The latest [pro-Israellobby] assult on Corbyn

21 Jul 2018

The latest assult on Corbyn

JVL introduction

Asa Winstanley of Lobby Watch and The Electronic Intifada provides an overview of recent developments in the row over antisemitism and the Labour Party

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A former minister under Tony Blair, Labour lawmaker Margaret Hodge is accused of attacking Jeremy Corbyn as a “fucking anti-Semite and racist.” (Chris Boland/Flickr)

New assault on Corbyn aims to ban criticism of Israel in Labour

Asa Winstanley Lobby Watch
20 July 2018

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A leading pro-Israel lawmaker is being investigated by the Labour Party for allegedly slandering Jeremy Corbyn as a “fucking anti-Semite,” The Electronic Intifada can reveal.

A Labour source said on Friday that following receipt of a third party complaint, a notice of investigation into “alleged abusive behavior” has been sent to Margaret Hodge.

But the source said that Hodge would not be suspended during the investigation.

Margaret Hodge’s office did not answer a call, and she did not immediately reply to emails requesting comment.

The news came as the Parliamentary Labour Party is once again in a state of near civil war over the manufactured “anti-Semitism crisis”this week.

Hodge, a former minister under Tony Blair, had on Tuesday confronted Labour leader Corbyn, reportedly attacking him as “a fucking anti-Semite and racist.”

Writing in The Guardian on Wednesday, Hodge confirmed she had “confronted” Corbyn, but did not repeat the expletives attributed to her by a fellow lawmaker.

She did, however, claim that Corbyn “is now perceived by many as an anti-Semite.”

Corbyn’s spokespeople responded that “action will be taken” against Hodge, who has reportedly violated Labour rules on acceptable behavior.

Hodge’s attack was prompted by a new Labour code of conductagainst anti-Semitism, which was formally adopted by the party’s ruling national executive on Tuesday.

While the new rules adopt large parts of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial definition of anti-Semitism, it removed one clause which would have barred criticism of Israel’s racist policies and Zionist state ideology.

The IHRA document includes “claiming that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor” as an example of anti-Semitism.

This could be used to ban criticism of a host of Israeli policies such as barring the return of Palestinian refugees solely because they are not Jewish, or the new “nation-state” legislation that has been widely condemned for enshrining elements of apartheid into constitutional law.

Israel lobby groups have mounted a major campaign for governments and institutions around the world to adopt the IHRA definition.

Racists accuse anti-racists of racism

Adoption of the clause barring criticism of Israeli racism into Labour’s rule book would have a serious chilling effect on Palestine solidarity activism by party members.

It is the rejection of this clause which Hodge and other right-wing and pro-Israel Labour lawmakers are up in arms about.

In effect, the party’s pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn lawmakers are arguing that it is racist to – accurately – describe Israel as racist.

Ironically, the furore comes in the same week that the Israeli parliament passed a new basic law formally enshrining Israel as a nation-state for Jews alone, removing Arabic as an official language and encouraging “Jewish settlement” on stolen Palestinian land “as a national value.”

A supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, Hodge was responsible for triggering the failed 2016 coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

Hodge submitted a motion of no-confidence in Corbyn, which led to a leadership contest that Corbyn ultimately won with an increased mandate.

Corbyn’s threat to take action against Hodge for her reported verbal assault was met with fury by the right wing of the Labour Party – who backed Hodge’s attack on their own leader.

Israel lobby groups have also piled in, with the Jewish Labour Movement offering Hodge “full solidarity.”

The JLM acts in close alliance with the state of Israel and is led by a former Israeli embassy officer. Its director has privately admitted to working closely with an exposed Israeli embassy spy.

JLM has been at the forefront of attempts to portray the Labour Party under Corbyn as a hive of anti-Semitism.

JLM officer and former local councillor Adam Langleben wrote in The Times of Israel this week that Labour’s failure to fully adopt the Israel lobby’s preferred definition of anti-Semitism in its code of conduct meant that his own party was now “institutionally racist.”

Lawmaker Joan Ryan, chair of Labour Friends of Israel, said she was “appalled” by the new code of conduct, claiming it helps those to want to “demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel.”

Ryan’s own conduct however illustrates the dangers of conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. In 2017, an undercover Al Jazeera documentary exposed how Ryan fabricated allegations of anti-Semitism against a party member who had questioned Labour Friends of Israel’s position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

On Thursday, Tony Blair weighed in, telling the BBC’s Newsnightprogram that it was a “disastrous move” for Labour not to fully adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

“I’m afraid I can understand the anger of much of the Jewish community and I sympathize with it,” the former prime minister said.

