Guerrilla History - Weaponizing Antisemitism w/ Asa Winstanley

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

In this excellent episode, we bring on Asa Winstanley to discuss his new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn.  This conversation is a fantastic work of recent history, and also is an important study for those of us active in the Palestine solidarity movement.  Be sure to listen closely, grab yourself a copy of the book, and let others know about the episode! Asa Winstanley has been writing about Palestine and the Israel lobby since 2005. He spent two years living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank as an activist and writer. He has been an associate editor and reporter with the award-winning website The Electronic Intifada for more than a decade. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bou? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons

of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmacky, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, who is historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's great to be with you, Henry. Great to see you, as always. Also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, who, of course, is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? Hello. I'm doing very good. excited to be here today. Absolutely. We have a really great conversation ahead of us and a really great guest that we have lined up for us.

But before I introduce the guest, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and keep us running and able to do what we do by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter by going to Twitter and searching for at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skod. Today, as I said, we're joined by a great guest. We have Aesa Wynne Stanley, who is an associate editor at the Electronic Intifada, and author of the new book, which we'll be discussing today,

Weaponizing Antisemitism, how the Israel, Israel Lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn. Hello, Asa. How are you doing today? It's really nice to have you on the show. Hi, yeah, I'm good. Nice to be with you. Looking forward to this. Yeah. I'm really happy to have you here. I've been following your work at EI for ages, years now. So it's really nice to finally meet you, quote unquote, you know, virtually, and get to talk about this book, which really is a great and very important book. So before we actually start talking about the book, though, which as I mentioned, is about how the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corby. I think that I want to go before the book even starts and talk about who is Jeremy Corbyn.

Can you talk a little bit about the rise and fall, quote unquote, of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2010s, for listeners particularly outside the UK, who perhaps aren't as familiar with him, as well as your background in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, which is certainly going to come up in the conversation regarding the Israel lobby and the, again, quote unquote, downfall of Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, I think that it's important to remember who Jeremy Corbyn is who he was, where he came from, and the political context that he arose in. So, Jeremy Corbyn was a backbencher. So obviously the UK has a parliamentary system. And he, was known as a backbench MP

so he was an MP in the Labour Party he was a MP in the Labour Party since the early 1980s and during that time he never followed the party line rarely followed the party line I suppose we should say but especially during the Tony Blair years

so you know the Labour Party is still ostensibly a socialist party on paper but really I mean especially in the Tony Blair years when the years when Tony Blair was the leader of the Labour Party and he was the Prime Minister of the UK, the Labour Party became this neoliberal party which was really indistinguishable from the Conservatives in many ways. And especially when it came to issues of war and peace and foreign policy.

And Jeremy Corbyn was one of a small group of Labour MPs who were really on the left of the party and maintained their sort of principal stances of voting against austerity, voting against cuts to public services, voting against privatization, and just generally, you know, keeping a socialist flame alive on the minority of the Labour Party.

So whether, you know, the Labour Party was in opposition or in government, he kind of kept that, kept the flame of the Labour left going. He was from the Tony Benn tendency of the Labour Party, Tony Ben being a kind of doyen of the Labour Party left, who in the 1960s was actually a Labour Minister, but he moved more and more to the left over the years.

And Jeremy Corbyn was of the generation of the early 80s Labour Party, and so there was a small number of Labour Party MPs who kept this kind of tendency alive. And what in particular made Jeremy Corbyn stand out, even from others in this small group, was his position on international matters, was his position on, his opposition to war, and his support for solidarity movements and support for anti-operialism, essentially. And so, really, we come up to 2015. Jeremy Corbyn all these years for decades by that point has been, you know, this backbencher. And he's really been the thorn in the side to the Labour Party's right-wing leadership. He was, you know, he was an opponent to Tony Blair.

At a time when Tony Blair was leading the UK. into the war in Iraq, especially. And, you know, supporting George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, which led to a great amount of destruction in Iraq, you know, over a million people dead, and the foundation of ISIS. At that time, there was a big anti-war movement. There was a very popular anti-war movement, and Jeremy Corbyn was not only voting against the war in parliament. But he was actually leading those demonstrations. You know, he played a part of the leadership of the anti-war movement. And he, you know, was openly speaking out against Tony Blair, really.

And so, you know, in those years, I mean, so I was in my early 20s then, and I started to get involved in the anti-war movement in my own small way. And, you know, to me in those years, the Labour Party was the war. party. The Labour Party was the party that it was a party of government. You know, Tony Blair was leading us into war against Iraq, which almost, you know, the majority of the population didn't want. And the Labour Party nonetheless was ignoring the popular will. And so the Labour Party was really seen by a lot of people, including myself, as the party of war. But then there would always be a few people within the Labour Party. Of course, the anti-war mover was so popular that there

was, you know, everybody, you know, people from all sectors of life were involved in it, whether it's just demonstrations or organizing activism and so forth. But even in the leadership of, so of course, there'd be lots of Labour Party members involved in the anti-war movement at the popular level, but there would be a few among the Labour parties and members of Parliament and other sort of national figures, I suppose, you could say, who were involved in the anti-war movement, involved in solidarity movements, and Jeremy Corbyn would always be one of those. And so we come to 2015, the Labour Party is still in opposition. It's lost another election. What happened was after the downfall of the

new Labour project, which was really a product of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's project. of turning the Labour Party from a socialist party into a neoliberal party that project was it had its own downfall first of all Tony Blair became so unpopular

that he was seen as an electoral liability and he was overthrown by his own ministers and then his successor who was another new Labour leader Gordon Brown the finance minister took over but he lost an election and that led to in 2020 to a coalition to a coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats and then the Labour Party took a very, very tentative step towards what was called the soft left so Ed Miliband took over as the leader of the Labour Party in opposition

And the Blair rights, the hard right of the Labour Party, really didn't like this at all, because as much as Ed Miliband's policies weren't really that different from Tony Blair's, any step towards the left, they were sort of adamantly against. And so what happened during Ed Miliband's leadership was he didn't achieve very much as a leader of the Labour Party, lost an election. but one thing he did achieve was to change the rules of how the Labour Party internally selected its leader so up until then it had been really very undemocratic

although there'd been some voting from Labour Party members the Labour Party's MPs its lawmakers essentially had the majority of the say in a kind of electoral college over who the Labour Party's leader would be and that meant that over the years there was several left-wing candidates for the leader of the Labour Party

including John McDonnell, including Diane Abbott who were Jeremy Corbyn's colleagues on the backbenchers and would later go on to be his shadow ministers but they never really stood much of a chance but come in 2015 the rules had changed. Ed Miliband changed the rules for various reasons and he increased the participants of the membership in that electoral college.

