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by Les May
SEVERAL days ago the High Court struck out a claim for libel against the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) made by Tony Greenstein. The organisation now boasts that the ruling made it permissible for it to call him, and presumably anyone else, a “notorious antisemite” in articles on the CAA website.
The problem for anyone challenging the CAA over such personal attacks is that whilst they are made with all the certainty of them being objectively true, the law treats them merely as opinions, and as the saying goes ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’.
The finding makes Mr Greenstein liable for costs of nearly £68,000, something else the CAA is eager to crow about.
Having seen off Greenstein the CAA is now renewing its attacks on the Labour party claiming that Starmer has ‘conned’ them and offered them ‘crumbs’ by allowing the Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension to be dealt with by the Labour Party’s existing disciplinary procedures which resulted in the lifting of the suspension. If Starmer thought that his removing the Labour whip would result in him being allowed to deal with complaints of anti-semitism in his own way, he was mistaken. The response from the CAA has been to claim ‘New evidence emerges showing that incompetence, factionalism and politicisation remain the hallmarks of Labour’s disciplinary process under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership’. Blackmailers always want more.
Not content with that, at the end of October the CAA submitted a short letter and almost 70 pages of allegations against a number of former and sitting Labour MPs who it referred to as ‘Respondents’ as if it had some legal authority . If Starmer actually read these he must have wondered who is in charge of the Labour party, himself or the unelected Gideon Falter and Joe Glasman of the CAA.
It should also be said that Starmer’s action in removing the Labour whip from Corbyn may be the start of an attempt to reverse the democratisation of the party which placed the decision about who should by Leader in the hands of the membership, and not in the hands of the parliamentary party.
The ruling against Greenstein is a warning that it is not possible to challenge the tactics of the CAA head on, pernicious though they are. But it is possible to point out some of the shortcomings of this organisation.
The CAA likes to present itself as a ‘non-governmental organisation’ and a ‘charity’. In 2019 its income was almost £900,000, almost all from legacies and donations. But when the Charity Commission investigated complaints against the CAA’s Gideon Falter said, ‘There are many people who oppose our mission and complain to the Charity Commission at every opportunity’ and described it as an ‘orchestrated campaign’. In October 2018 the report in the Jewish Chronicle showed how the CAA had broken charity law;
The Charity Commission told the JC its investigation was launched "following concerns raised about a petition launched by the charity which called for the resignation of the leader of the Opposition".
A spokesperson said: “Charities are free to campaign and engage in political activity in furthering their purposes...
"But there are rules that charities must follow. One of the most important of these rules is that charities must stress their independence from party politics and demonstrate party political balance.
"This is a cornerstone of charity law and the public rightly expect us to uphold it robustly."
The commission instructed CAA to change the petition's wording "to ensure it complied with our guidance on campaigning and political activity".
Reading the CAA’s most recent complaints against named individuals in the Labour party, which quote exactly which of the Labour party’s rules have been broken, it is difficult to see how the organisation can be said to complying with rules set out for charities.
The CAA makes much of its ‘methodology’ in its investigations into anti-semitism. But this is what the Institute from Jewish Policy Research had to say about its methods in January 2015;
However, unfortunately, the organisation’s survey about antisemitism is littered with flaws, and in the context of a clear need for accurate data on this topic, its work may even be rather irresponsible.
Its report is based on two surveys – one of Jews living in the UK, exploring their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism, and one of the general population of the UK, exploring its attitudes towards Jews.
In the first one, the data about Jewish attitudes are based on an open web survey that had very limited capacity to assess whether respondents were in any way representative of the British Jewish population. So the percentages quoted are of survey respondents, not of Jews in the UK. The findings might be representative of the Jewish community in some way, but it is at least equally likely that they are not. Unfortunately, due to quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses, there is absolutely no way the researchers or any readers of the report can really know
.
Because of this, the claim in the report, for example, that “more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s” verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate. Moreover, the very inclusion of such a question in the survey, which most credible scholars of the Holocaust utterly refute, was a dubious decision in and of itself, and raises issues about the organisers’ pre-existing hypotheses and assumptions. Professional social researchers build credible surveys and analyse the data with an open mind; the CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis.
The second survey, conducted by YouGov, is much better – the results are certainly broadly representative of the UK population. The findings would have benefited significantly from greater contextualisation, both in terms of attitudes towards other minorities, and the inclusion of some positive statements about Jews rather than just negative ones, which would have helped to provide some balance and nuance. But the research makes a valuable contribution to knowledge. The inclusion of some context might also have altered the way in which the results were presented in the CAA report and press release, which included the rather sensationalist claim that almost half of British adults harbour some kind of antisemitic view.
A far more accurate and honest read of the YouGov data would highlight the fact that between 75% and 90% of people in Britain either do not hold antisemitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4% to 5% of people can be characterised as clearly antisemitic when looking at individual measures of antisemitism. This figure is similar to Pew data gathered in 2009 and 2014 which estimated the level of antisemitic attitudes at somewhere between 2% and 7%, and Anti-Defamation League data gathered in 2014 which, while also flawed, put it at 8%, and, more robustly, identified the UK as among the least antisemitic countries in the world. It is possible that the proportion has risen in light of the summer’s events in Gaza (and those interested should look out for the next results from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey), but the notion that it has risen to such a significant degree seems to be highly implausible.
