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1/ It looks like some supporters of Middlesbrough Independent Councillors Association didn't the memo. Lee Garvey, the newly elected but already disgraced vice-chair of the Council, has apologised for a series of antisemitic comments he made on Facebook between 2015 and 2018. 
2/ But MICA supporters are doubling down and defending Cllr Garvey's remarks. Amy reckons we're "ruled and manipulated" by Zionists, Rick asserts "antisemitism isn't racism", Tara cites the Rothschilds' "repeated actions through history" and Pervaz claims he speaks for us all.
3/ Richard describes it as a "typical Zionist smear campaign against [Lee Garvey] because he has backed Palestine rallies". Hmm, not sure about that, Rick, given the person who called him out has supported many too. Michael points out that "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism".
4/ Criticism of Israel isn't a great alibi, though, as only two of the dozen antisemitic posts by Lee Garvey that have been highlighted mention Israeli government policies towards Palestinian Arabs. All the rest were tropes about Jews' supposed financial and political power.
5/ Back to Michael Hanif's comment about anti-Zionism not being antisemitism, it's actually quite difficult to find anything he does regard as antisemitic. I first encountered Michael a year ago disputing that antisemitism was a prejudice against Jews rather than "all Semites".
6/ Michael claimed the word 'antisemitic' had been "hijacked" to produce the specifically anti-Jewish definition. Apparently it was "a Zionist ploy being fallen for by many". This will be a familiar piece of nonsense to anyone who has debated these issues on social media.
7/ In fact, the term 'antisemitism' was popularised in the 1870s by Wilhelm Marr and aimed specifically at Jews. Marr founded the League of Antisemites to campaign against German's Jewish minority. Apparently he had a change of heart later in life but the damage had been done.
8/ But Michael Hanif's views on antisemitism go deeper than a mere misunderstanding of the terminology. He's also a Holocaust denier. He denies being a denier (they usually do) because he accepts that "hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews lost their lives to the Nazis".
9/ See, Michael doesn't accept that six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime. He thinks it's a lie because "the winner writes the history books" and that many of the dead bodies we see in footage of the WW2 death camps were Germans not Jewish.
10/ Michael Hanif claims that "Israel has killed more Palestinians than Hitler killed Jews" and he believes that Zionism has much in common with Nazi ideology, as several articles he has shared purport to prove.
11/ Now, I'm not saying Lee Garvey has engaged in Holocaust denial. But I would argue that the people who've spoken out in support of his Rothschild conspiracy theories and gone on about "typical Zionist smear campaigns" need to think about where such racist nonsense can lead.
12/ Antisemitic conspiracy theories are not just an innocent eccentricity.
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