The MP still had a bit of a veto in terms of you needed the support of a certain percentage of MPs to get on the ballot in the first place. And that was quite a hurdle that Jeremy Corbyn did manage to overcome through various ways, but nonetheless, it meant that essentially the membership could vote and the most of our votes would become the leader. And now, at the time, this was thought of it.

be a right wing. This was thought to be something, and it was something that was promoted by the right of the Labour Party because they wanted to delink the Labour Party from the trade unions and they were sort of deluded of how unpopular new labour was. And they thought it would turn the Labour Party into a kind of

third way US Democrats sort of increasingly right wing project. And it had the opposite effect. It meant that what happened then, in the summer of 2015, when the Labour leadership election internally was

happening within the party, there was a phenomenon. And Jeremy Corbyn put his hat into the ring and he stood as the left-wing candidate, which by that stage was becoming a sort of token gesture, essentially because the

left-wing candidates usually came lost. And so Corby didn't think that he would have much of a chance of winning. And a lot of people didn't think, I mean, nobody really thought he had much of a chance of winning. But the idea was to widen the debate. I mean, this was what he was saying at the time

or what others were saying at first. We were going to enter this leadership election to widen the debate about the future of the Labour Party to increase discussion within the national media of issues of where the Labour Party should go. So to promote policies such as, for example, the renationalisation of the railways, you know, in the neoliberal era under Margaret Thatcher and her successor

within the Labour Party, Tony Blair, who really carried on a lot of the same policies under a Labour guy. There were all sorts of prioritisations where national industries and resources were sold off to private corporations. And, you know, many of these were actually incredibly unpopular. Some of them were, it has to be said, were popular, such as the selling off of public housing, council housing, was popular in a certain way because it was marketed as the right to buy, you have the right to buy your home. Well, of course, that means then councils, it sounds good at first to people, but then it means that ultimately means

cancer houses are being sold off. And there's then a lack of public housing stock and, you know, rents go up for all of us ultimately. But there was lots of other policies pushed through in the neoliberal era that were unpopular all along,

such as the privatisation of the railways. And now, this discussion is still going on now. You know, that one of the biggest water companies in the country is on the verge of collapse and all these industries have to be publicly subsidised anyway

but it means the public money is going to go into private corporations so you know Corby wanted to enter the leadership election to kind of push for kind of what he said was common sense ideas about renationalizing the railways

which even opinion polling even the bourgeois opinion poll company showed that that was a popular policy. You know, even most conservative voters supported renationalizing the railways. And all these kinds, so there was a big opportunity there. So he wanted to have this discussion and to kind of,

what was said at the time by a lot of people, this phrase that was popular at the time about moving the Overton window and all this kind of stuff. And the unthinkable started to happen and it started to work. And not only did it that work, opinion polling started to show that he was the most popular candidate in that leadership election. And at first it was thought, well, this is, you know,

this is just an outlier poll and there's no way he's going to become the leader of the Labour Party. Because you have to think only a few years prior, his arch-political enemy, Tony Blair, had been the Labour Prime Minister, not that, you know, only a few years before. And so really for, you know, to think of a North American parallel, you'd have to imagine Dennis Cushenic or Mike Gravel being, becoming the leader of the Democratic Party, becoming, I mean, it's different because there isn't a formal leader that way. But I'd say, like, the presidential candidate for the Democrats, that was the political equivalent of. you know, Jeremy Corby

becoming the leader of the Labour Party because he's definitely to the left of Bernie Sanders and especially on issues of war and peace and international solidarity. So, you know, I hope that gives some kind of idea of the political

background and the kind of political earthquake that really started to happen in 2015. Yeah, that's an incredibly good little summary of the complicated and long history there. I want to put another piece on the table here because now we are introduced to Jeremy Corbyn his sort of rise to power as it were. But the other huge chunk of this text is focused

on the Israel lobby. And sometimes that word can get thrown around. Maybe some people don't understand exactly how that manifests here in the United States. You know, we often think of like APEC, for example, as like the prime example of the Israel lobby or the leading edge of it. But of course is more diffuse, it's sometimes less formal and more decentralized than that as sometimes on campuses or just in culture more broadly. It has influence. But can you just sort of remind us with all of that in mind what the Israel lobby is, maybe how it's different and similar between the US and the UK and sort of how it manifests its power within the political realm in the UK? Yeah, that's a good question. And there is entire books written on the

topic. But, I mean, in essence, it's simple and it's complicated. So in essence, it's quite simple. The Israel lobby is any organization that lobbies for Israel, whether professionally or voluntarily. So you could, in that sense, it's kind of a broad term. But it's also complicated in the sense that there is the phenomenon that the academic David Miller calls the Zionist movement and the Zionist movement refers to itself as the Zionist movement. And so in that sense, the Israel lobby could be understood as the more professionally orientated organizations as opposed to kind of active, more activist organizations. Actionary activist organizations, absolutely, but they could be understood as activist organizations.

So essentially, you know, anyone who pushes for Israel's interest within the West could be, is the Israel lobby, I would say, you know, more or less. The way, so there's a lot of similarities of how the Israel lobby operates in North America and in Britain especially and Europe to a certain extent. but they're particularly similar between the U.S. and the UK. So, but one of the differences, I suppose, is we don't have an exact equivalent of AIPAC. So there is an organisation called BICOM, the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre, which was set up in the early 2000s, and the idea that was that it would become the kind of the equivalent to AIPAC, but it never it's it's not um i mean look all these things are all very um you know they're they're completely untransparated in terms of how they're funded and even the level

of funding or whatnot so it's difficult to know for sure but you can kind of you can get an impression of uh you know how many staff they have and how frequently they operate and so you can see they're on a different level so apac is much more um wealthily funded um But so because of the differences in the parliamentary system as opposed to the U.S. political system, the primary way that the Israel lobby operates in the UK is through these groups that are called the Friends of Israel. And there's a recent book published actually with that title, which I haven't finished reading it yet, but it's got some good, so really, I don't, I actually disagree with some of the analysis in it. But nonetheless, it contains some really useful. research of how

the Israel lobby in the UK's particularly operates and it is through these so-called Friends of Israel groups. So you have the Conservative Friends of Israel within the ruling Conservative Party and by some accounts

almost all Conservative Party MP sign up as members to that and then there's a Labour Friends of Israel group and there's even Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel in the third part that we have here. And there's even been others, like even there's another right-wing party, which used to,

I don't know if it still exists really, but it's not what it once was called UKIP, the UK Independence Party, which was focused on the issue of leaving the European Union. Well, they've sort of achieved that now, so they're kind of reason for being. But even this small right-wing party at one point had a, UKIP friends of Israel, which was a really strange group, which this is quite funny because the symbol of UKIP, because they were focused on for a long time, because there was this issue of the EU, and they wanted to avoid entering the euro, the eurozone currency. Again, that was successful because we didn't, we never entered the eurozone. And so their symbol for the longest time

was the pound symbol for UKIP for the party. And so when they had, you can see where this is going, right? When they founded UKIP Friends of Israel, it was literally the pound sign surrounded by the Star of Davy. And they didn't think that one through the anti-Semitic, the genuinely anti-Semitic implications of that.

