Jonathan Cook dissects the investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the U.K. Labour Party.
by Jonathan Cook
Part 5 - Scouring Social Media
But the report misleads not only in its evasion and ambiguity. It does so more overtly in its seemingly desperate effort to find examples of Labour Party “agents” who were responsible for the “problem” of anti-Semitism.
It is worth pondering what it would have looked like had the commission admitted it was unable to find anyone to hold to account for anti-Semitism in Labour. That would have risked blowing a very large hole in the established media narrative indeed.
So, there must have been a great deal of pressure on the commission to find some examples. But extraordinarily — after five years of relentless claims of “institutional anti-Semitism” in Labour, and of organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement scouring through Labour members’ social media accounts — the commission is able to muster sufficient evidence against only two individuals.
Two!
Both are found responsible for “unlawful harassment” of Jewish people.
In those circumstances, therefore, it is important to critically examine just what evidence exists that these two individuals exhibited anti-Semitic attitudes or harassed Jews. Presumably, this pair’s behaviour was so egregious, their anti-Semitism so unmistakable, that the commission felt it had no choice but to single them out and hold the party responsible for failing to punish them summarily (without, of course, exhibiting at the same time any “political interference”).
I won’t test readers’ patience by examining both examples. In any case, I have dealt with one of them, Ken Livingstone, London’s former mayor, at length in previous blog posts.
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