hoping for a more equal and just society, who were the real threat that needed to be stamped out.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Joe Biden: The Guardian gets fooled again

Joe Biden: The Guardian gets fooled again
By Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
30 November 2020

“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”, sings Roger Daltrey at the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again, one of The Who’s greatest songs. In fact it’s one of the greatest anthems in the rock canon full stop, reaching the top ten in 1971. However, reading the Guardian’s coverage of Joe Biden you would think most of the staff at the liberal-left newspaper have never heard of the track, nor are familiar with the sceptical sentiment which courses through it.

In Guardianland the President-elect of the United States is “a decent, empathetic man”, as senior columnist Jonathan Freedland explained.

“Joe Biden has won… renewing hope for the US and the world”, the paper confirmed. “After four years of turmoil, misinformation, manipulation and division, the result of this historic presidential election offers fresh promise for democracy and progress.” To celebrate his victory the Guardian produced a “Free 16-page Joe Biden souvenir supplement” for readers, filled with propaganda photographs of the 78-year old looking popular and presidential.

“He will have to reassert America’s role as the global problem-solver”, a Guardian editorial asserted. “Under Mr Trump the ‘indispensable nation’ disappeared when it was needed the most.”

If all this bowing of the knee to authority sounds familiar that’s because it is.

“They did it. They really did it”, the Guardian’s leader column swooned when Barack Obama was elected to the White House in November 2008. “So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world… Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America’s hope and, in no small way, ours too.” Freedland himself breathlessly recorded Obama coming on stage in Berlin in July 2008: the then Democratic presidential candidate “almost floated into view, walking to the podium on a raised, blue-carpeted runway as if he were somehow, magically, walking on water”.

Of course, the problem is much wider than the Guardian.

“Congratulations @KamalaHarris and @JoeBiden we are all rooting for you in your new jobs!”, tweeted self-proclaimed “actual socialist” Stella Creasy MP. “He ran a campaign on the values that we in the United Kingdom share – decency, integrity, compassion and strength”, commented Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer. “In a dark year, this is a good day. It’s time for a return to decency, unity and humanity in our politics”, tweeted Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

There is no excuse for this kind of vacuous power-friendly bullshit. Unlike Obama in 2008, Biden has a very long political record so there is no reason to get fooled again.

As American political analyst Thomas Frank noted in the Guardian itself – sometimes useful things do appear in the paper – “Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus.”

“His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the ‘third way’ right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.”

And, Frank notes, “It was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s” and the abandonment of the working class “that set the stage for Trumpism.”

As Vice-President in the Obama Administration from 2009-17, Biden oversaw the bombing of seven Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen). According to a Council on Foreign Relations blog written by Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson, the US dropped 26,172 bombs in 2016 – an average of 72 bombs a day.

Going further back, in his new book Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, Branko Marcetic says Biden “arguably more than any Democrat had created the crisis in Iraq.” In the run up to the aggressive and illegal invasion in 2003 he supported the Bush Administration’s push for war in the media and as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and travelled to Europe and the Middle East to make the case to other leaders.

Writer Louis Allday recently provided some clear-sighted analysis in Ebb magazine: Biden “has caused an incalculable amount of suffering over his many decades as a senior official of the US empire.” This is supported by a September 2020 Brown University study, which “using the best available international data… conservatively estimates that at least 37 million people have fled their homes in the eight most violent wars the US military has launched or participated in since 2001.”

On the environment, the (recently departed) Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore argues Biden “has room for manoeuvre… he can, in short, act as if the climate emergency is real.”

Indeed, Biden has pledged to immediately sign up to the Paris Agreement, This is good news, though it needs to be tempered with a pinch of reality. As the leading climate scientist James Hansen remarked about the agreement: “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”

And while you’ll be hard pressed to find any mention of it in the fawning media coverage of Biden and the climate crisis, it’s worth noting the US’s piss-poor pledge at Paris, when Biden was Vice-President: the US promised to reduce its carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent below its 2005 level by 2025. Friends of the Earth described these goals as “weak” and not “commensurate with the demands of climate science and justice” as “it moves us closer to the brink of global catastrophe”.

To be sure Biden presidency will usher in many positive changes. The US will almost certainly re-join the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and reverse Trump’s move to withdraw from the World Health Organization. Biden is also expected to rescind Trump’s rule on US foreign aid, “which rights campaigners say has prevented millions of women across the globe from getting access to proper reproductive and sexual healthcare over the past four years”, the Guardian reports.

But Biden himself confirmed “nothing would fundamentally change” when he met with wealthy donors in New York in 2019. According to Salon, the President-elect went on to say that the rich should not be blamed for income inequality, telling the donors, “I need you very badly.”

“I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you,” he added.

Biden is, in the words of US muckraker Matt Taibbi, the latest “imperial administrator”. Yes, he might be a highly experienced politician, more prone to multilateralism and someone who will oversee a more predictable US foreign policy, but he is still the head of the reigning imperial power in the world today.

And this is the key issue: Biden’s presidency will give US imperialism a more likeable face that will likely reduce opposition to its often deadly policies and actions, both at home and abroad. It is, in short, another opportunity for An Instant Overhaul For Tainted Brand America, as Advertising Age hailed the last incoming Democratic president in 2008.

Interestingly, it seems many people were able to see through the political marketing surrounding Obama, with a 2013 WIN/Gallup International poll of over 60,000 people across 65 nations finding 24 percent (the most popular answer) believed the United States was “the greatest threat to peace in the world”.

Not so the Guardian. Instead, its servile coverage of the election of Biden and Obama makes a mockery of editor Katharine Viner’s claim the paper is committed to “holding the powerful to account.”