I should check up on what's happening when UKIP Friends of Israel these days. Anyway, so there's these. This is the main way the friends of Israel, the Israel lobby operates in the UK. And it's even more opaque than the AIPAC in a lot of ways, because there's no real indication of how these, they're clearly off well funded. But there's no indication of where this money really comes from. And, you know, so, you know, and they definitely influenced the political parties in a lot of key. ways. The Labour Friends of Israel, and I get into the history of Labor Friends of Israel in my book, referencing the work of Paul Kellerman, a really good scholar from, I think he's retired now, but from the University of Manchester, a really seminal book called the British Left and Zionism history of divorce. And in that, as I cite in my book, he explains Labour Friends of Israel and how it started in the 1950s.

the late 1950s, as a response to what was euphemistically called the Suez Crisis, which was, of course, was really a tripartite, you know, known in the Arab world. More accurately, is the tripartite aggression, which was an outright invasion of Egypt by Israel in collusion with the United Kingdom and France. And then there was this pretext of like, you know, UN, he's keeping force, which was always nonsense because there was a conspiracy

between France, Britain and Israel. So because of that, because after the Sue is invasion and, you know, the differences between the, obviously we're not going to get into the whole history of that, but the differences between the US and the UK over that,

the UK was forced to clung down. and now at the time it's interesting because at the time the label party's position was so the Suez invasion was over the conservative government of Britain at the time led the Suez invasion really because

Gamal Abdul Nasser the president at the time who wrote the revolutionary president he was trying to nationalize the Suez Canal now he did national I was the Syriest Canal, and that was what the invasion was supposed to abort. Now, the conservatives and the Labour Party, they both opposed Nasser, and the Labour Party at

the time was incredibly pro-Israel, for the most, you know, almost pretty much unanimously in terms of the MPs, really. and they didn't they didn't disagree the labor opposition didn't disagree with the conservatives in principle on the invasion but they they had these kind of unprincipled criticisms where they said well it's the way it's being done has turned out to be bad for British interests you know along those old lines the typical sort of imperialists of like intra-imperialist disagreements within capitalism

well but even that small difference was enough to kind of raise alarm bells within the Britain's Israel locally and so it meant that there was you know some minor criticisms among Labour Party MPs for the first time against

Israel and it was again it wasn't on anything principle but even these small criticisms were enough to for them to think, hang on, we better do something about this. And so they founded Labor Friends of Israel in order to kind of stem this tide of criticism. It didn't work in the long term because the Labour Party, over the decade, I mean, it worked. It did work in the short and medium term, but because, you know, at one point, Labor Friends of Israel was quite popular.

It had a membership base. But even by the 1970s, that was really, that completely declined. and there were, you know, Israel started to become more and more unpopular within the Labour Party. And even before Jeremy Corbyn became leader, Israel was incredibly unpopular, certainly within the membership of the Labour Party, which was part of the broad left. So, you know, these are the broad outlines, I suppose, of how the Israel lobby works in Britain. Thank you so much for that. And I want to also thank you very much for this wonderful work. I mean, this is a history podcast. And I regard this book as a very important work of history. I mean, it may be about fairly recent events, but this is a historical significance. And the way you've framed this is quite interesting because at the same time that you've been reporting on different. aspects of this over the years since the outset of the use of anti-Semitism allegations

against Jeremy Corbyn, against his particular movement momentum within labor. You've been documenting different aspects of the story sort of, you know, in news reporting and investigations at the time. But now you've sort of framed it in this kind of synthetic way and unfolding the story. And it's lovely that there's so many layers to the story. And we, it's like almost a mystery, sort of novel, detective fiction here, except it's, yeah, detective history of like, well, who was behind, you know, the suppressed and never published labor report that touches off the big Oxford scandal that helps get things going. So I just loved the way, you know, there's a very systematic unfolding of the story.

and it's a very gripping and exciting and a sad story that you tell here. But what I wanted to get at, and you're welcome to, you know, I think talk about any of the relationship between the reporting that you did on the ground at the time and what you tried to do with the book. So do feel free to discuss that. But one thing I wanted to actually specifically ask you about is about that, about the lobby. and about the really stunning revelations in your reporting then and even further now, about the intersection between the official embassy employees and activities and what we could consider and you name as front organizations that collaborated with the Israeli government as represented in, you know, its embassy in London,

as operatives working to subvert Corbyn's leadership of the Labor Party and success in elections and the threat of bringing to power somebody who you did describe as crucially an anti-imperialist activist and figure. So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that layer of the onion, the kind of unseen. kind of operatives and you even called some of them spies that worked to infiltrate into these front organizations and the Labour Party. Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. Well, yeah, first of all, thanks for, I mean, that's what I was going for. I was going for a kind of murder mystery. When I was trying to get this book published, which is a whole story in itself, a whole

difficulty in itself. One of my pitch is two more mainstream publishers was this is a true crime novel, basically. I was trying to hover and board that trend. Didn't work, obviously. I ended up with a very good publisher or books, but none of the mainstream ones bit because I guess it was too controversial for them. But, you know, I ended up writing the book like that anyway. you know if it's so

and I think that's been quite successful yeah so I'm glad that was noticed yeah the issue of I mean look there were Israeli spies of the Labour parties there's no doubt about it in and around the Labour Party especially during the Corbyn years and there was probably British spies too

although we know less about then so I yes you know this this is definitely a history book but it's as a journalist list. It's the first draft of history. My hope is that I, there will be more, I'm pretty confident there will be more revelations over the years about what happened during the Corbyn years and especially about the involvement of the British deep state in sabotage in Jeremy Corbyn.

