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A short thread with initial critical thoughts on #BBCPanorama’s 10 July ‘Is Labour antisemitic?’ ‘investigation’ 1/10
#BBCPanorama wasn’t an ‘investigation’. It was the case for the prosecution. Very many Jewish members of @UKLabour have vastly different and positive experience of membership from those interviewed. Shouldn’t a fair investigation have interviewed some of them too? 2/10
Polls show antisemitism is a much contested and misunderstood term among Jews and the public. There’s bitter division over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic #BBCPanorama didn’t reflect this essential fact which is central to @UKLabour’s struggle to deal with the a/s issue 3/10
Only 2 men portrayed as ‘experts’ on #antisemitism were interviewed. I don’t recall that we were ever informed about their institutional affiliations and credentials. Why the lack of transparency? 4/10
The lion’s share went to @daverich1, Director of Comms for the Community Security Trust, the Jewish establishment’s defence body. Quite right to present an ‘official’ Jewish view. But @CST_UK sees BDS and anti-Zionism as antisemitic and Rich attacks left-wing Jews on Twitter 5/10
The other ‘expert’ Alan Johnson works for BICOM @BritainIsrael, the main Israel lobby organization in UK. Given the programme exposed conflation of Jews and Israel as antisemitic, why put up an Israel lobbyist who has already damned @UKLabour as institutionally antisemitic? 6/10
Convincing evidence of leader’s office interference was absent. The Seamus Milne ‘smoking gun’ email suggesting party was ‘muddling up political disputes with racism’ and a ‘review’ was needed, was malicious selective quotation. This was not an ‘instruction’. 7/10
Full Milne sentence reads: ‘But if we’re more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for #antisemitism, something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism’. This is legitimate, fair, just and true. 8/10
Have sympathy for painful testimony of ‘whistleblowers’ but it’s not the whole truth. Under Gen Sec McNicol the complaints procedure was chaotic and dysfunctional. New Gen Sec @JennieGenSec reformed it, producing incontestable stats proving very limited scale of the problem 9/10
A serious, objective and fair context-based investigation of @UKLabour and the antisemitism issue may be a legitimate project. This wasn’t it, but rather an egregious betrayal of the values of public service broadcasting, shamefully fuelling a sickening moral panic. 10