As Tony Benn memorably wrote in his diaries: “The Guardian represents a whole batch of journalists, from moderate right to moderate left – i.e. centre journalists – who, broadly speaking, like the status quo. They like the two-party system, with no real change. They’re quite happy to live under the aegis of the Americans and NATO.”

“They are just the Establishment”, he added. “It is a society that suits them well.”

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Book review. Bad News For Labour: Antisemitism, The Party & Public Belief by Greg Philo et al.

Book review. Bad News For Labour: Antisemitism, The Party & Public Belief by Greg Philo et al.
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2019-January 2020

The headline findings from this new co-authored Glasgow Media Group (GMG) study of the anti-semitism controversy in the Labour Party are astonishing.

Between June 2015 and March 2019 eight national newspapers printed a massive 5,497 stories mentioning Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and anti-semitism. A Survation poll commissioned by the authors in March 2019 found “on average people believed that a third of Labour Party members have been reported for anti-semitism” when “the actual figure was far less than one per cent.” The two things are connected, of course, with the results of four focus groups showing “the media and the extensive coverage that the story has received feature very prominently in the reasons that were given” for higher estimates of levels of anti-semitism in the Labour Party.

Summarising the findings of research conducted by the Media Reform Coalition on the issue, Justin Schlosberg, a Senior Lecturer in journalism and media at Birkbeck College, University of London, concludes the media’s coverage of the issue is “consistent with a disinformation paradigm”.

Anthony Lerman, the former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, also contributes a chapter – a majestic overview of the media distortions surrounding the controversy over whether Labour should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism. For example, while The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland referred to the definition as “near universally accepted”, Lerman points out only 6 of the 31 member countries of the IHRA have formally adopted the definition.

Presumably published quickly to maximise its impact, Bad News For Labour is perhaps not as comprehensive as previous GMG studies, such as 2004’s Bad News From Israel. Nevertheless it’s an important, myth-busting intervention into the debate. For activists the book should serve as a reminder the mainstream media is a key site of struggle in the fight for a better society: despite the rise of social media the study shows the press and TV news continue to wield significant power when it comes to framing news events and shaping public opinion.

Along with the book’s comprehensive timeline of events, many activists will also find the authors’ proposals for how Labour should combat the media falsehoods very useful. First, Labour should make sure “an effective, rapid and fair process” is in place for dealing with allegations. Second, the party needs “an effective communication infrastructure for both mainstream and new media”, including “a well-resourced rebuttal unit.” And finally, the mass membership needs to be mobilised to defend the leadership and party from erroneous attacks, with face-to-face contact with the public “a very powerful way of countering distorted media messages.”

Bad News For Labour: Antisemitism, The Party & Public Belief is published by Pluto Press, priced £14.99.

How the media covers-up the bloody reality of Western wars in the Middle East

How the media covers-up the bloody reality of Western wars in the Middle East
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
10 August 2019

From what I can tell a new report from monitoring group Air Wars, concerning US media coverage of the US-led military interventions in Iraq and Syria since 2014, has been ignored by the entire British media, except for the Morning Star.

“News reporting on civilian casualties from international and US actions, was found to be largely absent during key periods of the conflict”, the study concludes.

The extraordinary depth of this Western power-friendly journalism is highlighted by Airwars’s survey of more than 900 US Department of Defense transcripts of press conferences. Incredibly the research “found that [US military] officials were… the first to raise civilian harm in three-quarters of the press conferences or briefings in which the issue was broached since 2014.”

This lack of coverage was linked by US journalists themselves to a variety of factors, including “the limited presence of reporters on-the-ground”, a news cycle dominated by US domestic politics and credibly sourcing claims of civilian casualties. However, these justifications ring somewhat hollow when you consider arguably the most interesting finding of the study: “Major US media were… five times more likely to report on civilian harm from Russian and Assad regime actions at Aleppo than they were from US and allied actions at Mosul” (the report notes “civilian harm outcomes” in Aleppo and Mosul “were often similar”).

So it turns out the US media does report on civilian casualties – as long as the civilians are harmed by Russian and Syrian government forces.

US writer and media critic Adam Johnson has humorously coined The North Korea Law of Journalism, in which “editorial standards are inversely proportional to a county’s enemy status”. If journalists are considering crimes committed by the US and its allies then “rock solid, smoking gun evidence” is usually required to run a story. In contrast, journalists can “pretty much make up whatever [they] want” with little or no evidence to back up their claims if they are criticising North Korea, and nations like Iran, Russia and Syria.

Though the Air Wars study only looked at US media, there are indications the British media also acts as a defacto “propaganda system” when it comes to reporting on Western intervention in the Middle East.

Take three well-known commentators working at two respected newspapers: The Times’s David Aaronovitch and Jonathan Freedland and George Monbiot at The Guardian. Monbiot is arguably the most radical journalist working in the mainstream media. No doubt all three of these experienced journalists see themselves as critically-minded, free-thinking writers.

Their Twitter feeds suggest a different story.

Culminating in December 2016, the battle for Aleppo involved Syrian government and (from September 2015) Russian forces unleashing hell on areas held by assorted rebel groups in the northern Syrian city.

Aaronovitch has tweeted about Aleppo 13 times. “Aleppo is Stalingrad” and the “destruction of Aleppo” is “awful” were two of his outraged hot takes.

Freedland tweeted about Aleppo six times up until December 2016.

Monbiot has tweeted about Aleppo nine times, according to Interventions Watch blog. “A monstrous crime against humanity” and “a crime beyond reckoning”, the enraged Monbiot commented.

Monbiot’s “response to events in another Syrian city, however, was markedly different”, Interventions Watch explains.

From June to October 2017 the US (with British support) led an intense assault on Raqqa, targeting the city being held by Islamic State with airstrikes and artillery barrages.