Because I think there's no doubt that that happened. And, you know, as I alluded to in the kind of introduction because of all Jeremy Corby's activities even before he became leader we know that he was according to one whistleblower and I mentioned in the book we know that he was spied on by the British security services

by this whistleblower from what's known in the UK as the spy cops which were undercover British police who infiltrated protest movements all over the country from the whole

of the left and never the right except a couple of exceptional occasions which were almost accidental but it was everyone from the anarchist left to communist parties to Trotskites

to the left wing of the Labour Party including Jeremy Corbyn were targeted for infiltration by these spyed cops who were these were long-term deployments and they posed as activists and they pretended to be activists and they spied on us

I was involved in a Palestine Solidarity Group called the International Solidarity Movement I was spied on by a man who called himself Rob Harrison and we now know that wasn't his real name his real first name is possibly was Robert but he wasn't who he claimed to be and he was a serving

and this isn't like this isn't like a an informant this was a serving police officer a trained police officer who pretended to be and there was hundreds of these there was the entire left

yeah we don't have time to get into that whole thing but we know from one of the whistleblowers of these spy cops who incidentally were MIFI agents so they were reporting to MIFI 5 which was Britain's which is Britain's

Benzor, nearest equivalent of the FBI, not quite the same, but the nearest equivalent of the FBI, one of these Bicop's whistleblowers, has specifically said that Jeremy Corbyn was also a target for them. So we know that he was a target of British deep state and intelligence agencies before he became leader. So there's absolutely no doubt that they were involved in subversion of his leadership. We know less about the specifics. But because of the way the blatant and entitled way that the State of Israel operates in the West

and how its connected Israel lobby organizations work, we know not a lot more about how they work to subvert Jeremy Corby. And also crucially, because of Al-Dazira, and this is in a couple of my chapters I rely quite heavily on, two investigations, undercover investigations Al Jazeera did into the Israel lobby in the UK and

the US. And the US, the UK series coincided with the beginning of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. And because of that, we know a lot about how the Israel lobby works within the Labour Party especially.

And the main Israeli spy we can say was a spy whether he was an officer of a particular intelligence agency isn't known but I mean

it's definitely accurate to call him a spy because he was he was he was spying he was spying he was gathering information he was trying to sabotage Labour party you know pro-Palestinian groups within the Labour Party and that's Shai Massot

now he was posing as a diplomat as a lot spies do but he was actually never on the diplomatic role of the diplomatic list of the Israeli embassy in London. Nonetheless, his business card said he was a senior political officer of the Israeli embassy in London, Shy Massot, and we know he was a veteran of, he was probably, it's possible. It's likely that he was a veteran of military intelligence. He was certainly in the Israeli Navy. And he was, according to our reporting and the documents that we found,

Israeli documents that we found, it's most likely that he was employed by the Israeli Ministry's Strategic Affairs, which was this, it's now been folded into the foreign ministry, but it was for several years, for a good few years, it was essentially Israel's anti-BDS ministry, And it was kind of, really, it was a spy agency in terms of a sabotage agency. It was a semi-covert government agency, which was targeted at subverting the Palestine Solidarity Movement around the world, particularly the boycott divestment and sanctions movement. And it did have some successes. And so we think that Shai Maasot was an agent of this organization, which was stuffed full of Israeli,

former Israeli intelligence operatives, if there is such a thing as a former intelligence operative, but certainly veterans of various Israeli spy agencies, including military intelligence and Mossad and probably Shimbab as well. And so this, Shyam Assov was exposed in that documentary is doing quite a lot in the Labour Party and he was actually, he was, you know, it looked like he may have been expelled from, he was either expelled, he was by the embassy or, you know, there was, there might have been a discreet push from the government at the time, but he was certainly made the conservative government, but he was certainly made into kind of the scapego. I mean, they made it sound like at the time that he was this

kind of almost rogue element, but there's no doubt that he was, you know, he was made a kind of sacrificial lamb, I suppose, by his boss, the Israeli ambassador. So, you know, he was doing all these things within the Labour Party, which were famously exposed by that four-part Siri. And there's quite a good quote from, obviously, at the time, Jeremy Corbyn was the leader

of Labour Party, and his foreign affairs spokesperson, Emily Thornbury, he and she called for an inquiry after the initial revelations came out in the newspapers before the full documentary be broadcast. And they actually, I mean, Emily Thornberry was surprisingly

strong in her language especially considering she later came out as very pro-Israel and as a Labour friend of Israel. And she said, quote, this is improper interference

in our democratic politics by Israel. Quote, this is a national security issue. You know, so she said something, I mean, she was almost calling Israel hostile foreign power, essentially. And Israel is in this kind of unique position geopolitically because it's, you know, there's great stock in the West

put in how great of an ally Israel supposedly is to Britain, to the EU, and especially to America and to Canada. You know, and we've just seen this nauseating display of the Israeli president being fetid in Congress. But, and, you know, there's no doubt that Israel is an ally in the sense that it's funded by billions of US military aid and, you know, there's all this support on the governmental level. But is it a, Israel's in a unique position in terms of such allies because when the Edward Snowden revelation showed and confirmed, and this was kind of already known, they confirmed that US counterintelligence

considers Israel to be one of his top threats because of how much spying Israel that is on the United States and not just citizen, not just activists, but like on the United States government and that sort of position is normally reserved for official enemies

including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Israel's pretty much unique in that, considered to be a top threat in that way. And so, you know, obviously there's this kind of contradiction here, you know, between this great ally, which is nonetheless considered that sometimes to be a national security threat. And so, you know, this is what, that's how it was briefly seen by the leadership of the labor partender, Jeremy Corby. Of course, then, when the actual documentary itself was broadcast it was realized

that most of the documentary concerned things that were going on in the Labour Party because the initial headlines that Emily Thornberry was reacting to there were actually about the Conservative Party so Shyam Assock was actually trying to subvert the Conservative Party too because there was

one, he's gone now but at the time there was one very senior minister Alan Duncan who was quite critical of his Israel, like, you know, in a very sort of contingent way. But nonetheless, they hated him. The Israelis wanted him out.

And, you know, just for, you know, criticisms of settlements and stuff like that. And he was caught on camera in this plot in the undercover Adelaire investigation with a very civil servant, Maria Strasolo. and they were sort of half joking, half not joking about, quote, taking down Alan Duncan and other. Alan Duncan was the deputy foreign minister at the time. And because he'd said critical things about Israeli settlements, they wanted to, what they said was manufacturer's little scandal for him.

And that, before the documentary was broadcast, that was what hit headlines. It came out in the mail on Sunday, a conservative newspaper, paper that they this Israeli agent Israeli spy essentially was plotting this against the ruling conservative government so that's what Emily Thorby was reacting to

you know and that was a problem probably she saw as a problem for the conservative but the majority of the series actually exposed these machinations within the Labour Party now for Emily Thornberry to address to, no, Emily Thunbury and Jeremy Corbyn, if they were to follow through with their inquiry into this, what they called improper interference in democratic politics,

within the Labour Party, it would have meant they would have had to have acted against the Labour Party's internal Israel lobby, especially Labour Friends of Israel, and also, which would have been harder for Jeremy Corbyn, considering the manufactured anti-Semitism scandal, which we're obviously going to talk about, the Jewish Labour movement,

