The Newspaper That Smeared Corbyn & the Left

September 2, 2021




https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/02/the-newspaper-that-smeared-corbyn-the-left/




Jonathan Cook analyzes why a British media watchdog doesn’t take meaningful action against The Jewish Chronicle for its anti-Semitism libels against the former Labour leader and his followers.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly newspaper that was saved from liquidation last year by a consortium led by a former senior adviser to Theresa May, the former U.K. prime minister, has been exposed as having a quite astonishing record of journalistic failings.

Over the past three years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the misnamed and feeble “press regulator” created by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has found the paper to have breached its code of practice on at least 28 occasions. The weekly has also lost, or been forced to settle, in at least four libel cases over the same period.

According to Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University in London, that means one in every four or five editions of the Chronicle has broken either the law or the IPSO code. He describes that, rather generously, as a “collapse of journalistic standards” at the paper.

The Jewish Chronicle’s offices in London. (Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

IPSO, led by Lord Edward Faulks, a former Conservative minister, has repeatedly failed to launch any kind of formal investigation into this long-term pattern of rule and law-breaking by The Jewish Chronicle. He has also dragged his feet in responding to calls from a group of nine individuals maligned by the paper that IPSO urgently needs to carry out an inquiry into the paper’s editorial standards.

Consequently, IPSO has left itself in no position to take action against the paper, even assuming it wished to. The “press regulator” has not fined the Chronicle — one of its powers — or imposed any other kind of sanction. It has not insisted on special training to end the Chronicle’s systematic editorial failings. And the paper’s editor, Stephen Pollard, has remained in place.

And here one needs to ask why.

Holding the Line

Cathcart’s main explanation is that IPSO, as the creature of the billionaire press, is there to “handle” complaints — in the sense of making them go away — rather than seriously hold the media to account or punish its transgressions.

IPSO has never fined or sanctioned any publication since it was created seven years ago by the owners of the corporate media to avoid the establishment of a proper regulatory body in the wake of the Levenson public inquiry into media abuses such as the phone hacking scandal.

The bar for launching an investigation by IPSO was intentionally set so high — failings must be shown to be “serious and systematic” — that the “press regulator” and its corporate media backers assumed they would plausibly be able to argue that no paper ever reached it.

“Cathcart’s main explanation is that IPSO, as the creature of the billionaire press, is there to ‘handle’ complaints — in the sense of making them go away.”

The Chronicle has put even this sham form of regulation to the severest test.

Cathcart argues that IPSO’s job has been to hold the line. If it tackled The Jewish Chronicle for its serial deceptions and character assassinations, it would risk paving the way to similar sanctions being imposed on Rupert Murdoch’s titles.

Attack Dog

But there is an additional reason why IPSO is so loath to crack down on the Chronicle’s systematic editorial failings. And that is because, from the point of view of the British establishment, those failings were necessary and encouraged.

It is important to highlight the context for the Chronicle’s egregious transgressions of the editors’ code of practice and libel laws. Those fabrications and deceptions were needed because they lay at the heart of the establishment’s campaign to be rid of former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

The Jewish Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and the Labour left, in service of an establishment represented by the Conservative party and the long-dominant right wing of the Labour party.

Whereas the rest of the corporate media tried to discredit Corbyn and the Labour left with a range of early, lamentable claims — that he was scruffy, unpatriotic, sexist, a national security threat, a former Soviet spy — the Jewish Chronicle’s task was more complicated but far more effective.

The paper’s role was to breathe life into the claim that Corbyn and his supporters were anti-semites, and the paper managed it by maliciously conflating anti-Semitism and the left’s criticisms of Israel as a racist, apartheid state that oppresses Palestinians.

Confess or You’re Guilty

Labour Leader Keir Starmer, at left, in December 2019 with former Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. (Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr)

The Chronicle’s job was to initiate the anti-Semitism libels and lies against Corbyn and his followers that served to feed and rationalize the fears of prominent sections of the Jewish community. Those fears could then be cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities.” And in turn the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be attributed to its rampant anti-Semitism.

It culminated in the McCarthyite claim — now being enforced by Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer — that to deny Labour has some kind of special anti-Semitism problem, separate from that found more generally in British society, is itself proof of anti-Semitism. Once one is accused of anti-Semitism, as the Labour left endlessly is, one is guilty by definition — the choice is either to confess to anti-Semitism or be proven an anti-Semite by denying the accusation.

Like a victim caught in quicksand, the more vigorously the Labour left has rejected claims that the party is riddled with anti-Semitism the more it has sunk into the mire created by The Jewish Chronicle and others.