An April 2019 investigation by Amnesty International estimated the US-led coalition killed over 1,600 civilians during the assault. “Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely”, Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK, reported after visiting the city. “Think Dresden and you’d be close.”

“The intent may have been different … but through modelling the impacts, we have determined that there was not a huge difference in terms of civilian harm between the coalition in Raqqa and Russia in East Ghouta and Aleppo,” Airwars director Chris Woods told The Times in December 2018.

Monbiot’s response to this slaughter? Tumbleweed. “Monbiot *said nothing*. Not a word of condemnation, not a single attempt to highlight the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding, not even a passing mention, either as it was happening, or afterwards”, Interventions Watch note.

Likewise, Aaronovitch and Freedland have not tweeted one word about the US-UK bloodbath in Raqqa as far as I can tell.

This brief Twitter review echoes the findings of Dr Florian Zollmann, Lecturer in Journalism at Newcastle University, who analysed US, UK and German newspaper coverage of human rights abuses in Kosovo (1999), Iraq (2004), Libya (2011), Syria (2012) and Egypt (2013) for his 2017 book Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention.

“If countries designated to be ‘enemy’ states of the West conduct human rights violations, the news media highlights these abuses and conveys demands for action to stop human rights abuses”, he notes. “If, on the other hand, Western states or their ‘allies’ are the perpetrators of human rights violations the news media employs significantly less investigatory zeal in its reporting and virtually no measures to stop abuses are conveyed.”

This systematic bias can only increase the worrying level of ignorance of UK foreign policy amongst the British public – a status quo the government and military will be more than happy with.

“There is a general policy by the MoD [Ministry of Defence] to keep the horror of what’s going on in Afghanistan out of the public domain, and that’s probably for political reasons”, a senior British officer told the Sunday Telegraph in 2008. “If the real truth were known it would have a huge impact on Army recruiting and the government would come under severe pressure to withdraw the troops.”

With the media providing such poor, power-friendly coverage, how is the general public supposed to gain an accurate understanding of the world? How can politicians make good decisions when it comes to future votes on war and peace? And what chance does the public have of understanding why many people in the Middle East and beyond have an unfavourable view of the UK?

Rather than being the tenacious Woodward and Bernstein-style Fourth Estate of journalists’ fantasies, it’s clear that when it comes to the Middle East the US and British media have, by and large, given their own governments and their militaries a free pass, shamefully helping to hide the bloody reality of Western military action from the American and British people.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

 

New report highlights the inaccurate news coverage of antisemitism controversy

New report highlights the inaccurate news coverage of antisemitism controversy
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
13 October 2018

Though it is the first in-depth, academic-level research focussing on the media coverage of the controversy surrounding antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Media Reform Coalition’s (MRC) new report has been ignored by the mainstream media.

This media blackout is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the report’s broad findings: “we identified myriad inaccuracies and distortions in online and television news including marked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered.”

An “independent coalition of groups and individuals committed to maximising the public interest in communications”, the MRC’s current chair is Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The report is co-authored by Dr Justin Schlosberg, Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London, and Laura Laker, a freelance journalist with eight years’ experience, including appearing on Sky News, BBC Breakfast and LBC radio. Schlosberg is an active member of the Labour Party and Jewish Voice for Labour, while Laker is not a member of the Labour Party, and has not voted consistently for Labour in local or national elections. For the research geeks out there, the researchers analysed their sample of 258 news items separately, “yielding a 93% agreement across the coding decisions”, which they argue “is considered near perfect agreement and indicates highly reliable findings.”

The report looks at the media coverage of the core document at the heart of the controversy – the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which the Labour Party has been under intense pressure to adopt.

The authors’ provide crucial context missing from most media reporting, noting that although the IHRA itself adopted the definition in 2016, only six of its member state countries have adopted it to date, and only eight countries in total. In contrast, the media has repeatedly inflated how widely the IHRA definition had been adopted. Speaking on the BBC Today Programme in September 2018, presenter John Humphrys said the definition had “been accepted by almost every country in the world”. Similarly, writing in the Guardian Jonathan Freedland referred to the “near universally accepted” IHRA definition.

The Board of Deputies (BoD), Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and many commentators have also repeatedly referred to over 120 UK local authorities having adopted in full the IHRA definition. However, the report explains “to date, less than a third [of local authorities in the UK] have heeded the call” and that “several of those local authorities that have adopted the definition do not appear to have included any of the accompanying examples” (which are defined as being part of the full IHRA definition by its supporters). Suspicious of the “over 120 local authorities” claim, I personally contacted the BoD, JLC and LFI and asked for a list of all the local authorities that have adopted the IHRA definition. All three organisations refused to provide me with the list.

Discussing sourcing, the report notes “A number of news reports focused on the code controversy also featured no defensive sources at all. The Guardian was a particular outlier in this respect, with critical sources given an entirely unchallenged platform in nearly half of the articles within this sub-sample”.

“In sum, both quantitative and qualitative analysis of sourcing revealed marked skews which effectively gave those attacking Labour’s revised [antisemitism] code and championing the IHRA definition a virtually exclusive and unchallenged platform to air their views”, the report concludes about sourcing. “By comparison, their detractors – including a number of Jewish organisations and representatives of other affected minorities – were systematically marginalized from the coverage.”

The report ends by looking at media coverage of the alleged antisemitic remark Labour activist Marc Wadsworth made to Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth at the launch of Shami Chakrabarti’s report into antisemitism in June 2016. In actual fact the video footage shows Wadsworth simply accused Smeeth of “working hand in hand” with the Daily Telegraph newspaper. There was, the report notes, no evidence of antisemitism in Wadsworth’s remarks (Wadsworth has always maintained he didn’t know Smeeth was Jewish). However, taking its framing from Smeeth and her supporters, the media coverage repeatedly reported that Wadsworth had accused Smeeth of conspiring with the press in general (which chimes with a longstanding antisemitic trope), and even of being part of a “Jewish media conspiracy” (The Sun).