Yeah, so something that comes up frequently in your work, both in terms of your book as well as your writings at electronic and taffata, are the role of the media with regards to the downfall of Corbin, the Israel lobby, etc. So there are a couple of different ways that we can look at how the media has operated within this story and how that has changed over time. So, of course, the media was always fairly stacked against Jeremy Corbyn from the beginning, you know, long before he was the leader of the Labor Party. And they became willfully complicit, like in this false anti-Semitism narrative. It wasn't like they were caught up in some intrigue. You know, this was willful complicity and was used as a political weapon by the media against Jeremy Corbyn. much the same way, and this is just a shameless plug, that media narratives against Stalin have been used to change his image over time. And of course, this is something that was

written about in Los Ordo's book, which pre-orders opened for today. Stalin, history and critique of a black legend. Again, shameless plug, because I translated and edited that book alongside Salvatore Angle de Mauro. You can find it. Please. Please. Iskerbooks.org. Go pre-order it. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading it and I will be pre-ordering it after we finish this recording I've read some of it in the previous translation

yeah fascinating stuff but yeah so I find a lot of the way that you're analyzing the media turning the narrative to be similar in some regards at least the way that the media was weaponized to change the narrative

and change the image of Stalin after World War II The point is, is that the media was used for this very political aim of changing the way that Jeremy Corbyn was viewed in the UK. And there's also other media angles that we can look at here. So you mentioned Al Jazeera several times in the investigations they did. But of course, Al Jazeera's relation to this changed as Qatar's relation to Israel evolved. you know, there's all these different media narratives and ways that we can analyze how the media has weaponized the anti-Semitism scandal, how they've examined, kind of buried, and then we're kind of forced to put out the story of how these false narratives were put out there. So I know this is like kind of a vague question. I'm not really like saying, tell us exactly, you know, blah, blah, blah, but whatever. But the point is is that the media narratives are a very critical component of this story, the way that the media narratives were weaponized against

Corbin to change his image, as well as how the narratives in the media, like in Al Jazeera, a media that was trying to expose this false anti-Semitism narrative, that evolved over time as Qatar's relationship to Israel evolved. So can you talk a little bit about these media narratives, the goals of the media narratives to take down Corbin? Like I said, it goes far before this the anti-Semitism scandal came up but really did ramp up with the anti-Semitism a false

scandal. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a tendency on the Western left sometimes to downplay almost the role of the media to be honest as but it's incredibly powerful. There's no, yes, of course it can be challenged and

I think a large part or even you could say a majority of the population perhaps doesn't necessarily. necessarily believe all these things. I mean, but nonetheless, it has a massive role. So there is a large part, most likely of the British population, where Jeremy Corbyn is seen as a kind of, quote, unquote, extremist. And the main and most successful reason for that is that he's perceived to be anti-Semitic.

Now, you know, if that was drilled down on and you were the respondents to, you those kind of polls are asked, well, what is anti-Semitism? They might not necessarily understand that because that issue of anti-Semitism has been so weaponized that it's now, the

very concept has almost become meaningless to a lot of people, you know, whereas traditionally anti-Semitism, well, first of all, the very first anti-Semites were proud to be anti-Semites, you know, they were the term was originally a self-definition, ironically,

It was people who were openly anti-Jewish and were arguing that the Jewish people of Europe didn't belong in Europe and that they should leave Europe and be expelled from Europe. And Hitler himself was said to have a claim that the Jews, quote and quote, actually belong in Palestine and they should go back, quote, to Palestine in this sort of – and it's this mythological idea that. that the Jews are Semites and that they are of the East and these kind of false ideas partially based on biblical mythology. And so, you know, this, the media narratives, false media narratives, have a very powerful effect. And it's interesting you mentioned about Al Jazeera because, you know, I mentioned not long ago about there was two,

it's often forgotten now, but there was two, so the Al Jazeera series about the UK Israel Lobby it's quite well known among Labor's left wing activists now although they're mostly by now expelled or left the Labour Party in the wake of Corbyn's defeat so that was quite well known but it's less well known that there was a US series which was also very good and there was a second undercutor reporter

who infiltrated the Israel lobby in the United States. You know, he got involved in various different pro-Israel organizations, posing as a pro-Israel activist. He did a very good job. And there was another series, but it was actually never broadcast by Al Jazeera. And we, the Electronic Indifada, did manage to obtain a copy, and we, along with two other organizations,

one in France or one in Lebanon, on, we, we released copies of it online, which you can still see now on our website. If people look up, watch the film, the Israel Lobby didn't want you to see it, it's all there. I will just go to our YouTube channel, you can find it there. And it was, yeah, it was interesting because according to my sources, the original Israel Lobby series was actually, quote, unquote, two success. And it ruffled so many feathers that then there was, it became almost a geopolitical problem for Qatar, whereby there was, it was part, you know, if you remember during the Trump years when there was the whole thing where they were, Trump was kind of ganging up with the UAE and the Saudis to put Qatar under a siege and to put Qatar under a siege and to put. Qatar under all this pressure for various geopolitical reasons.

Well, this was another part of that mix. This documentary was another part of that mix. And it was fairly well known because Aldezer was head of investigations at the time. Clayton, Swisher, had announced that after the UK one, that there would be a US one coming up. So it was known there was in the works. So Qatar itself then became a target for the Israel lobby, and they put a lot of pressure on them. and the Carterian leadership did essentially bow to that and it was then you know it was never it was never released on on the broadcast channel it was just just sort of we were managed to obtain it in this way and so yeah you know it's all these things you know the media has a very powerful effect on a lot of things and we saw that in the core years, you know, this was a story that was really, it was kind of an interminable story

where the British media was so relentless, it kind of threw everything against Corbyn that it possibly could, and it tried so many things. And for the most part, these things kind of didn't have the desired effect of aborting the kind of Corbyn, the Corbynite project, if you I'm going to call it that. But the Labourer anti-Semitism, the manufactured anti-Semitism scandal, ended up being quite an effective way of destroying and dividing that movement,

whereby people start, some elements started within the pro-Corp, and we've decided to kind of believe this narrative about there's this massive anti-Semitism problem within the Labour Party now during under Jeremy Corbyn. um so you know it's um it was quite a powerful political weapon which was uh why we named the the book what we did yeah i kind of um think i'd love to give your your thoughts on this little bit um which is this fact that i would say it's like a hallmark of the late neoliberal period this weaponization of more broadly

identity politics in general you could even talk about identity reductionism specifically against a class and anti-imperialist focused left. And the UK bringing down Jeremy Corbyn, it had reverberations, I think, here in the U.S. as well. There was even a period of time. Most people have memory hold this where they even trotted out an article in one of the major papers accusing Bernie Sanders of anti-Semitism. Right. So they saw how it worked with Corbin and they tried to apply it to Sanders. But one of the things that I had, you touched on this a little bit in your last answer from an American on the outside looking into the Corbin spectacle was this confusion over what was like cynical on the on the behalf of the accusers and what was