It is therefore hardly surprising that so many victims of the Chronicle’s libels and code violations are Corbyn supporters targeted in the anti-Semitism witch-hunt. Without these deceptions, the anti-Semitism claims against the Labour Party would have looked even more preposterous than they did to anyone familiar with the evidence.

False Accusations

For those interested, here are those four recent libel cases that went against the Chronicle:

September 2019: “The Jewish Chronicle has paid out £50,000 in libel damages to a UK charity [Interpal] that provides aid to Palestinians after wrongly linking it to terrorism.”

February 2020: “The libel settlement comes after a UK press regulator in December ruled that the paper’s four articles about [Labour activist Audrey] White had been ‘significantly misleading’ and that the paper had engaged in ‘unacceptable’ obstruction of their investigation.”

October 2020: “Nada al Sanjari, a school teacher and Labour councillor, was the subject of a number of articles published by the newspaper in 2019 that claimed she was one of several Momentum activists responsible for inviting another activist who the Jewish Chronicle characterised as anti-Semitic to a Labour Party event.”

July 2021: “The publication falsely accused [Marc] Wadsworth, in an article on its website in March, of being part of a group of current and ex-Labour members targeting Jewish activists in the party.”

It is not hard to spot the theme of all these smears, and many others, which suggest that those in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli oppression, including Jews, are anti-Semites or guilty of supporting terrorism.

Saved from Liquidation

Remember, the 28 IPSO code violations — media euphemism for fabrications and deceptions — are only the tip of the iceberg. It is almost certain that many of those maligned by the Chronicle did not have the time, energy or resources to pursue the weekly paper either through the pointless IPSO “regulation” process or through extremely costly law courts.

And remember too that IPSO found against the Chronicle for breaching its code at least 28 times, even though that code was designed to give IPSO’s member publications every possible benefit of the doubt. IPSO has no incentive to highlight its members’ failings, especially when it was set up to provide the government with a pretext for not creating a truly independent regulatory body.

“It is almost certain that many of those maligned by the Chronicle did not have the time, energy or resources to pursue the weekly paper.”

The reality is that the 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it has remodelled itself, would have gone out of business some time ago had it not been twice saved from liquidation by powerful, establishment figures.

It avoided closure in 2019 after it was bailed out by “community-minded individuals, families and charitable trusts” following massive losses. The identities of those donors were not disclosed.

At the time Stephen Pollard highlighted his paper’s crucial role: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the anti-Semitism in the Labour party and elsewhere.”

Consortium of Investors

Then only a year later the Chronicle had to be rescued again, this time by a shadowy consortium of investors who promised to pump in millions to keep the paper afloat and reimburse those who had donated the previous year.

Why these financiers appear so committed to a paper with proven systematic editorial failings, and which continues to be headed by the same editor who has overseen those serious failings for years, was underscored at the time by Alan Jacobs, the paper’s departing chairman.

He observed that the donors who bailed out the paper in 2019 “can be proud that their combined generosity allowed the JC to survive long enough to help to see off Jeremy Corbyn and friends, one of the greatest threats to face British Jewry in the JC’s existence.”

Corbyn had lost the general election to a Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson later that same year.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn during IYV debate. (Screenshot)

The public face of last year’s consortium was Sir Robbie Gibb, a former BBC executive and a longtime ally of figures on the Conservative right. He served as Theresa May’s spin doctor when she was prime minister. He was also an early adviser to GB News, a recent attempt to replicate the overtly rightwing Fox News channel in the UK.

Other visible consortium members are associated with the anti-Semitism campaign against Corbyn. They include former rightwing Labour MP John Woodcock, who cited anti-Semitism as his reason for quitting the party after it had begun investigating him for sending inappropriate messages to a female staff member.

Another is Jonathan Sacerdoti, a regular “analyst” on the BBC, ITV and Ch4 who previously served as a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a lobby group set up back in 2014 specifically to discredit critics of Israel as antisemites.

And then there is John Ware, a former Sun journalist turned BBC reporter who fronted probably the single most damaging program on Corbyn. An hour-long Panorama “special” accusing Labour of anti-Semitism was deeply flawed, misleading and failed to acknowledge that several unnamed figures it interviewed were also pro-Israel lobbyists.

It would probably be unwise for me to say more about Ware or his publicly stated views on Muslims, shared by The Jewish Chronicle, because he has recently become litigious. He apparently has deep pockets, helping to fund both the rescue of the Chronicle and law suits against critics.