Blair added that it would be “crazy” for the party to proceed with disciplinary action against Hodge.

Sabotage

Over the weekend, a new book by a former Labour staffer exposed details of the lengths to which Labour’s right-wing establishment has tried to sabotage Corbyn from within.

Tom Baldwin, a former director of communications, revealed that during last year’s general election, Labour campaign chiefs secretly refused to run social media adverts designed by Corbyn’s leadership team, which had been aimed at increasing voter registration.

Rather than say no to their party leader, they instead ran the messages as Facebook “targeted” advertising, so that only Corbyn and his inner circle of left-wing activists would see them.

“Labour Party officials became so good at targeting Facebook ads, they were able to deceive Jeremy Corbyn about the kind of campaign they were running,” Baldwin reportedly writes. “If it was there for them, they thought it must be there for everyone. It wasn’t. That’s how targeted ads can work.”

The Labour right and Israel lobby groups have run a sustained campaign of sabotage against Corbyn.

This included undermining the party leader during the 2017 election and suggesting to voters that Labour was not a “credible party of government.”

Corbyn’s response to such open disloyalty has often been characterized by attempts at appeasement that have only served to embolden the attacks.

Racist endeavor

On Monday, a majority of Labour MPs voted against the new code of conduct.

But the lawmakers do not have the final say, with the National Executive Committee responsible for deciding Labour’s rule book. The vote was intended to pressure the NEC to scrap the new code, but it appears not to have worked.

In a letter addressing Labour lawmakers ahead of their Monday meeting, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby defended the new code of conduct,

“The only one of the IHRA examples … that is not quoted or explicitly referenced in our code deals with claims about the state of Israel being a ‘racist endeavor,’” Formby wrote in the letter obtained by The Electronic Intifada.

She explained that the “the wording in the IHRA example is open to different interpretations and runs the risk of prohibiting legitimate criticism of Israel.”

“Palestinians have as much right as any other people to define the discrimination they have experienced as racism, and we cannot uphold one set of rights by infringing another,” Formby added.

Left-wing national executive member Darren Williams wrote on Facebook after the ruling body met on Tuesday that the National Executive Committee had confirmed adoption of the code of conduct but “agreed to reopen discussions with Jewish organizations regarding their concerns.”

In a Facebook discussion, Williams wrote that inclusion of the “racist endeavor” clause would have been “an unacceptable curtailment of legitimate criticism of Israel and it’s to the credit of those who drew up the party’s code of conduct that it was consciously excluded.”

Meanwhile, 40 Jewish organizations from around the world expressed support for Labour’s new code of conduct.

In an open letter, they condemned the IHRA definition as being worded to “intentionally equate legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism, as a means to suppress the former.”

Groups signing onto the statement include Jewish Voice for Peace, the Jewish Socialists Group and Independent Jewish Voices.

Also supporting it is Jewish Voice for Labour.

The left-wing group has cautiously welcomed the new code of conduct, while warning that the IHRA definition “has never had unanimous support” among British Jews, is “badly drafted and confusing” and has been used to prevent criticisms of Israel.

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/the-latest-assult-on-corbyn/

Dark money lurks at the heart of our political crisis

George Monbiot

Democracy is threatened by organisations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs that refuse to reveal who funds them

Wed 18 Jul 2018 05.59 BST

Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

Amere two millennia after Roman politicians paid mobs to riot on their behalf, we are beginning to understand the role of dark money in politics, and its perennial threat to democracy. Dark money is cash whose source is not made public, and which is spent to change political outcomes. 

The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal,unearthed by Carole Cadwalladr, and the mysterious funds channelled through Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party to the leave campaign in England and Scotland have helped to bring the concept to public attention. But these examples hint at a much wider problem. 

Dark money can be seen as the underlying corruption from which our immediate crises emerge: the collapse of public trust in politics, the rise of a demagogic anti-politics, and assaults on the living world, public health and civic society. Democracy is meaningless without transparency.