genuinely like believed because you talk about people within the labor party becoming convinced that this is a real problem to some extent although when you start turning over rocks and you start really digging deep you can it's there's really not a lot here so how much of this was like cynicism on behalf of the corporate media and the Israel lobby trickling down to regular people who might have sympathies to the labor left broadly, but who were actually convinced that this is a real problem despite much real concrete evidence. This is your thoughts on that as a whole. Yeah, this is a really interesting question, and it's hard to answer it definitively

because it's very difficult to know motives. but I think what we can say is that in terms of people on a kind of mass level who were convinced, they weren't necessarily convinced that there was a real anti-serratism problem. They were convinced that there was enough smoke without that there must be some sort of fire here because the story was so relentlessly pushed by the national media. And I think what we can say is where it was, the people who were the most effective and most relentless pushers of this narrative was the Israel lobby, was the pro-Israel lobby, was the Zionist movement, was the pro-Israel groups in the UK. And they were able to then provide

this wholesale as a political weapon to the wider Labour Party right, to the wider right in the country in general. Everyone, by now it's really for everyone from the right wing of the Lent Party, to the Conservative Party, to the fascist right, even now. I mean, I, I, This is something that I've been told recently by anti-fascist activists in the UK. You know, there's a great, there's a large, relatively large upswing in the fascist movement at the moment, campaigning against refugees and the issue of refugees, you know, what they call illegal immigrants and all this kind of nonsense. and when the anti-fascists mobilize against them what they're hearing more and more

is that are you lot are all anti-Semitic you support Jeremy Corbyn and your anti-Semite now that is definitely an example of cynicism because they don't care obviously the fascist right doesn't care about racists because they are racist and probably if you dig deep enough there you will find anti-Jewish sentiment

in one way or another but the issue of anti-Semitism has been so destroyed that it's being weaponized in this way. And what we see is from the Israel lobby, it is cynical because it comes from a completely wrong and twisted definition of anti-Semitism where anti-Semitism has been changed from its traditional definition, which, as I mentioned earlier, was at first. it was a self-definition, but then in terms of an anti-racist definition of anti-semitism, it was simply hatred of or prejudice against Jews as Jews. And now it's become this whole contorted thing whereby any kind of criticism of Israel is smeared and defamed as, quote-unquote, anti-Semitic.

We see that constantly from the state of Israel and its satellites in the West and around the world, that any kind of criticism and I mentioned the history of this in the book and I get into it where, and I locate it in 1972 with Abbe Iban the foreign minister of Israel at the time

who was at the time attacking what was called the new left at the time in the West and again this continues on from the history whereby the British left and the American left

in large part was very pro-Israel up until really up until the 60s and you know it was a gradual process of becoming more pro-Palestinian but we have this phenomenon where the you know what was called for what was called the new left then a lot of ways but Averyband said that the new left was the progenitor of what it called what he called the new anti-Semitism and the idea was that the new anti-Semitism was essentially anti-Zionism and so this was an anti-communist thing, obviously, as well, that despite the Soviet Union's unfortunate pro-and-brief pro-Zionist turn, the Soviet Union had become increasingly anti-Zionist,

and so this was a way to kind of attack the Western left as a whole, to say that it was anti-Semitic. And so this almost philosophy of new anti-Semitism, and it was quite often with a capital N sort of like a new Copacola kind of thing that it was a way to change and we need to value the definition

of anti-Semitism as a way to simply attack the left and since that speech in 1972 there was then a whole I mean if you go now to a second hour book shop website and you search for a new anti-Semitism

there's a whole slew of these books from the 1970s. onwards, you know, there was one written by the actual, by the ADL itself, the pro-Israel group, the anti-deformationally, which incidentally was, worked very closely with the state of Israel as and ran aspiring in the United States on behalf of Israel and apartheid South of that. But there's a whole slew of these books where they're saying they're trying to redefine anti-Semitism into new anti-Semitism, which is essentially opposition to Israel And what it boils down to his opposition to Israel, criticism of Israel, and opposition to Zionism, which is Israel's racist settler colonial ideology.

And so, you know, this is where it originates. And it is cynical in the sense that it's a completely wrong and, at best, modeled definition of anti-Semitism, which it's a political project. You know, they believe it in large part, but it's, I mean, that's like saying that, you know, fascists believe in fascism. They believe in this, but it doesn't make it any less cynical in my view. And so, you know, yeah, there was people who, there was people within the Labour Party who were confused about it. But I think in terms of this, what I define as a kind of reactionary vanguard within the Labour Party, This is why the Israel lobby has become such a useful kind of gradually vanguard for the, for Western imperialism, really. Yeah, excellent, lots of interesting points there that I hope we'll get a chance to follow up.

But I did want to further extend this kind of point that Rhett raised about some of the features of contemporary politics. that this whole episode seems to really exemplify and illustrate rather acutely. You know, one component of it is this kind of campus politics and scandals about campus politics and the so-called intolerance of the universities and their culture simply because ever since the new left, the universities have ended up being almost the only institutional space where left politics, you know, could really have some genuine purchase. And of course, it's, you know, gone through its evolutions in various ways of maybe over-emphasizing certain identity and culture war components as opposed to class and anti-imperialist politics. But, you know,

they're all intention there. But there is definitely the way in which, as you discussed in your book, in one chapter about the Oxford crisis, the way in which campus politics around Israel apartheid week, which I recall when that started to come through in the mid-2000s as a way of dramatizing the BDS struggle and making the connection between solidarity work internationally through the BDS campaign in the same way that it had been to end apartheid, you know, in South Africa, was such a threat that it led to this ministry that you've referred to and so on. So that's one component that maybe it's worth thinking a little bit about the campus sort of dimensions. We sometimes think, oh, these campus politics don't really matter, but your

story kind of shows the way these are integrated. The second component of it is also this kind of politics around causing distress and that you can't discuss the truth. And you already referred to, you know, the history of the Nazi kind of support in some ways for the idea of Zionism, i.e. the idea that Jews don't belong in Europe and that they should be resettled somewhere else, something that shouldn't even be controversial. Somebody like Hannah Arendt talked about it. And she was no like investigative historian finding kind of obscure documents. I mean, these things were readily available when she was, you know, discussing the trial of Eichmann and, you know, for the New Yorker and reporting on it. And she, you know, kind of talked about how Eichmann had been involved with thinking about plans for how to transport Jews out of

of Europe before the final solution that accomplished the genocide of the Jews. There was, you know, maybe there's some intermediate things we can do, we can encourage them to leave, we can help them leave, and so on. So the Ken Livingstone affair, I think, something you also dedicated a chapter to is also another example of some of these features of contemporary politics where a statement about history turned into causing grief, you know, to the Jewish community and needed to be apologized for in the same way that Nas Shah had to kind of, you know, for sort of banal remarks, because you're causing distress to a community. So truth can't be discussed because.

some of the consequences of actually confronting truth might, you know, cause people to feel really bad, you know, about it. So I'm wondering if you could maybe talk about how this whole Corbyn episode is just so illustrative in these key ways and why you wanted to kind of stitch those links in your, in your book. Well, just to add one other component in real quick, Adnan, and it's something that you've actually covered on your other podcast, The Mudge List, and something that Asa talked about And his last answer is the redefining of anti-Semitism, particularly the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. So the listeners can't see, but AESA has an opposed IHRA poster immediately behind him. And Adnan, like I said, you have at least one episode of the modulus, I think two.