Exceptional Indulgence

But the exceptional indulgence of The Jewish Chronicle, both by IPSO and prominent figures in broadcasting, and the paper’s continuing credibility as a source of news for the wider corporate media, indicates how the anti-Semitism narrative about Labour served, and continues to serve, the British establishment.

Represented politically by the Conservative Party and the Labour right, that establishment was able to reassert its cozy parliamentary duopoly by ousting any meaningful challenge from the Labour left. With Corbyn gone, the threat of real politics has disappeared. We are back to one-party, corporate rule under the guise of two parties.

“The anti-Semitism narrative about Labour served, and continues to serve, the British establishment.”

Which is why IPSO cannot take any meaningful action against The Jewish Chronicle. To do so would pull the rug from under the anti-Semitism narrative that destroyed Corbyn and is now being used by his successor, Starmer, to purge Labour of the remnants of the left and to distance the party as far as possible from any lingering signs of Palestinian solidarity.

Exposure of The Jewish Chronicle as an editorial wrecking ball aimed at the left would show just how much the paper and the anti-Semitism narrative it bolstered were key to the Conservative party’s successful smearing of Corbyn that helped to keep him out of No. 10. It would highlight the enduring collusion between the corporate media and the political elite.

And it would indicate that corporate media is not really an exercise in capitalist, free-market economics, where profitable outlets drive out those that are unpopular. Rather loss-making corporate media such as The Jewish Chronicle are a price the establishment is only too happy to bear as long as those publications fulfil a more important purpose: ensuring that the political and economic climate remains favorable to the ruling class.

The Jewish Chronicle has played its part in destroying Corbyn and the left. Now it will continue that role by policing the public discourse and ensuring that no one like Corbyn ever gets near power again. Those libel payouts were a small price to pay.

How Owen Jones justifies Labour’s purge of socialists

Asa Winstanley

The Electronic Intifada

3 September 2021



https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-owen-jones-justifies-labours-purge-socialists/33831




Guardian columnist and YouTuber Owen Jones has apologized for a tweet supporting “Britain’s greatest living filmmaker” Ken Loach, who was expelled from the Labour Party last month.

Backtracking from his support, Jones tweeted last week that he wanted to “reflect” on “the justifiable distress” caused “to Jewish people” by a play Loach directed three decades ago.

I “therefore apologize for the tone of my tweet,” Jones wrote.

The 1987 production, called Perdition, was critical of the role the Zionist movement played during the Holocaust.

Zionism is Israel’s official racist and colonial ideology that is used to justify the expulsion of indigenous Palestinians and the seizure of their land.

As usual, Jones wants to have his cake and eat it.

He prefaced his condemnation of Loach with the claim that he did not support the Labour Party’s “action” against the director.

Loach’s television and cinema work, over more than six decades, has focused particularly on the lives of working class people, and has also included anti-war and anti-colonial themes.

The Palme d’Or winner is popular among the same left-wing audience that Jones relies on to buy his books and watch his videos.

A veteran British socialist, Loach has long been an advocate of Palestinian liberation.

Loach revealed his ejection from Labour on 14 August.


Loach’s expulsion is part of the McCarthyite purge of socialists and Palestine solidarity activists by right-wing party leader Keir Starmer and his acolytes,



According to right-wing party news website LabourList, Loach was expelled due to his support for Labour Against the Witchhunt, one of several left-wing groups recently banned by the party.

This is all a continuation of the right-wing campaign that single-mindedly aimed to oust Jeremy Corbyn after the veteran left-wing lawmaker was elected party leader in 2015.

The witch hunt has targeted Corbyn supporters with disciplinary measures including suspensions and expulsions. They have often been wrongly accused of “anti-Semitism” – almost always a code word for supporting Palestinian rights.

Corbyn, who resigned as leader in 2019, was himself purged the following year.

Jones’ claim that he did not support the expulsion of Loach is belied by one of his tweets from July.

Jones tweeted that he agreed with a supposedly left-wing member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, who had just voted for the “auto-expulsion” of party members associated with banned left-wing groups, including Labour Against the Witchhunt.



Pro-Israel lobby group the Jewish Labour Movement told LabourList that it supported Loach’s expulsion.



Chair Mike Katz responded that Starmer had “shown strong leadership in tackling anti-Semitism.”

Jones happily promoted Israel lobby talking points at a Jewish Labour Movement event in 2017.

Ahead of the national executive’s July vote banning the left-wing groups, LabourList reported that getting rid of Loach was one of the main motivations for including Labour Against the Witchhunt in the ban.