So much for the Campaign Against Antisemitism's‘methodology’.
In what I write and say I try to avoid using words like ‘racist’, ‘islamo-phobic’, ‘anti-semitic’, ‘fascist’, ‘nazi’ etc, largely because the way they are sometimes used against individuals is difficult to distinguish from what has been called ‘hate speech’. Nor do I find it easy to distinguish the repeated attacks by organisations like the CAA on Corbyn and other individuals, easy to distinguish from what is called in social media circles ‘trolling’.
The Labour party and those of us who support it have a choice to make. We can go on trying to appease organisations like the CAA or we can insist that if it feels it has the right to call people anti-semites, we have the right to defend ourselves against such charges and to criticise the policies of the state of Israel and those who act as apologists for it. To paraphrase Shakespeare: 'Caesar would not be wolf, if the Romans were not sheep'.
The Charity Commission website carries details of the CAA. The page headed ‘What, who, how, where’ is revealing, and rather difficult to equate with it’s recent activities with regard to the Labour party and its supporters.
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6 comments:
Many thanks for this. Seems fine
The wording of Mr Greenstein’s comment could be interpreted by people intent upon causing mischief as implying that I wrote this piece at his behest. I would like to make it clear that I have never met or spoken to Mr Greenstein, nor have I ever communicated with him by letter, e-mail or SMS (text). I wrote this piece because I am disturbed that a privately funded organisation operating as a charity, promotes dubious information about the level of anti-semitism in the UK, and has repeatedly described some individuals as ‘anti-semites’ based, not upon any statement they have made which attacks, denigrates or expresses hatred for Jews, but upon who they associate with or have associated with. I believe that by using the World Wide Web to promote these descriptors, which might reasonably be described as hate speech, this organisation shows a callous disregard for the harm that this may do to the health, wellbeing and livelihood of people who have no redress.
But how can we distinguish between German Fascism from Jewish?
I ask this merely because Les May says in this post that "the claim of the Campaign Against Antisemitism that ‘more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s” verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate’.
In 1939, the novelist Ignazio Silone wrote in his book ‘School for Dictators’ about the impact of national temperament when considering the psychological state of the average individual and he concluded: ‘No country has a national tradition or temperament that makes totalitarianism inevitable, but neither does it have one that makes it apriori impossible. National involvement plays a purely decorative role in the genesis of totalitarianism; it can be useful in distinguishing German from Jewish (yes, that exists too), Italian Fascism from French or Irish. But mass civilisation tends, in any case, to standardize national temperament ...'
The sentence in my piece, ‘Because of this, the claim in the report, for example, that more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate.’ is NOT a statement of my opinion, they are the words used by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR). All of the text between the words ‘However’ and ‘implausible’ is taken from the same source.
How would Jewish Fascism differ from the German version? I suppose it would have to focus on some other scapegoat culture to persecute. And give some grief to the Arabs or Palestinians in the Middle East? Elsewhere in his book 'THE SCHOOL FOR DICTATORS' Silone tries to confront the great challenge of the Americans who according to Mr. DOUBLE W'S claim 'their aren't many Americans who sincerely love politics or would fight to defend the two-party system; but they all like freedom.' To which Silone explains: Don't be downhearted 'Before Fascism took over Italy, many people insisted that it was incompatible with our individualistic temperament. When it came to Germany, there was the same talk on incompatibility, and Hitler's primitive concepts were contrasted with the great German contributions to art and philosophy....up to 1933 you could hear people saying, "Germany isn't Italy," and then from 1933 to 1938, "Austria isn't Germany".'
So perhaps those who crave a similar totalitarian type system in Israel, and want to transform the British Labour Party, under Kier Starmer, into a nodding dog for such a regime; could speed things up with the guidance of the British Board of Jewish Deputies, and other lobbies like the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). It just goes to show how formerly persecuted folk like the Germans and Jews can so easily become the persecutors! Given half a chance?
I am not in mourning for the death of the Labour Party now that it is in the hands of the MP for Mossad Central. For a while Corbyn allowed the discussion of socialist values but his anti racism and belief in fairness, decency and justice were too much for today’s Blairites. He had to be sabotaged, undermined and expunged. His major failing? He never punched the playground bullies on the nose. Why does he wish to stay in the Party? Me, I would tell Starmer to look for a job with sex and travel.
In my playground experience most bullies strongly restricted their exposure to facts; to reason; to questioning; and, especially, to disagreement. Winning arguments did not endear you to them.
It is very easy to outargue Sir Keith but he can call upon some deeply embedded and widely shared prejudices regarding socialism and, word of words, Semitism. It refers to a family of languages but Hitler and company used it racially against Jews and, as the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv demonstrates, Judaism is a religion, not a race. Does Netanyahu look like an Ethiopian?
Back to J C. That Manifesto, what does it resemble? Something Stalin might have written? Robespierre perhaps? For me it recalls the Liberal Party Manifesto of 1929. It was restorative not revolutionary. Written mostly by Lloyd
George and Maynard Keynes, neither of them Leninists, the Liberal Manifesto merely aimed at getting us on an even keel after the cock ups of capitalism.
I suggest that Starmer is and wants to be Establishment Man. His establishment includes the Board of Deputies. How do you please an Establishment if you wish to become a member? You certainly do not question what they say.
Starmer only questions those that might inhibit his chances of joining his chosen establishment.
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