“Nearly half of the reports in the sample (15 out of 33) either quoted Smeeth directly or referred to her allegations without mentioning Wadsworth’s denial”, Schlosberg and Laker note. “This was a clear subversion of the journalistic principle of offering a right of reply to those who face reputational damage from an allegation of harm.”

With the so-called left-wing Guardian and trusted BBC coming in for lots of criticism, the report concludes “overall, our findings were consistent with a disinformation paradigm” – defined by the authors as “systematic reporting failures that broadly privileged a particular agenda and narrative.”

“This does not mean that these failures were intentional or that journalists and news institutions are inherently biased”, they caveat.

Whether the skewed, anti-Corbyn coverage was intentional or not, this vital research provides some important lessons for those wishing to see a Corbyn-led Labour Party in government powerful enough to carry out its manifesto promises. First, it is clear the media, including those organisations which are perceived to be sympathetic to the Corbyn Project, cannot be trusted to report accurately on Labour Party politics. They must be consumed carefully and actively monitored. Second, to overcome future attacks on the Corbyn Project, Labour Party members, Corbyn supporters and concerned citizens must become better organised and more powerful – and, most importantly, build up their own independent media to combat the lies and distortions.

Read the Labour, Antisemitism and the News: A Disinformation Paradigm report http://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Labour-antisemitism-and-the-news-FINAL-PROOFED.pdf

The Washington Post: Watchdog or stenographer to power?

The Washington Post: Watchdog or stenographer to power?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
22 March 2018

STEVEN SPIELBERG’S new film about the Washington Post’s decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers — a secret history of the Vietnam War that proved successive US presidents had lied to the US public — has received huge amounts of critical acclaim.

The Post “is a pointed celebration of liberal decency” and “a stirring example of principle,” wrote Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, in his four star review.

Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s senior liberal hawk, made a case last month for the film to be awarded best picture at the Oscars, arguing it’s a newspaper story “full of … integrity.”

The Post is, undoubtedly, an impressive film that tells a riveting and important story.

Under intense pressure from the Richard Nixon administration, the paper’s publisher Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) choose to disregard the government’s warning about endangering “national security” and publish the leaked documents.

As one of the newspaper’s employees tells the newsroom, relaying the Supreme Court’s decision that supported publication, in one particularly Spielbergian scene, “The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”

Frustratingly, a number of inconvenient facts have been largely forgotten in this self-serving celebration of the US press as crusading, obstinate and deeply critical of government.

As the film highlights, Washington Post assistant managing editor for national news Ben Bagdikian played a key role in getting hold of the Pentagon Papers and their eventual publication.

However, what I haven’t seen mentioned in any reviews or wider coverage is that Bagdikian went on to write one of the most important critiques of the mainstream media in the US.

First published in 1983, The Media Monopoly explained how the increasingly concentrated corporate ownership, combined with the impact of mass advertising, created news media that “suffer from built-in biases that protect corporate power.”

Political discourse “is limited to an unrepresentative narrow spectrum of politics,” trade unions are treated poorly, while media owners, their interests, families and friends are usually treated as “sacred cows” in newsrooms — off limits to critical reporting.

Though he made his name at the Washington Post, Bagdikian doesn’t spare the newspaper in the book, seeing it as a central part of the US mass media that collectively weakens the public’s ability to understand the economic and political forces that shape the world.

“Criticising capitalism has never been a popular subject in the general news,” Bagdikian argued in 1997, echoing The Media Monopoly’s main argument.

A recording from a recent internal New York Times meeting shows he was right on the money, with the paper’s editorial page editor telling staff: “We are pro-capitalism.”

Why was the most influential paper on the planet so supportive of capitalism? “Because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty programme and engine of progress that we’ve seen.”

Returning to Spielberg’s The Post, the film conveniently skates over the Washington Post’s early and strong backing of the US aggression in Vietnam and wealthy socialite Graham’s offer of support to Nixon after he was elected in 1968.

Despite this, as Norman Solomon noted in the Huffington Post last year, Graham wrote in her memoirs, “I don’t believe that who I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications.”

Robert Parry, a Washington correspondent for the Graham-owned Newsweek magazine in the 1980s, has a different take.

Parry reported “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures,” providing an example from 1987.

“I was told that my story about the CIA funnelling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs Graham and [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.”

In 1988 Graham revealed her democratic credentials in a speech to the CIA. “We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” she said. “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t.

“I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

It seems the legendary Bradlee, who played a key role in reporting the Watergate revelations that led to Nixon resigning in 1974, also stumbled badly in the 1980s.

Speaking to author Mark Hertsgaard for the 1988 book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, Bradlee explained that the Washington Post “and probably a good deal of the press gave Reagan not a free ride, but they didn’t use the same standards on him that they had used on [President Jimmy] Carter and on Nixon.”

“We did ease off,” he added.

After 9/11, the US media become even more supportive of the US government. Famously, the highly respected veteran US news man Dan Rather appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, solemnly explaining: “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. And, you know, as just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where and he will make the call.”

Like the majority of the US press, the Washington Post supported the march to war in Iraq in 2003.

From August 2002 to the launch of the war there were more than 140 front page stories that focused on the Bush administration’s rhetoric against Iraq, while stories questioning the government’s case for war were generally buried inside the paper or sometimes spiked.

Having struggled to get stories past senior editors, veteran reporter Thomas Ricks noted: “There was an attitude among editors — Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?”

The coverage was “strikingly one-sided at times,” according to staff writer Howard Kurtz. These stats and quotes are taken from a 2004 front page investigation the Washington Post conducted into its woeful pre-war reporting. Bradlee, having stepped down as executive editor in 1991, said he was “embarrassed” by this public apology.