Loach is arguably the most high-profile supporter of the group.

So Jones’ claim not to support Loach’s expulsion when that was the inevitable and predictable result of the ban on Labour Against the Witchhunt – which Jones supported – is disingenuous or downright dishonest.
“Distressing to Jewish people”

Jones also implies that Loach is not a real socialist, tweeting: “Why would someone on the left want to make this play?”


But the play, Perdition, by late socialist scriptwriter Jim Allen, was loosely based on a real event – a fact Jones ignores.



Jones claimed the play was “incredibly distressing to Jewish people.”

But what he really meant was that the play caused distress to supporters of Israel.

Ahead of its 1987 debut at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Perdition was attacked by the Israel lobby.

Later that year protests against a reading of the play were called by the Union of Jewish Students – a pro-Israel group which at least in recent years has been funded by the Israeli government.

A day before its opening, the play was canceled. Loach and Allen correctly blamed the Israel lobby and said they were being censored.

The play was eventually staged in 1999. Once more, the Union of Jewish Students protested.

“The charge of anti-Semitism is the time-honored way to deflect anti-Zionist arguments,” Loach said in a 2004 letter to The Guardian.
“Collaboration with the Nazis”

What was all the fuss about? In order to answer that, it is necessary to relate a well-documented, but little-known episode.

Perdition was based on the 1954 Gruenwald-Kasztner trial in Israel.

Malchiel Gruenwald – a refugee from Hungary who lost 50 relatives to the Nazi Holocaust – was sued for writing a pamphlet accusing Labor Zionist functionary Rezső Kasztner of “collaboration with the Nazis” back in their native country.

A press spokesperson for an Israeli ministry, Kasztner was a member of the ruling Mapai party, the forerunner of Israel’s present-day Labor Party.

Mapai leaders were hoping to get Kasztner into the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. He was a Mapai candidate for the first two Knesset elections, and initially for the third, before he was removed as an embarrassment.

Rezső Kasztner speaking on Israeli state radio. Kasztner’s cooperation with Nazi war criminals in his native Hungary caused a national scandal after his actions came under the microscope during a 1954 libel trial in Israel. (Wikimedia Commons)

Party leaders had a degree of loyalty to Kasztner, as he had been their man in Hungary during the war. If Kasztner was a collaborator, so were they, they reasoned. Gruenwald’s accusations could not be allowed to stand.

According to a 1950 Israeli law, if Kasztner was a Nazi collaborator, he could even have faced the death penalty. The government resolved to sue Gruenwald for libel. They would come to regret it.

After months of hearings, the court found Gruenwald had not defamed Kasztner and decided that the Mapai man had indeed collaborated. Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil,” the judge famously ruled.

Worse still for the Labor Zionists, the hearings became a trial of Kasztner in the court of public opinion – and by extension a trial of them. The affair still resonates in Israel decades later.

The trial exposed a gruesome history of Nazi-Zionist cooperation which Israeli leaders would have preferred remain buried.
Deadly lies

After the March 1944 German invasion of Hungary, Kasztner, a local member of the Zionist leadership, worked directly with the Nazis.

He agreed to help maintain calm in the Hungarian Jewish community, particularly the 20,000 Jews of Kasztner’s native town of Kluj. The Nazis wanted to ensure there was no repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in Poland the year prior.

The Jews of Kluj were concentrated in a ghetto prior to deportation, and were told a tale about “Kenyermeze,” a work camp in a German-occupied area where they would supposedly be sent and kept alive.

But this was a deadly lie: The trains were actually taking people to Auschwitz, the death camp in occupied Poland, where the Nazis murdered 12,000 Hungarian Jews per day.

Almost half a million Hungarian Jews were ultimately exterminated.

To ensure there was no rebellion, Kasztner’s men told the Jewish community that they would be safe. Fake postcards and letters from “Kenyermeze” were distributed or read by his group assuring the Jews in Kluj that all was well. Thinking they were being deported to labor camps, Jews in Hungary mostly did not resist.

As Ben Hecht writes in Perfidy, his 1961 book on the affair, the Jews of Kluj were guarded in their ghetto by fewer than two dozen Nazi and Hungarian guards. They could have easily overcome them and escaped to safety across the Romanian border, just three miles away, had Kasztner told them what fate he knew really awaited them.

But Kasztner had personally negotiated a deal with senior Hitler aide and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. Kasztner knew where the “resettlement” trains were actually headed, but remained silent.
“A success for Zionism”

In exchange for deceiving his community, the Nazis agreed to let Kasztner select a group – mostly fellow Zionists, friends and family – who would be permitted to escape Hungary on a train to Switzerland. The idea was that the elite group would join the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine.