The techniques now being used to throw elections and referendums were developed by the tobacco industry, and refined by biotechnology, fossil fueland junk food companies. Some of us have spent years exposing the fake grassroots campaigns they established, the false identities and bogus scientific controversies they created, and the way in which media outlets have been played by them. Our warnings went unheeded, while the ultra-rich learned how to buy the political system

The problem is exemplified, in my view, by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). In the latest reshuffle, two ministers with close links to the institute, Dominic Raab and Matthew Hancock, have been promoted to the frontbench, responsible for issues that obsess the IEA: Brexit and the NHS. Raab credits the IEA with supporting him “in waging the war of ideas”. Hancock, in his former role as cabinet office minister, notoriously ruled that charities receiving public funds should not be allowed to lobby the government. His department credited the IEA with the research that prompted the policy. 

This rule, in effect, granted a monopoly on lobbying to groups such as the IEA, which receive their money only from private sources. Hancock has received a total of £32,000 in political donations from the IEA’s chairman, Neil Record.

The IEA has lobbied consistently for a hard Brexit. A report it published on Monday as an alternative to Theresa May’s white paper calls for Brexit to be used to tear down the rules protecting agency workers, to deregulate finance, annul the rules on hazardous chemicals and weaken food labelling laws. Darren Grimes, who was fined by the Electoral Commission on Tuesday for spending offences during the leave campaign, now works as the IEA’s digital manager.

So what is this organisation, and on whose behalf does it speak? If only we knew. It is rated by the accountability group Transparify as “highly opaque”. All that distinguishes organisations such as the IEA from public relations companies such as Burson-Marsteller is that we don’t know who it is working for. The only hard information we have is that, for many years, it has been funded by British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris International. When this funding was exposed, the IEA claimed that its campaigns against tobacco regulation were unrelated to the money it had received. 

Recently, it has been repeatedly dissing the NHS, which it wants to privatise; campaigning against controls on junk food; attacking trade unions; and defending zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships and tax havens. Its staff appear on the BBC promoting these positions, often several times a week. But never do interviewers ask the basic democratic questions: who funds you, and do they have a financial interest in these topics?

The BBC’s editorial guidelines seem clear: “We should make checks to establish the credentials of our contributors and to avoid being ‘hoaxed’.” In my view, the entire IEA is a hoax. As the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has revealed (ironically, on the BBC’s website), when the institute was created, in 1955, one of its founders, Maj Oliver Smedley, wrote to the other, Antony Fisher, urging that it was “imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias. … That is why the first draft [of the institute’s aims] is written in rather cagey terms”.

The two men were clear about its purpose: to become a public relations agency that would change society along the lines advocated by the founder of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek. It should not, Hayek urged them, do any actual thinking, but become a “second-hand dealer in ideas”. The IEA became the template for other neoliberal institutes. It was financed initially from the fortune Fisher made by importing broiler chicken farming into the UK. Curtis credits him with founding 150 such lobby groups around the world.

While dark money has been used to influence elections, the role of groups such as the IEA is to reach much deeper into political life. As its current director, Mark Littlewood, explains, “We want to totally reframe the debate about the proper role of the state and civil society in our country … Our true mission is to change the climate of opinion.”

Astonishingly, the IEA is registered as an educational charity, with the official purpose of helping “the general public/mankind”. As a result it is exempted from the kind of taxes about which it complains so bitterly. Charity Commission rules state that “an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political”. How much more political can you get? In what sense is ripping down public protections and attacking the rights of workers charitable? Surely no organisation should be registered as a charity unless any funds it receives above a certain threshold (say £1,000) are declared.

The Charity Commission announced last week that it has decided to examine the role of the IEA, to see whether it has broken its rules. I don’t hold out much hope. In response to a complaint by Andrew Purkis, a former member of the Charity Commission’s board, the commission’s regulatory compliance department claimed that the IEA provides a “relatively uncontroversial perspective accepted by informed opinion”. If the commission sees hard Brexit, privatising the NHS and defending tax havens as uncontroversial, it makes you wonder what circles its members move in.

I see such organisations as insidious and corrupting. I see them as the means by which money comes to dominate public life without having to declare its hand. I see them as representing everything that has gone wrong with our politics.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/18/dark-money-democracy-political-crisis-institute-economic-affairs

Deir Yassin: The Massacre that Sparked the Nakba

APRIL 12, 2018

Deir Yassin: The Massacre that Sparked the Nakba 

by BRETT WILKINSacebookTwitterGoogle+

April 9 marked the 70th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, in which Jewish militias murdered over 100 Palestinian men, women and children as part of a self-described “cleansing” campaign to expel indigenous Arabs to make way for the nascent Jewish state of Israel. 