Shockingly, the Washington Post argued in 2016 that US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, whom the paper had used as a source for stories on the US government’s vast electronic surveillance programmes, should stand trial on espionage charges.

Its reasoning was that his leaks likely endangered “national security” — the same justification given by editors at the New York Times for spiking journalist James Risen’s reports on the US government’s vast domestic surveillance programme in 2004. For more on this, read Risen’s extraordinary expose published by The Intercept earlier this month.

It turns out the government’s crying wolf about “national security” and interfering in the so-called free press isn’t just something that happened when journalists smoked in newsrooms and called sources from payphones.

What all this shows is the Washington Post’s coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate was, in reality, small islands of crusading, dissenting journalism in a sea of stenography to established power.

Worryingly, the sole owner of the Washington Post today is Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder. Beyond the obvious concerns about corporate influence, the Amazon link is troubling because the internet giant signed a $600m contract with the CIA in 2014 to provide it with a computing “cloud.”

As the US academic Robert McChesney once wrote, “So long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible.”

No doubt Bagdikian, who died in 2016, would strongly agree.

Radical action now is the only sensible option

Radical action now is the only sensible option
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 February 2018

Today the UK faces a number of serious and interlinked threats to the public’s health and future wellbeing. Tinkering around the edges, gradual reform or triangulation-style politics are simply no longer commensurate with the challenges bearing down on us. Radical action – implemented right now – is the only realistic option.

Research consistently shows the UK has one of the highest levels of inequality – and one of the lowest levels of social mobility – in Western Europe. However, last year the Guardian reported the government’s own Social Mobility Commission found “policies have failed to significantly reduce inequality between rich and poor despite two decades of interventions by successive governments”. Headed by former Labour MP Alan Milburn, the study noted there had been “too little” progress since 1997, with many policies implemented in the past no longer fit for purpose. The study warned “that without radical and urgent reform, the social and economic divisions in British society will widen, threatening community cohesion and economic prosperity”, noted the Guardian.

Pollution is also a significant problem, with around 40,000 deaths every year in the UK attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution, according to a 2016 Royal College of Physicians report. In response, the government announced in July that the UK will ban the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040. London mayor Sadiq Khan criticised this measure, arguing Londoners needed action on pollution right now. But while Khan has introduced several important measures, including the roll out of an Ultra Low Emission Zone in the capital, in October the Commission on the Future of London’s Roads and Streets criticised Khan himself for not going far enough. The Green Party have also highlighted the hypocrisy of Khan talking a good game on “healthy streets” while backing the plan for the Silvertown Tunnel – that is, a new urban motorway – in east London.

Turning to climate change, the future is looking bleak. Last month a new forecast published by the Met Office assessed that annual global average temperature could reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels during the next five years – already breaking the hopeful goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Indeed, the United Nations news service recently noted “pledges made under the Paris Agreement are only a third of what is required by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change”.

Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, fleshed out the danger of climate chaos in 2014: “What we are talking about here is an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term. In the short term, it carries all sorts of risks as well and it requires a human response on a scale that has never been achieved before.”

What is required, according to the respected climate scientists Professor Kevin Anderson and Professor Alice Bows, is for the wealthier nations to immediately adopt a de-growth strategy – wholesale systems change on a far greater scale than the allied mobilisations that ‘won’ the Second World War.

So who should we look to for assistance in implementing the radical policies that will address these threats?

The re-designed Guardian newspaper sees itself, in the words of editor Katharine Viner, as the repository for “thoughtful, progressive… and challenging” thinking. However, it is important to remember the Guardian strongly opposed Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to become leader of the Labour Party, instead lending its support to New Labourite Yvette Cooper. Before and after Corbyn was elected, a string of Guardian columnists including Polly Toynbee, Jonathan Freedland, Suzanne Moore and Martin Kettle, were let loose, spewing invective, half-truths and nonsensical arguments to undermine the Islington North MP and the movement behind him.

“The Guardian represents a whole batch of journalists, from moderate right to moderate left – i.e. centre journalists – who, broadly speaking, like the status quo”, Tony Benn memorably wrote in his diaries. “They like the two-party system, with no real change. They’re quite happy to live under the aegis of the Americans and NATO… they are very critical of the left… they are just the Establishment. It is a society that suits them well.”

A Corbyn-led Labour Party winning the next election on the back of energised social movements offers the best chance for significant progressive change in my lifetime. But while it is essential to defend Corbyn from establishment attacks, those who wish to address the threats I’ve listed above need to understand they will almost certainly need to push beyond Corbynism in its current guise. If Corbyn and his core leadership team can be persuaded and/or pressured to be more radical, that’s great, but if not, then the grassroots needs to be prepared to go further to achieve change.

On the environment, though Corbyn’s Labour Party put forward many good proposals in their 2017 general election manifesto, Greenpeace noted “there are some important areas for improvement” including the party’s continuing promotion of North Sea oil and gas and its “cautious support” for airport expansion in south east England. More importantly, the Labour manifesto, like the Tory Party, championed economic growth – precisely the ideology and economic path that is propelling the planet over the climate cliff.

We desperately need radical, joined-up thinking. For example, a reduction in private car use and increased funding for public transport would have number of positive knock-on effects for society beyond helping to reduce carbon emissions: a reduction in air pollution; less noise and improved quality of sleep; fewer road deaths; safer streets meaning more people walking and cycling, leading to more people exercising and less obesity and depression. All of which would lead to a reduction in stress on the NHS.