Zionists and Nazis both agreed on the goal of removing European Jews from Europe.

Eichmann was captured in Argentina in 1960 by Mossad agents and brought back to Israel, where he would be tried and executed in 1962.

Speaking to a pro-Nazi Dutch journalist, while still at large in 1955, Eichmann himself fondly recalled working with Kasztner. He described the Nazi-Zionist meeting of minds in chillingly frank terms.

According to Eichmann, Kasztner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to go to Palestine.

“You can have the others,” Eichmann recalled Kasztner saying, “but let me have this group here.”

The Nazi also asserted that “there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders.”

“I believe that Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal,” Eichmann said. “He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work.”

“Because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his group escape,” Eichmann explained.

Judge Benjamin Halevy took nine months to write his ruling, concluding on 21 June 1955 that “the Nazis’ patronage of Kasztner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews.”

He said that Kasztner “considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism.”
“How could the judge dare!”

The Israeli press extensively covered the story and the affair dominated the 1955 Knesset elections. The government immediately appealed to the high court. There were calls in the Knesset and press to have Kasztner tried under the Nazi collaborators law.

“A nightmare, a horror,” Prime Minister Moshe Sharett wrote in his diary. “How could the judge dare!”

Kasztner had become a liability. He was leaking inconvenient facts like a damaged bucket.

Israel’s second prime minister Moshe Sharett, who called the verdict “a nightmare.” (Wikimedia Commons)

If the appeal had not gone the government’s way, calls to try Kasztner as a Nazi collaborator would have been much harder to resist.

But before he could take the stand again, Kasztner was silenced forever.

In March 1957, he was assassinated outside his home. The three killers were already known to the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, and immediately arrested. One of them, Zeev Eckstein, confessed to having been a Shin Bet agent prior to the killing.

During and after the Gruenwald trial, Kasztner was given police protection. Shortly before his assassination, this was lifted. There were allegations that the Israeli security establishment had made a decision to murder Kasztner to shut him up.

The killers were sentenced to life in prison – yet only five years later they were released. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had personally intervened to help secure their freedom.

The high court overturned most of the libel trial verdict. The judges did not dispute the facts that emerged in the trial about what Kasztner had done, but only Judge Halevy’s legal interpretation of what they amounted to. In some instances the judges even justified his actions.

What did Kasztner have left to tell? It’s likely that some secrets died with him.

Notably, his collaboration with Nazi war criminals did not end with the war.

After the Holocaust he traveled to Germany and testified at Nuremberg in defense of several Nazis involved in the extermination of Jews, such as SS officer Kurt Becher. As a result, Becher escaped the noose and eventually became one of West Germany’s richest industrialists.

Kasztner had originally been brought to Nuremberg to testify against Nazi war criminals, as detailed in Akiva Orr’s 1994 book Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises.

But according to one American prosecutor, “Kasztner roamed the Nazi prison camp for Nazi officers searching for those he could help by testimony or intervention on their behalf. In the end we were very glad when he left.”
Jones’ double game

While Kasztner’s behavior may have been particularly egregious, it came within the context of broader Zionist-Nazi cooperation, as both movements shared the goal of removing Jews from Europe.

Kasztner’s affidavit to the Nuremberg tribunal on behalf of the Nazi Kurt Becher stated that it was given “not only in my name, but also on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress” – two of the leading bodies of the Zionist movement at the time.

In the appeal of the Gruenwald verdict, Israel’s attorney general admitted as much.

“Kasztner did nothing more and nothing less than was done by us,” he stated. “It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of the many in arranging the immigration to Palestine.”

What do we learn from all this?

Owen Jones is often referred to on the British left as a weather vane, because he changes his positions so often.

In 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was popular, Jones supported his leadership.

But at the first test in 2016, when there was an attempted coup by Labour MPs and the Israel lobby, Jones turned against him, writing that he was in “despair” about Labour under Corbyn.

Soon before the June 2017 election, Jones went further and explicitly called for Corbyn to quit.

After Corbyn’s Labour came within a few thousand votes of winning that election, depriving the ruling Conservative Party of its majority and ultimately forcing Prime Minister Theresa May to step down, Jones flip-flopped once again, writing that he had made a mistake.

Unchastened, Jones has played a similar double game ever since. He has long fueled the Labour witch hunt over “anti-Semitism,” endorsing calls for socialists like Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker and this author to be suspended or expelled.