One of the key ideological elements of Zionism — the movement for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine — is the premise of what literary theorist Edward Said called “the excluded presence” of the indigenous population of Palestine. From its earliest days, Zionism, which is at its core a settler colonial movement of white, mostly European people usurping Arabs they often viewed as inferior or backwards, propagated the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” 

Such supremacist notions, brimming with messianic self-righteousness and bolstered by European fealty to the Westphalian state system which presumed non-European territories were ripe for colonization, allowed Zionists to justify horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. This, just a few years after Jews had suffered one of the worst episodes of genocide in human history, and even more recently, after the international community had condemned Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg for many of the same atrocities Jews were now committing in pursuit of their own lebensraum in Palestine.

The trouble with Zionism is that is presumes universal belief in, or at least acceptance of, the deity and prophecy of the Old Testament, which according to the sacred mythology, promised the Jews, “God’s Chosen People,” all of Palestine. The Arabs of Palestine, who comprised 90 percent or more of the population there for centuries preceding Zionist colonization, certainly did not believe nor accept this. 

Nor did the British, who ruled Palestine from 1923 until Jewish terrorism drove them out in 1947 and who had, after originally authorizing in the Balfour Declaration a homeland for the Jewish people within Palestine, limited Jewish immigration in 1939 after having found the colonists had violated the declaration’s provision that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” There is no way to avoid prejudicing civil and religious rights under settler-colonialism, especially the Jewish supremacist settler-colonialism that is Zionism. 

Thus there were two major obstacles to achieving the Zionist endgame of an independent Jewish state of Israel encompassing all of Palestine: the British and, of course, the Palestinians themselves. The British were dispatched via a prolonged wave of assassinations, terror bombings and other attacks, often planned and carried out by men who would later become prime ministers and other leaders of Israel. The Palestinians — a people who, as Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion presciently warned would “not tire easily” in the face of “usurpation of its land” — proved much tougher to erase. 

There was, however, much erasing to do. As Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, had declared: 

“It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country… There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer them all… we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.” 

To that end, Ben-Gurion and his inner circle devised Plan Dalet, the “principle objective” of which was, according to a directive to Jewish militia troops, “the destruction of Arab villages… and the eviction of the villagers.” 

On April 8, 1948, the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin was prosperous, expanding and, despite rapidly deteriorating relations between Palestine’s Arabs and Jews as all-out war neared, at peace with its Jewish neighbors. Limestone mining was the main source of employment for Deir Yassin’s 600 or so residents, who traded widely with Jews and supplied markets in Jerusalem, five kilometers (3.1 miles) to the east. The Jewish village of Givat Shaul stood between Deir Yassin and the main road to Jerusalem. As hostilities grew in the wake of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul signed a peace pact, which was approved by Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary force that would later form the core of the Israel Defense Forces. 

Peace treaty or not, Haganah, as well as the terrorist groups Irgun and Lehi, which were respectively commanded by future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were determined to attack Deir Yassin. The first phase of Israel’s war of independence focused heavily on controlling Palestine’s roads, the lifelines linking Jewish communities through territory that was still populated overwhelmingly by Arabs. Irgun and Lehi viewed Deir Yassin as a threat to controlling the main road to Jerusalem as well to nearby Jewish communities and had few if any qualms about breaking the peace pact. 

A plan was devised to attack Deir Yassin before dawn on April 9, expel all of its residents and kill those who refused to leave in order to seize the village and terrorize Arabs throughout Palestine into flight. In language horrifically reminiscent of the recent Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Irgun officer Ben-Zion Cohen recounted how Lehi members proposed “liquidating” the entire village. Fortunately, the proposal was rejected, although Deir Yassin was indeed ultimately “liquidated,” like more than 400 other destroyed Arab villages in 1948-49.

Women and children were meant to be spared, and residents were meant to be warned by loudspeaker to encourage their escape. However, the armored vehicle carrying the loudspeaker crashed early during the attack and the 120 attackers encountered fierce resistance, including sniper fire, from the village guards and other residents, many of whom were armed. The inexperienced Jewish fighters resorted to going from house to house, tossing grenades indiscriminately into each one before storming inside and spraying survivors with submachine guns and other weapons. Fahimeh Ali Mustafa Zeidan, who was 11 years old, later recalled how the attackers…

… blew the door down, entered and started searching the place; they got to the store room, and took us out one by one. They shot the son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra, who was still being breast fed, they shot my mother too. We all started screaming and crying, but were told that if we did not stop, they would shoot us all. They then lined us up, shot at us, and left.