This kind of holistic thinking has long been the mainstay of the Green Party who, let’s not forget, stood aside 30 candidates for another progressive candidate they thought had a better chance of winning the seat at the last general election. It is the Green Party who have been questioning the concept of economic growth and discussing, long before Labour, the idea of a Universal Basic Income and Land Value Tax. Last month Green MEP Molly Scott Cato suggested extending VAT to all processed and factory farmed meat to help combat climate change and encourage healthier eating habits.

Though Corbyn is riding high at the moment, joining forces with the Green Party would massively strengthen the movement that has made his leadership so successful.

As the title of Canadian author Naomi Klein’s generation shaking book about climate change and capitalism argues, the size and all-encompassing nature of the climate crisis “changes everything”.

“It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand”, she explains. “And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away.”

You can follow Ian Sinclair on Twitter on @IanJSinclair.

The dangers of short-term foreign policy thinking

The dangers of short-term foreign policy thinking
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
29 January 2018

From Iraq circa 2002-3, to Libya in 2011 and Syria today, influential liberal commentators including David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Paul Mason, Jonathan Freedland and many politicians have repeatedly pushed for Western military intervention. “Something must be done!” they shout from their newspaper columns. “We must act now before it is too late”, they warn in the House of Commons. One of the things that characterises these emotive and often simplistic calls for action are their narrow, laser-like focus on human rights abuses Western governments are publicly concerned about. Those who advise caution, critical thinking and a wider lens of analysis are often labelled naïve, or worse – apologists for the authoritarian leader in the West’s sights.

However, recent history shows this unwillingness to consider possible wider, long-term impacts of Western wars of choice has had grave consequences for the UK and the rest of the world.

Take NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, sold by Tony Blair’s government to the British public as a humanitarian intervention urgently needed to stop ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbian government forces.

“The liberal press – notably the Guardian and the Independent – backed the war to the hilt (while questioning the tactics used to wage it) and lent critical weight to the government’s arguments”, British historian Mark Curtis notes in his 2003 book Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role In The World. In addition, “the anti-war movement failed to mobilise beyond the political margins”, explained international relations specialist Dr Aidan Hehir in a 2009 Irish Times op-ed. David Aaronovitch, then at the Independent, proclaimed he would fight if asked by the government, while Andrew Marr writing in the Observer put forward “the Macbeth option: which is that we’re so steeped in blood we should go further” and “put in ground troops.”

With Tony Blair basking in the liberal media’s adoration after playing a leading role in the military campaign that pushed Serb forces out of Kosovo in June 1999, it is worth considering some of the longer term ramifications of NATO’s intervention.

It is clear the war’s perceived success (rejected by Curtis and US dissident Noam Chomsky) emboldened Blair, likely increasing his messianic tendencies, which many believed played a crucial role in the invasion of Iraq four years later. “It may well be he was actually drunk on his self-importance having had successes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone”, Colonel Tim Collins, a senior figure in the army in 2003, commented when the Chilcot Inquiry published its findings. “He genuinely believed he could do no wrong.” Iain Duncan Smith came to a similar conclusion when he recounted a September 2002 meeting he had with Blair to Andrew Rawnsley for his 2010 book The End Of The Party. “He’d decided this was a successful formula. He’d done Kosovo. He’d done Afghanistan. It was what he believed in”, said the Tory Party leader at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Writing in the Financial Times in 2007, Quentin Peel makes the obvious connection: “Kosovo was… a crucial moment in the development of the international vision… that eventually led to [Blair’s] backing for the US-led invasion of Iraq.” An invasion, let’s not forget, that was not authorised by the United Nations – just as the Kosovo intervention was also not backed by the UN. As the title of Dr Hehir’s Irish Times piece argued: NATO’s ‘Good War’ In Kosovo Degraded International Law.

There are other important links to the race to war in 2003. “It was during the [Kosovo] war… that Blair and Campbell hones their PR machine and Blair’s image as a humanitarian leader”, asserted former International Development Secretary Clare Short in her 2004 book An Honourable Deception? Noting how the Foreign Office had been sidelined in 1999, writing in International Affairs journal Dr Oliver Daddow argued Kosovo was the point when Blair confirmed “that he did not need to rely on Whitehall’s decision-making machinery for ideas or strategy”.

The 2011 NATO war in Libya has also had a number of influential effects on subsequent conflicts.

Backed by around 97 percent of British MPs and much of the liberal commentariat, the UK intervention was given legal cover by the passing of UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorised “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya.

Though the resolution did not refer to regime change – illegal under international law – the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s examination of the intervention in 2016 concluded the “limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into a policy of regime change by military means”.

Soon after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was forced out of Tripoli, David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy made a triumphalist, political capital-boosting visit to the country in September 2011 (or so they thought). Russia, on the other hand, took an entirely different lesson from the war.

Quoting a senior Obama Administration official as saying President Putin is “obsessed” by the NATO-enabled overthrow and death of Gaddafi, Julia Ioffe recently argued in The Atlantic magazine that “regime change in Libya and Ukraine led to Russia propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” Ioffe goes on to quote former US Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff as characterising Putin’s approach to Syria as “Not one more.”

A 2011 BBC article titled Why China And Russia Rebuffed The West On Syria confirms this thesis. “Libya is perhaps the prime reason” behind Russia’s vetoes at the UN on Syria, Jonathan Marcus notes. “Both the Chinese and Russian governments seem to think that the West took advantage of [UN] resolution [1973] to intervene militarily in a Libyan civil war” and carry out regime change, he notes. “They are determined not to allow any similar resolution to go forward [on Syria]”.

