by
Jonathan Cook
Part
4 - ‘Too apologetic’
Shortly
before he found himself formally shunned by media commentators and
his own parliamentary party, Williamson twice confirmed his guilt to
the inquisitors.
First,
he dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested
that some of those being hounded out of Labour may not in fact be
witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a
Labour “anti-semitism crisis”, he argued that the party had been
“too apologetic” in dealing with the bad-faith efforts of those
seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party.
In other
words, Williamson suggested that Labour ought to be more proactively
promoting the abundant evidence that it was indeed dealing with what
he called the “scourge of anti-semitism”, and thereby demonstrate
to the British public that Labour wasn’t “institutionally
anti-semitic”. Labour members, he was pointing out, ought not to
have to keep quiet as they were being endlessly slandered as
anti-semites.
As
Jewish Voice for Labour, a Jewish group supportive of Corbyn,
noted: “The flood of exaggerated claims of antisemitism make it
harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The
credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less
credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to
account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around
the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing
attention to.”
As with
all inquisitions, however, the witchfinders were not interested in
what Williamson actually said, but in the threat he posed to the
narrative they have created to destroy their enemy, Corbynism, and
reassert their own power.
So his
words were ripped from their context and presented as proof that he
did indeed support witches.
He was
denounced for saying what he had not: that Labour should not
apologise for its anti-semitism. In this dishonest reformulation of
Williamson’s statement, the witchfinders claimed to show that he
had supported anti-semitism, that he consorted with witches.
Source:
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