Meir Pa’il, an intelligence officer in Palmach, the Haganah strike force, later described his fellow Jewish fighters as “full of lust for murder” during and after the attack. Israeli historian Benny Morris claims there were cases of mutilation and rape. One resident described how the attackers shot a pregnant woman before bashing in her belly; such atrocities were confirmed by Jewish participants. Pa’il wrote that Irgun and Lehi fighters… 

…were going about the village robbing and stealing everything: chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold and more… Each [one] walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed. 

“I have seen a great deal of war, but I never saw a sight like Deir Yassin,” confessed Haganah officer Eliahu Arbel, who “saw bodies of women and children who were murdered in their houses in cold blood.” 

“To me, it looked a bit like a pogrom,” said Haganah intelligence officer Mordechai Gichon, referring to the organized slaughter of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe that drove so many of them to flee to Palestine. “When the Cossacks burst into Jewish neighborhoods, then that should have looked something like this.” 

Pa’il wrote of finding a house in the center of the village where 200 terrified women and children had been rounded up, and of a “commander [who] explained that they intended to kill all of them.” Fortunately, help arrived shortly thereafter in the form of ultra-Orthodox Jews from Givat Shaul, who rushed to Deir Yassin in time to shame the attackers into sparing the prisoners. 

Some survivors, including women and children, were forced onto trucks and paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem, where residents spit, stoned and taunted them. Some of the prisoners were then executed. Haganah intelligence officer Yitzhak Levy wrote of a mother and her child, as well as seven old men and women, who were executed in a quarry. 

When it was all over, over 100 men, women and children of Deir Yassin lay dead, while the village’s defenders managed to kill four of the attacking Jews. Word of the massacre spread like wildfire and succeeded in the stated Zionist goal of terrorizing Arabs in other towns and villages throughout Palestine into permanently fleeing their homes and their homeland. Haganah psychological warfare operators approaching Arab villages often broadcast over loudspeakers recordings of shrieking Arab women accompanied by exhortations to leave immediately or face a similar fate as Deir Yassin. The massacre was a major motivator of Arab flight from Palestine, the beginning of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe;” the ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during Israel’s war for independence.

The international community was horrified and outraged when news of Deir Yassin got out. In the United States, a group of prominent Jews including Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the editors of the New York Times blasting the “terrorist bands [who] attacked a peaceful village.” Others compared the Deir Yassin attackers to Nazis. However, then, as now, the Zionists committing horrific crimes cared little for what the world thought. For all its horror, leading Zionists touted Deir Yassin as a smashing success. “We created terror among the Arabs,” Menachem Begin boasted at the time. “In one blow, we changed the strategic situation.” 

In the heroic myth-making endemic to all settler-colonial states, atrocities are unceremoniously buried like so many victims’ bloating corpses. Many Israelis today, including some leading historians, deny any massacre occurred at Deir Yassin, despite the overwhelming evidence presented by village residents, Jewish perpetrators and international observers. To these revisionists, any negative portrayal of Israel or even Zionism is rooted in antisemitism, or if the accuser is Jewish, in self-loathing, a “trick we always use” to deflect legitimate criticism, according to the late Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni. 

And so although the Jewish Agency for Israel — the head of Jewish affairs in Palestine — and the Haganah condemned and apologized for Deir Yassin, and although an IDF intelligence officer’s report states“there can be no doubt at all that large numbers of civilians were killed unjustifiably” there, there is a strain of denialism among Israelis akin to those other supremacists who deny the undeniable events of the Holocaust. Seventy years after the horrors of Deir Yassin, it is more necessary than ever to ensure that, like the Nazi genocide of Jews, we “never forget” the brutal massacre of that peaceful village or the wider catastrophe it sparked. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/12/deir-yassin-the-massacre-that-sparked-the-nakba/

The Enabling Of Steve Bannon

SUNDAY, 15 JULY 2018

The Enabling Of Steve Bannon

What helped fuel political parties like UKIP, especially in the run-up to the EU referendum, was the access given to them by broadcasters. Newspaper columns and other print coverage were fine, but to inject the virus directly, you need to be on air. And that is what drove the message of Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and his pals. Now, post-referendum, UKIP is old hat, and the access has been given to the far-right instead.