NATO’s intervention in Libya also had an important influence on the Syrian rebels fighting to overthrow the Assad government. Writing about the UN’s mediation efforts in the Syrian crisis, the academics Raymond Hinnebusch and William Zartman refer to “the opposition’s unrealistic expectations” of the peace process in 2012: “During a visit to a Free Syrian Army unit, one UN official found that the Libyan precedent and anti-Assad Western rhetoric had convinced opposition fighters that NATO was going to intervene on their behalf”. According to the UN official, this was “not conducive to… serious engagement.” In his 2017 book The Battle For Syria: International Rivalry In The New Middle East, Chatham House’s Dr Christopher Phillips highlights a similar dynamic with the opposition’s regional supporters in 2012: “Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were convinced both that Assad was close to falling and that eventually the US would intervene as it had in Libya, and so saw no need to compromise.”

The Libyan intervention, then, was one of the reasons behind Russia’s large, obstructive role in Syria, and the decision by some opposition groups to shun negotiations aiming to end the war – two of the many reasons why the horrific conflict continues today.

So it goes. The ongoing North Korean crisis is inexorably linked with these events in the Middle East. “North Korea learned from Iraq that Saddam Hussein’s mistake was he did not possess the weapons of mass destruction he was falsely accused of having. Libya taught a similar lesson”, Professor John Delury, a North Korean expert at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, told the BBC in 2016. According to a 2017 Guardian report, North Korean “state media frequently refers to their [Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein] demise as proof that the US wolves are now at North Korea’s door.”

What these three examples show is that beyond the immediate crisis, Western military interventions have – often predictable – serious and widespread knock-on impacts that have been disastrous for the British public and the wider world. Not to say anything about how the interventions often undermine the UK government’s own interests and policy goals – Russia’s response to the Libyan intervention worked against UK policy goals in Syria, for example.

We desperately need more critical and long-term thinking when the government tries, as it inevitably will, to gain public support for its next foreign war. Rebuilding and maintaining a popular and powerful anti-war movement is an essential first step to achieving this.

Book review: To Kill The President by Sam Bourne

Book review: To Kill The President by Sam Bourne
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
31 August 2017

Writing under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland’s new book is a timely Washington D.C.-based political thriller.

Presumably finished soon after Donald Trump won the presidency in November last year, To Kill The President begins with an unnamed, newly elected and manically unstable Commander in Chief stopped at the last minute from ordering an unprovoked nuclear strike on North Korea – a storyline that got Freedland plenty of media exposure during the recent US-North Korean nuclear standoff.

Operating in the shadows is the president’s calculating, deeply unpleasant chief strategist Crawford ‘Mac’ McNamara, clearly based on the recently departed Steve Bannon.

Fighting the good liberal fight is Maggie Costello, a former UN aid worker and peace negotiator now working in the White House’s Counsel Office. Ordered to investigate the mysterious death of the President’s personal doctor, she uncovers a plot to assassinate POTUS, grappling with the personal, moral and political repercussions of her discovery. Should she try to stop the murder of the democratically elected head of state, or would the US and the world be a better place if the ignorant and dangerous demagogue was six feet under? This conundrum isn’t as interesting as Freedland thinks it is but nonetheless it’s an entertaining plot device, one that encourages the reader to root for the assassin, in a similar way to Frederick Forsyth’s classic The Day of the Jackal.

The centrality of the assassination plot means the book is inescapably premised on a particularly elite view of history – that the real power resides with Great Men and that significant, long-lasting political change is triggered if they are disposed. Social movements, grassroots activism, broad historical currents – all are ignored.

Talking of politics, as a long-time reader of Freedland’s Guardian articles, I was interested to see if his brand of liberal, establishment-friendly politics would be reflected in his writing, or whether he was a skilled enough author to escape, or atleast think critically about, his increasingly irrelevant worldview (e.g. his article just before the general election about Labour’s fortunes titled ‘No more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown’).

Spoiler alert: it’s the former.

Diligently following the press pack, lamentably the book is preoccupied with the supposed dangers of social media, and those liberal bête noires – so-called Fake News and post-truth politics. In contrast Media Lens told the Morning Star last year the “media performance” of the corporate liberal media “is itself largely fake news”, arguing the term is deployed to demonise social media and bolster the corporate media. Indeed, Freedland isn’t averse to some post-truth politics himself. For example, “when violence resumed in Gaza” was how he described/dismissed, on BBC Question Time, Israel’s 2014 one-sided bombardment of Gaza that killed 1,523 Palestinian civilians, including 519 children, according to the United Nations.

The previous occupant of the Oval Office – who Costello reverentially remembers serving under – is represented as a benign, wise, rational man. Laughably, at one point Freedland writes that this Obama-like figure insisted an investigation into a “mid-ranking official” in his own administration had as wide a remit as possible to make sure it uncovered any corruption going on. Again, this power worship shouldn’t be surprising when one considers Freedland’s quasi-religious account of Obama coming on stage in Berlin in July 2008: the then Democratic presidential candidate “almost floated into view, walking to the podium on a raised, blue-carpeted runway as if he were somehow, magically, walking on water”, he breathlessly recorded.

“We will miss him when he’s gone”, he wrote about president No. 44, who had bombed seven nations, killing thousands of men, women and children, during his presidency. Freedland has acted as a defacto unpaid intern in the White House press office for decades. “I had seen a maestro at the height of his powers. Clinton was the Pele of politics, and we might wait half a century to see his like again”, he gushed at the end of Bill Clinton’s time in office in 2000. “I will miss him”.

Perhaps it’s too much to ask from To Kill A President, but the book – and no doubt Freedland – shows no awareness of the relationship between Obama’s neoliberal, status quo-saving politics and the rise of Trump. Or the key role played by liberal commentators such as Freedland in shielding the Wall Street-funded Obama from serious criticism.

Though it doesn’t match the excitement levels or political conspiracy of the best in the genre – think the unthreatening and simplistic politics of TV show Designated Survivor rather than the radicalism of Costa Gavras’s Z or the lightening pace of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels – Freedland has written an enjoyable page-turner. Just don’t read it to understand US politics, the Trump presidency or how real progressive change might be made in America.