We've had three, maybe three. Okay, two or three that are about the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. And the fact that we're redefining anti-Semitism in such a way that ASA was touching. on in that previous answer of his is also a critical component of this in terms of campus politics about what's acceptable discussion on campuses, but what's acceptable discussion within the political realm talking about the Ken Livingstone affair. So that's also another component that can be weaved into here is that redefinition of anti-Semitism, particularly the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which like I said, ASA was talking about a little bit in

the last answer. And listeners, you can hear a lot more about, like, tuning into Adnan's other podcast, the Mudgellus. Yeah, it's definitely related. I think this whole issue and topic of identity politics is really interesting and kind of disturbing in a lot of ways. I think, and it does relate to campus politics a lot, where, as you mentioned, Adnan, this issue becomes, the left has, in a lot. of ways, yeah, I mean, look, the left has become distracted by identity politics in a lot of ways. It has to be said. I don't want to overstate it. Obviously, you know, I don't want to go too far the other way where obviously class is not the only issue that's important, right? Like,

racism exists in our societies and therefore, you know, people talking about issues of race and identity is obviously important. But it has become, we've definitely, the Corbynures were really illustrative of where the Western left has kind of gone astray in some ways on this issue, I think. Because, and the issue of weaponized anti-Semitism really showed that. And there's a part of my book where I talk about this and how, there's a really emblematic incident which happened when and actually it happened on Twitter

as suitably um which was where and it they were so in 2009 there was a discussion on Twitter by um several young Labour Party activists and you know these were this was a few years after the Oxford incident that you referred to and so there's a The Labour Party activist called Laura McNeil, and at the time in 2019, she was the youth representative on Labor's ruling body, the NEC National Executive Committee. And this was during the general, or at least a run-up to the general election campaign. And Jeremy Corby was being attacked by Margaret Hodge, one of the pro-Israel Labor MPs, who I mentioned in the book, She played a fairly dedicated, I mean, an incredibly dedicated part in trying to sabotage Corbyn from within the Labour Party, from the right of the Labour Party, and because she's pro-Israel. And Lara O'Neill was trying to defend her.

So she was a pro-Corbyn member of the Labour's ruling executive, but she was quite equivocal in a lot of ways she was, didn't really like Jeremy Corbyn himself. She didn't really, she didn't just come out and say, look, this is a witch hand, this is a smear campaign. And she kind of, because of, because of identity politics, it made it, it made it difficult for a lot of people to say, well, no, Jeremy Corbyn's not anti-Semitic. Because when there's people who and the groups are identifying themselves as, oh, we are the Jewish labor movement, they're saying, well, this is anti-Semitic. people didn't, were often too afraid to then stand up and say, well, what's the actual evidence of this? You know, we can't, and to try and talk about objective facts of history, as you said. And so because of that, she came out with this sort of timid defense of Jeremy Corbyn. But even that, you know, she said, you know, Corbyn was being accused of, you know, being anti-Semitic and this MP was leaving the party.

or thinking about leaving the party and then other members of the Jewish Labour movement, this other pro-Israel group within the Labour Party then attacked Lara Wignil and they said that like

just her very sort of tentative defense of Corby and saying like I don't think this I don't think it's true that he's anti-Semitic they then in turn accused her of what they call

quite institutional anti-Semitism because she was on the ruling NEC and so, you know, and they even said she was du baiting and this stuff even though she wasn't she wasn't doing anything of the sort and her defense

was quite tentative and, you know, she then went on to defend herself she said, I'm not sure I'm not sure how it constitutes the scale of your accusations. Am I not entitled to disagree with that. So then the response came, no, you're not Jewish.

So it was that bold. Like, if you're not Jewish, you can't say, you can't then defend yourself against facts. If you can't, you can't sort of accurately stand up to this. And so, I mean, I don't know, that response just kind of encapsulated so much to me about this. It was so boldly stated, oh, no, you're not Jewish. So therefore, you can't ever. say anything about

anti-Semitism. The same principle is then never replied you know in other areas it would never be really stated that a white person couldn't defend themselves against an

allegation of anti-black racism so it wouldn't therefore make them automatically racist to defend themselves against that on a factual basis this you know and so yeah that was that was a very powerful weapon because it was kind of seen as and correctly it was seen as um in to use their sort of terminology these were always terminology in one instance it was seen as kind of putting the tanks on the the left's own lawn right

because it was like this is something that really goes to the heart of how the left defined itself as the left. It was people who stood up to defend the rights of oppressed minorities. And the pro-Israel Jewish groups, especially the Jewish labor movement, kind of then weaponized this form of identity politics because they define themselves as a minority, as an oppressed minority, even though I don't think that's really true. but they kind of took this positionality

whereby they were constantly saying that there was a threat to the Jewish community in Britain and it just reached really hysterical levels where there was even one I mentioned this in the beginning of the book there was one author and historian

this right-wing historian who claimed on National Radio that Jeremy Corbyn quote wanted to reopen Auschwitz. And this was just one small example of how crazy the British media got. He was allowed to say this on national radio with no real, there was a little bit, I mean, it has to be said in that instance, there was a little bit of pushback from the radio host because that was just outright defamatory.

But there was so many instances of this kind of mass hysteria over the years about all kinds of things were said about Corbyn. So it came to the point where he was. just seemed to be this you could say anything about him really on this issue he defended himself in other ways successfully defended himself in other ways

like he there was this there was a story in the the sun the right wing tabloid the sun about how he during the cold of war he was supposedly this spy for the Czechoslovakian

communist government it was completely untrue it was just invented and Corbyn successfully sued the newspaper for that and donated the proceeds to charity but there was no similar pushback on the issue of anti-Semitism and so it meant that by the end he was so weak on the issue

that he was able to just be openly defamed even by one of his own MPs. Margaret Hodd who called him a fucking racist and anti-Semite to his face and then talked about it on the radio afterwards and it just meant that he became so distracted and he was unable to actually talk about the policies

that he really wanted to talk about. And the things I mentioned at the beginning, the re-nationalization of the railways, public ownership of public utilities, and just try and swing the barometer the other direction and to try and move things into a more hopeful direction where the government would operate. in the interests of the masses, he spent all of his time instead condemning anti-Semitism.

