, 13 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
A great thing about social media is how it enables us to reach out and help people we've never even met. Jeff Bowler of Mansfield CLP spent many fruitless months trying to find "genuine antisemitism" in the Labour Party, so I was pleased to be able to assist him in his quest. /1
Many of Jeff's friends and comrades shared his frustration at the lack of evidence of antisemitic conduct and felt that those raising the issue conflated criticism of Israel with a/s. It was "bullshit powers of the first order" and "snide manipulation", reckoned the comrade. /2
I was sure that Jeff Bowler would be delighted to receive the evidence he had sought - especially as it turned out to be so close to hand. I therefore showed him antisemitic articles about "Jewish supremacy" that a Labour member had shared from neo-Nazi websites. /3
Of course the Labour member who'd posted the articles was Jeff Bowler himself. He had also recommended pieces, again from far-right sites, about Israel "colonising" the USA and "Israel stooges freak[ing] out" over Jenny Tongue's insensitive comments on the Pittsburgh killings. /4
Another example from comrade Bowler's own timeline was this charming account of Jews supposedly stealing Syrian children in order to harvest their organs for financial gain. He had shared it from a website called 'Jew World Order'. /5
A number of Jeff Bowler's Facebook friends joined the thread at this point and expressed their horror at the racist posts, which they hadn't seen before, and asked him for an explanation. To which the comrade said he'd "made the fatal error of not reading through the posts". /6
But there were plenty of clues in the article titles, whose meaning hadn't been obscure, and the TL;DR excuse could hardly be applied to the antisemitic memes that Jeff Bowler had shared, like this one about Benjamin Netanyahu using Jewish "deception, lies, craft and magic". /7
Bowler's responses became somewhat belligerent. It was his timeline and he could post whatever he chose. That's true. But it could be damaging to the Labour Party given his frequent declarations of membership. As a Labour activist, I don't want such views expressed in my name. /8
I decided therefore to make an official complaint about Jeff Bowler's antisemitic conduct and emailed the Labour Party complaints team (and @CST_UK) with the evidence I had discovered. /9
Sadly, comrade Bowler appears to have learned little from the challenge, even though his CLP (Mansfield) is now aware of the situation. After our encounter, he continued to post racist material, including pieces from the far-right, Islamophobic 'Voice of Europe' website. /10
I would probably have left the matter there had Jeff Bowler not intervened in subsequent exchanges where people were being challenged for posting antisemitic material. In some instances such a conversation suffices. But Jeff's contributions have been far from positive. /End
Among the screenshots included in my introductory tweet was this one of Jeff Bowler sharing a Facebook post by his friend Gary Jakings demanding that evidence of antisemitism be produced, a challenge he too posed regularly. Check out Gary's post about Tony Blair's "shady secret".
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