To Kill The President is published by HarperCollins, priced £7.99.

 

How does UK foreign policy raise the terror threat in the UK?

How does UK foreign policy raise the terror threat in the UK?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
5 June 2017

We are in the middle of a high stakes propaganda war.

With the Conservative poll lead shrinking by the day, the establishment have been throwing everything it has got at Jeremy Corbyn to put a stop to his increasingly credible bid for Downing Street.

Perhaps sensing the floodgates of the Tory attack machine would be opened after the atrocity in Manchester carried out by Salman Abedi on 22 May 2017, the Labour leader did the smart thing and took control of the narrative himself. “Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home”, Corbyn explained when electioneering started up again on 26 May 2017.

Though much of the press didn’t take kindly to this argument, a YouGov poll found 53 percent of people agreed with Corbyn that the wars the UK has supported or fought are partly responsible for terror attacks in the UK (24 percent of people disagreed). However, despite – or perhaps because of – the broad public support for this position, Theresa May and her cabinet have continued to smear Corbyn on the topic by wilfully misrepresenting his argument.

With this in mind, it is worth summarising the three main ways UK foreign policy has increased the terror threat to the UK — a task made even more important in light of the terrorist attack in London on Saturday.

The first is the most simple and direct relationship – UK wars in the Middle East have created a well of anger that has energised and motivated a number of people to carry out terrorist attacks on British soil. “Until we feel security, you will be our targets,” Mohammad Sidique Khan stated in his 7/7 suicide bombing martyrdom video. “Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.” According to a report in the Independent, the last message left on the WhatsApp messaging service by Khalid Masood, the perpetrator of the 22 March 2017 Westminster attack, “declared that he was waging jihad in revenge against Western military action in Muslim countries in the Middle East.” Similarly, Abedi’s sister told the Wall Street Journal “He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge”.

These justifications concur with the testimony of the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, who told the Iraq Inquiry in 2010 that the 2003 invasion of Iraq “substantially” increased the terrorist threat to the UK.

Interestingly, those who try to downplay or deny a link between terrorist attacks and UK foreign policy, such as Jonathan Freedland in his recent Guardian piece titled It’s A Delusion To Think This Is All About Our Foreign Policy, focus their attention on this connection alone, thus creating straw man to knock down. The link, as Freedland surely knows, is deeper than this.

The second way UK foreign policy increases the terror threat to the UK was set out by Corbyn in the Channel 4/Sky Battle for Number 10 programme: “We have to have a foreign policy… that doesn’t leave large areas without any effective government… which can become a breeding ground of enormous danger to all of us.” In a video for Novara Media, Dr David Wearing from SOAS, University of London fleshes out this thesis. Islamic State (ISIS) “grew out of and flourished in the chaos created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, he argues, before also explaining the UK-backed Saudi bombing in Yemen has created a “chaotic situation” in which Al-Qaeda and ISIS have grown in strength. “ISIS and Al Qaeda they love the chaos created by conflict”, he notes. “That’s where they thrive, that’s where they operate, that’s where they exploit people’s grievances.” Ditto Libya, where the 2011 NATO intervention contributed to “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL [ISIS]”, according to a 2016 House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report. And it is not just overt military intervention. In Syria the West has covertly armed rebels and played a little known role in blocking peace negotiations, thus helping to intensify and prolong the conflict, creating the perfect conditions for extremist groups to prosper.

The third connection is largely ignored by Westminster and mainstream commentators: the longstanding diplomatic, military and economic support the UK has given to its close ally Saudi Arabia.

The authoritarian Gulf monarchy – propped up by the UK and US – has “exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years”, according to the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking in 2013.

Starting in the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia made huge efforts to spread its extremist form of Islam, Wahhabism, across the world. “They took the massive petro dollars they had accumulated and started spreading it, creating these madrassas, or schools, aswell as mosques, importing Imans and teachers and then sending them back home indoctrinated”, Medea Benjamin, author of Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection, told me last year.

The UK has not been immune to this influence. “It is no secret that Saudi Arabia in particular provides funding to hundreds of mosques in the UK, espousing a very hardline Wahhabist interpretation of Islam”, Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, recently wrote to the UK Prime Minister. “It is often in these institutions that British extremism takes root.”

While Corbyn is repeatedly grilled about his relationship with the IRA and Hamas, the fact the Tory Government has been selling billions of pounds of armaments to the biggest exporter of “extreme ideology” on the planet has been swept under the carpet by our so-called fearless fourth estate. A more perfect example of the propaganda function of the media you’ll be hard pressed to find.

Finally, recent reports point to one more example of how UK foreign policy likely heightens the terror threat. “MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, facilitated the travel of many Islamist Mancunians back to Libya” to fight the Libyan government, according to the Financial Times. The Middle East Eye news website provides more detail, noting British authorities “operated an ‘open door’ policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders.” The Financial Times notes that security officials have repeatedly highlighted the dangerous dynamics of the Syrian war – which are also applicable to Libya: “a cohort of young Britons who will be brutalised by the conflict, skilled in the trade and tools of war, connected to transnational networks of fellow fighters by powerful bonds of kinship and shared suffering.”

Of course, UK foreign policy is not the sole cause of the terror threat from radical Islamists. However, UK foreign policy is the one aspect of the problem that we have the most influence on – both as UK-based activists and the British government itself. And while it may not eradicate the threat completely, a foreign policy that does not repeatedly military intervene in the Middle East and prop up dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia would likely significantly reduce the terror threat to the UK. With the UK’s stretched security services reportedly currently investigating 3,000 people in the aftermath of the Manchester attack surely this can only be a good thing?