Now, with Loach expelled, Jones again wants it both ways. He wants to claim he doesn’t support expulsion, but at the same time he unjustly condemns Loach’s work as “incredibly distressing to Jewish people” – and thus implies there’s merit to the expulsion.

Owen Jones is no true friend to socialists or Palestinians.

Sources
Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Atlanta: On Our Own Authority, 2014), pages 284-291
Ben Hecht, Perfidy, (New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1961)
Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises (London: Pluto Press, 1994), pages 81-116
Tom Segev, The Seventh Million (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pages 255-296, 305-310

Labour reverses ban on Palestine Solidarity Campaign speaker

Asa Winstanley
Activism and BDS Beat


3 September 2021




https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/labour-reverses-ban-palestine-solidarity-campaign-speaker





Labour has apologized for telling its youth wing that it could not speak alongside the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) at the UK party’s annual conference later this month.

Young Labour had been told by a party official “that they could not invite PSC to address one of their events at conference,” the campaign said in a statement on Thursday.

“When pressed for a reason, they were informed that PSC’s positions were ‘controversial,’” the campaign explained.

After discussions with party officials on Wednesday night, PSC and Young Labour were informed there “had been a mistake” and that PSC could be invited after all, “and an apology was given.”
On Tuesday, Young Labour’s chair Jess Barnard posted on Twitter that she had been told by unnamed party officials that “anyone from Palestine Solidarity Campaign will be refused as a speaker, as will Jeremy Corbyn” – a left-wing political activist and the party’s former leader.



The campaign said in its statement on Thursday that it had been “informed by well-placed sources” that a senior party official had cited PSC’s support for the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, BDS.

The official had claimed this “might violate the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.”
“Cloud of suspicion”

Contacted by The Electronic Intifada, PSC declined to name the senior Labour official, citing assurances of confidentiality given to its sources.

The Labour Party did not respond to a request for comment.
The bogus “working definition” of anti-Semitism approved by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 has been used for years now to quash freedom of speech on Palestine.



It is an anti-Palestinian document, because it conflates legitimate criticisms of Israel and its racist ideology, Zionism, on one hand, with anti-Jewish prejudice on the other.

PSC explained that it had not been banned from the conference. Like previous years, it would have a stall at the event and hold a meeting on Palestine.

The group blamed “the Israeli state and its allies” for long-running efforts “to delegitimize the global campaign for Palestinian rights, most particularly by conflating that campaign with anti-Semitism.”

This creates “a cloud of suspicion around raising the cause of Palestine, which leads to a chilling effect,” PSC said.
Young Labour’s Jess Barnard said on Wednesday that her group would be going ahead with an event outside the main conference area. Organizers dubbed it “the event that David Evans and Keir Starmer tried to ban from [the] Labour conference.”



Evans and Starmer are Labour’s general secretary and leader. Both belong to the party’s right.

World Federation of Trade Unions backs Nabisco strikers

https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58736/







By a guest author posted on September 2, 2021

This statement was issued Aug. 25 by the Secretariat of the World Federation of Trade Unions/La Federación Sindical Mundial.

Nabisco workers on strike in Chicago say, “No contract, no snacks!”

The World Federation of Trade Unions, which is the militant voice of 105 million workers in 133 countries around the world, conveys its solidarity to the workers of Nabisco Company in the U.S.A. who are on strike in five locations: NABISCO distribution centers outside Atlanta, as well as in Portland, Ore., Aurora, Colo., Richmond, Va., and Chicago, Ill.

Nabisco workers in all five locations join voices and demand from the Company to stop exporting their jobs to Mexico and to end its demands for contract concessions.

The world class-oriented trade union movement stands by the side of NABISCO workers who fight from Oregon and Colorado to Illinois, Virginia and Georgia against negative changes in their contracts and working conditions. We urge the fulfillment of their just claims and the protection of their working rights.

Sordid source of ‘lab-leak’ accusation – against China

https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58745/




The U.S.-China Solidarity Project has just released an up-to-date, in-depth look at the network of anti-China think tanks responsible for promoting the bogus lab-leak theory that COVID-19 originated in Chinese labs.


“Capitalism on a Ventilator” can be found at these and other online locations: kobo.com/us/en/ebook/capitalism-on-a-ventilator andworld-view-forum.myshopify.com/products/capitalism-on-a-ventilator.

The report, “Chinese and U.S. Activists Say NO to the Biden’s Virus Origin Investigation!” was put together by the editorial team that produced “Capitalism on a Ventilator,” the book comparing COVID responses by capitalist and socialist governments. (kobo.com/us)

In May, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19, including the allegation that the virus came from a laboratory in China. Biden asked the groups to report back to him within 90 days — a deadline that is looming as summer draws to an end.