Steve Bannon - given a platform

How that has come about is for those giving the access to explain, but the result these last few days has been the appearance of Steve Bannon, a white supremacist who supports the likes of the French Front Nationale and Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands. He supports the Identiarian movement, which is, let us not drive this one round the houses for too long, a bunch of actual Nazis, some of whom are now on trial in Austria.

He didn't know it was going on, honest

Yet Bannon was invited on to ITV’s Good Morning Britain last Friday, where former Screws and Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, to his shame, was craven in his questioning, his co-host Susanna Reid left to put The Great Man on the spot. This contrasted with Morgan’s aggressive and dishonest attack on Ash Sarkar of Novara Media.

Susanna Reid - got the same insult as Theo Usherwood

And then came Bannon’s appearance with Farage on his Sunday morning LBC show. What might have been expected to be a softball session got an unexpected hard edge when the station’s political editor Theo Usherwood called Bannon out for his support of Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson.

Usherwood noted the reaction. “Bannon to me off-air: ‘Fuck you. Don't you fucking say you're calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’” Remember the “Liberal elite” part of that.

Bannon’s grovelling Mini-Me Raheem “call me Ray” Kassam was unhappy. “LBC’s @theousherwood introduced himself to Bannon before the interview as the ‘neutral’ political editor of the station. He then proceeded to attack him both on and off air, and then tweet a private conversation. @Ofcom”. Tough. Run along, Ray. Grown-up talk.

In any case, Usherwood put Kassam straight. “For the record, nothing was agreed beforehand … If he wanted the conversation to be off-the-record, he should have said”. Meanwhile, Owen Jones, who had taken an interest in Morgan’s inexcusable shouting down of Ash Sarkar, observed “Two leading British broadcasters - ITV and LBC - have given an uncritical platform to this fascist little thug Steve Bannon, in both cases interviews by personal friends of Donald Trump (Piers Morgan and Nigel Farage)”.

And then came an intervention from Ms Reid. “My approach to Steve Bannon on @gmb was entirely critical to the point where he accused me of insulting questioning and being part of the liberal elite”. Hey, it’s that “Liberal elite” rant again! Stock response to proper questioning. But Bannon being that Good Ol’ Gen-tle-man, he held the swearing.

That revelation was one thing; Morgan’s weaselling out of Owen Jones’ questioning was quite another. “Hi @piersmorgan. Can you please explain clearly why you conducted a hectoring, aggressive interview against a left-wing Muslim woman, but a respectful, unchallenging interview with the Mussolini-admiring far right extremist Steve Bannon?” he asked The Donald’s bestest buddy and softball interviewer.

Morgan’s answer was deflection at its less than finest. “Sure, Bannon answered every question we put to him - and we (very sexist of you to pretend @susannareid100 wasn't involved...) challenged him repeatedly. Your communist friend didn't so I had to keep repeating the questions. The fact she's a woman or a Muslim was irrelevant”. That Jones did not mention Ms Reid is irrelevant, but if that’s how he wanted it, fine.

Jones duly mentioned his co-host. “You aggressively shouted down Ash Sarkar and made up her opinions. Susanna didn't. When the Mussolini-admiring white nationalist Steve Bannon was on, you treated him as a respected guest. Susanna challenged him. You're the problem, you're the disgrace, not Susanna”. Ouch!

And, in case we had forgotten, the Tweeter known as Briefcase Mike let everyone know what Bannon had been defending before Usherwood called him out. “Steve Bannon says it's a disgrace that Tommy Robinson is in prison and calls for his release saying he broke the law ‘only in a technical sense’. In UK you've either broken the law or you haven't. And in any case Robinson pleaded guilty. #LBC”.

Steve Bannon called someone with a string of criminal convictions “the backbone of this country”. He tried to reinvent the law. His sole response to being held to account is to whine about the “Liberal elite”. He supports actual Nazis.

Evening all

Small wonder that when Piers Morgan once again invented attributes for someone he was trying to shout down - this time Owen Jones and inventing a connection to the Trump “baby balloon” - Jones dismissed the Trump toady with “I have nothing to do with the Trump balloon, but at least it will go down in history for something other than being a disgraced newspaper editor who sucked up to a grotesque Nazi praising sexual predator”.

The enabling of Steve Bannon needs some explaining. And my Occam’s Razor tells me that the one who needs to do the most of that explaining is Piers Morgan. Giving the far-right a legitimacy they do not merit is worrying. And it’s bang out of order.

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/