“That puts the expected release of Biden’s investigation at any day now,” said Siu Hin Lee, an author of the new report and an editor of the book. “Our report provides ammunition for progressive U.S. forces seeking to counter the growing anti-China narrative, a poisonous focus which started in right-wing circles and has since metastasized, gradually garnering mainstream acceptance even among some leftists.”

The new report shows how a network of think tanks including the Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute and the Center for the New American Security has teamed up with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and others — including the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Gordon, who along with Judith Miller in 2002 promoted the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction lie and is now playing a crucial role in demonizing China.

As of the end of August, the U.S. COVID death toll is well over 600,000 in a country of over 333 million. By contrast, the number of COVID deaths in China, a country of 1.4 billion, has remained below 5,000.

The lab-leak theory has gained traction as the Delta variant ravages U.S. schools and communities, while China numbers remain substantially lower — even as the new strain started appearing there.

The report, “Chinese and U.S. Activists Say NO to the Biden’s Virus Origin Investigation!” can be found at tinyurl.com/5ynswr96 and is available for download.

Report from New Orleans: Government does nothing for the poor

https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58750/




By John Catalinotto posted on September 2, 2021




Sept. 1 — Gavrielle Gemma, union and political organizer since the 1970s and now working with the New Orleans-based Workers Voice Socialist Movement, called Workers World to report on the situation there, post-Hurricane Ida. Gemma is now living in a modest single-family home in the Florida neighborhood of New Orleans, part of the Upper Ninth Ward.

“It’s bad,” she said. “Only poor folk stayed once the mayor and governor advised that people evacuate. That means the people left had no choice, no place to go, no money to pay for hotels or motels — assuming they could find a room. If they had made the evacuation mandatory, then the government would be responsible for the welfare of the people who left. But they’re doing nothing.



“The biggest immediate problem is that there is no electricity. The company that provides it — Entergy — says it may be a month before they restore full service. And it is hot, hot, hot, in the ’90s with high humidity. To stay alive in this weather, you need water and a way to get cool. The cooling centers — for people in danger of heat exhaustion — had no food or water.

“Look, we don’t expect miracles. They can’t stop a hurricane. But even if we’re not dying in the flood, they’re letting us starve in the streets. From Day One, someone should have been out,” said Gemma, “telling people what to expect and what to do. Tankers with water and with food could have been going street to street, bringing ready-to-eat food and water to drink, tarps to cover leaks.

“Here it is three days after landfall, and the government only set up three places in the city where you can go for water. Then when you get there, you have to wait in line for hours.

“Not only do we have no power and no food, but there is no gasoline available. There are already long lines of people waiting for gas and for ice. The only people getting by are those few with generators.



“The money to buy one lousy F35 bomber would be enough to get a home generator to every household in the city.

Compound crises: COVID, cutbacks, Ida

“This will give your readers an idea of what the state government is like here,” Gemma added. “The state government rejected the extra COVID-19 federal unemployment insurance of $300 a week for the last two months. This was like robbing $2,400 from people who needed money badly. And you know, no one gets paid sick days here.

“The state is even abandoning New Orleans residents with enough resources to evacuate or relatives to house them. The governor’s message to them is: ‘Don’t come back. We can’t take care of you.’ So even when stores reopen, many people will have no money to buy food. And for every purchase you need cash, no food stamps, no SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

“Already people are being evicted from their homes. It will only get worse after Ida.

“Biden took responsibility for leaving Afghanistan — good that the U.S. got out. He could order federal efforts to deliver aid to New Orleans. In California, giant planes are used in firefighting. He could use cargo planes to deliver aid here.

“Biden’s coming here to see Louisiana post-Ida. The people in my neighborhood are angry as hell that nothing is being done to help. They’re ready to protest.

“On top of the other problems in Louisiana is the surge in COVID-19 cases. Jamming people into a shelter to solve one problem will cause another. It’s criminal how the state authorities have handled the pandemic here.

“We’ll turn these words into action. The Workers Voice Socialist Movement will mobilize to fight for demands to help the working class of New Orleans. I’ll be part of that.”

Sotomayor Rips Right-Wing Justices as Supreme Court Effectively Overturns Roe v. Wade

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/02/sotomayor-rips-right-wing-justices-supreme-court-effectively-overturns-roe-v-wade



In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed conservative justices for opting to "bury their heads in the sand" when faced with a "flagrantly unconstitutional law."



JAKE JOHNSONSeptember 2, 2021


The conservative U.S. Supreme Court issued an unsigned order in the dead of night Wednesday leaving Texas' draconian abortion ban in place, a move that effectively overturns Roe v. Wade and imperils reproductive rights across much of the United States.

The high court's decision—against which Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and John Roberts dissented—lets stand the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, an unprecedented law that deputizes private individuals to sue anyone who performs an abortion or "aids and abets" one after around six weeks of a pregnancy.

In her blistering dissent (pdf) against the 5-4 decision, Sotomayor condemned the Supreme Court's most conservative justices for opting to "bury their heads in the sand" when faced with a "flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny."The law's empowerment of private citizens rather than state officials to enforce the abortion ban was designed to make the new restrictions difficult to challenge in court. Plaintiffs who win their lawsuits against abortion providers and others—potentially including those who drive a person to a clinic to obtain the procedure—are entitled to $10,000 and the recovery of their legal fees, a reward that reproductive rights advocates have characterized as a bounty.

The Texas law, Sotomayor noted, "equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman's last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability."

"The act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents... The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law," Sotomayor continued. "Taken together, the act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this court's precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas."

Turning her attention to the conservative justices who refused to block the law—Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas—Sotomayor wrote that "the court has rewarded the state's effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court's precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state's own creation."

"The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law," Sotomayor added.

Legal analysts and advocates warned that the high court's ruling all but spells the end for Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 decision that established abortion as a constitutional right—a right that has long been in the crosshairs of the conservative movement.

"We can stop debating about whether the court overturned Roe v. Wade. They did. So what if it’s on a technicality? It's not a technicality to the people forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will," wrote Jessica Mason Pieklo, executive editor of Rewire News Group. "In the immediate, it means that Roe is dead letter law in Texas. And probably Mississippi and Louisiana—the other states in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And it means more bad news is coming."

"But it doesn't mean people stop needing access to abortion," she continued. "Nor does it mean that providers will stop providing that care. After this week though, it is undeniable that the abortion landscape is radically changed—for generations."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 22 states across the U.S. currently have laws that could be used to restrict or gut abortion rights. The research organization notes in its latest round-up that nine states have "unconstitutional post-Roe restrictions that are currently blocked by courts but could be brought back into effect with a court order in Roe's absence."

In Texas, the near-term consequence of the law—known as Senate Bill 8—could be the imminent closure of the massive state's relatively few abortion clinics, many of which cannot withstand the risk of a wave of lawsuits.

"If this was a criminal ban, we’d know what this is and what we can and cannot do," Jessica Rubino, a doctor at Austin Women's Health Center, told the New York Times. "But this ban has civil implications. It requires a lawyer to go to court. It requires lawyers' fees. And then $10,000 if we don't win. What happens if everybody is sued, not just me?"

"My staff is nervous," she added. "They've been asking, 'What about our families?'"

Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman's Health, said in a statement earlier Wednesday that "we are heartbroken that this law has not yet been blocked."

"Last night, our waiting rooms were filled with patients and their loved ones, and our staff were pouring their hearts out trying to help every person they could up until 11:59 pm—the minute before S.B. 8 went into effect," said Hagstrom Miller. "But today, we will be forced to turn away most Texans seeking an abortion. Anti-abortion politicians in Texas can no longer hide behind the guise of health or safety—this is an abortion ban, plain and simple. It robs Texans of their ability to make decisions about their health and their futures. We have been here before, and we'll continue serving our patients however we legally can and fighting for their right to safe, compassionate abortion care."

With fundamental reproductive rights under assault from the courts and Republican-led states, Democratic members of Congress are facing growing pressure to respond with legislative action.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus co-chairs Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Congress must "immediately take action to enshrine the right to access abortion into federal law."

"The House should immediately pass the Women’s Health Protection Act... to ensure that states like Texas cannot ban this critical health service, and we urge the Senate to do whatever is necessary to send it to the president's desk," the lawmakers said. "Congress must also continue to strike down other restrictions on access to abortion in federal law, including bans on insurance coverage like the Hyde Amendment."

The three House Democrats also urged the Biden administration to uphold its "commitment to protecting the right to abortion."

"We call on Attorney General Garland to explore whatever steps the Department of Justice can take to respond to this blatant violation of Texans' constitutional rights," they said. "Everyone—no matter their income, where they live, or how they're insured—has the right to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives, and we are committed to promoting policies that protect the reproductive freedom of all people."