His main response to all of these defamations was, we condemn anti-Semitism, we oppose anti-Semitism, I will not tolerate anti-Semitism again and again over and over. And ironically, he was then accused by the mainstream media of not condemning anti-Semitism, not apologizing, even though he did constantly keep doing this. well you know who could disagree with the statement we condemn anti-semitism of course we all condemn you know prejudice against Jewish people but the problem is he that then ended up he was kind of shooting himself in the foot by doing that because he gave the impression that he did have something to apologize for that there was credence to these allegations even though the facts show that

in 99.9% of the case the times there was no basis to any of this it was actually what was being condemned was criticism of Israel was really yes there was okay there were some cases on social media people saying things that maybe were a bit crude a bit exaggerated you know Naiz Shah posted a meme online

of them and this was from years ago as well just this silly thing where it said like oh the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is to move Israel to the United States

You know, it's obviously not intended as like any kind of serious proposal. It's just a stupid graphic posted online. And it was years before she was even an MP. But it was then sort of disinterred as this great national scandal. And oh, we've got this terrible anti-Semitism problem within the Labour Party. And that ended up with the suspension of Ken Livingston, who was one of the most important leaders of the Labour Party. left for many, many years. And I was a very successful mayor of London, left-wing mayor of

London, who was forged anti-imperialist ties, including with Hugo Chavez. And Ken Lewison was really destroyed by that, really, was what happened. And Corbyn lost one of his most powerful supporters. And it was a real shame what happened. And it, you know, it shows that this whole thing was quite successful and it's still carrying on now and the Labour Party left was certainly the Labour Party left and really a large, the broad left in Britain was really destroyed by the whole weaponised anti-Semitism campaign and it's still carrying on now and yeah I think as you mentioned this there is a very sad story. Well yes indeed and I mean I think one it's a couple of the other implications following on from as you pointed out that

derailing of his genuinely popular left-wing policy agenda, which wasn't itself, so incredibly radical, but was not common sense as he tried to promote. But what it did is it really distracted from genuine right-wing anti-Semitism, which is increasingly over the last, you know, several years become a very serious and growing kind of problem, while also, you know, the success of the lobby in framing itself as the genuine and exclusive representatives of the Jewish identity and community in Britain meant that a genuine Jewish anti-Zionists were completely marginalized in this discussion. And many of them have actually been purged, you know, because they've been discussing the issue in trying to expose the contradictions between associating through this definition.

of anti-Semitism, loyalty to Israel, because they are not loyal to Israel, because they have criticisms of Israel. They themselves have ended up being accused of anti-Semitism or bringing into disrepute the labor party and so on. And so clearly what happened by not taking a strong firm stance, you know, Corbyn's continuing kind of approach or during those years ended up also allowing all of his own strongest allies who many of them were Jewish anti-Zionists to be liquidated and purged from the party while also ignoring other aspects where there's a lot of evidence of racism in the in the in the in the labor party uh the forward report uh maybe that's something you can also discuss about the consequences and the you know that that part of the

story but you know it clearly shows that there's there is a problem of racism in the Labour Party is mostly anti-black and anti-Muslim Islamophobia, you know, and that has also also been completely sidelined. Yeah, absolutely. I have a chapter in the book dedicated to the issue of the left-wing Jews who were increasingly being purged from the Labour Party and who were sort of de-duified, you know, for one of a better phrase in the mainstream media. So, you know, this would happen time and time again.

There would be a left-wing criticism of Israel, someone who opposed Zionism, they said something, someone who supported Jeremy Corbyn and who was more often than not a Jewish person themselves. And then that was reported in the most twisted way in the mainstream media. First of all, they wouldn't be mentioned that they were Jewish, quite often to disguise that. they weren't named. It just said there was this terrible anti-Semitic thing that was said

and you read the details of it and it was actually somebody criticizing Israel and the context that they were themselves Jewish was then not mentioned and they were then often purged from the Labour Party

because of that as you mentioned and I get into the details of that in that chapter especially and because of that We ended up in the most ridiculous circumstance where quite a few times what happened was you would get a non-Jewish person, pro-Israel person, such as Joan Ryan MP, who was the chairperson of Labour Friends of Israel for most of the Corbyn years, who, you know, she would then be quite often criticising as anti-Semitic, a Jewish person. person for who was then criticizing Israel, you know, for the, the sensible crime of criticizing Israel, a Gentile was criticizing as Jew as anti-Semitic, you know, and that is just an example of how twisted the whole thing became, the whole definition of anti-Semitism has become.

And it happens a lot, you know, we get these Labour Party bureaucrats are increasingly purging pro-Palestinian Jews from the Labour Party for this ostensible anti-Semitism, which is I mean, it will be couched in certain ways. It will be like, well, you're bringing the party into disrepute, bringing the party into disrepute. They might not necessarily outright state that it's anti-Semitic,

but they'll quote a tweet, which is criticising Israel in some way, And the implication will be that, yeah, you fall in a foul of the IHRA definition, or in some other way or another, they'll be at least trying to imply or to smear that it's anti-Semitism in some way, if not outright, just saying it. And so, yeah, it's a really sad state of affairs. Yeah, and of course, there's lots to be said on this entire point. I mean, making being Jewish synonymous with support of a right-wing, apartheid, settler colonial state can be seen in and of itself as anti-Semitic in a lot of ways. The diluting of the term by over-applying it cynically to your political enemies. It dilutes the seriousness of that term and allows right-wing forms of anti-Semitism to flourish. There's a sense

in which the left actually has the real criticism of Israeli policies and, you know, through our anti-imperialist lens and our critique of colonialism, we understand like these real world ways in which the Israeli state hurts and harms Palestinian people, et cetera, while the right wing just invents conspiracy theories about how, like, you know, Jews are in control of international banking and they've infiltrated our governments. And so there's a sense in which the actual left-wing real-world critiques are more of a short-term threat, but by trying to cynically label that criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, you're allowing it to foster and blossom on the right. because often when you're attacking the far left, you are siding with the right, whether you know it or not, consciously or not, and you're bolstering their narratives, etc. But the question I really want to ask is, in retrospect, seeing that you were mentioning how Corbyn would, you know, apologize endlessly about this. And, you know, in retrospect, we can look at that strategically as being a mistake. But this is a lesson I think we should learn. Because, again, here in the U.S., it might not be anti-Semitism, but, you know, Bernie bros. I mean, it goes back to the Obama bros.

weaponizing sexism, racism, anything they can against the class and anti-imperialist left. So it behooves us to try to understand what's the best way to try to deal with these accusations when they come up? So in your opinion, what do you think Corbyn could have done or could have reacted to this whole scandal in a way that would have bolstered his side or maybe skipped around it and centered the policies that actually matter? If you were advising him in round two, what would you say to him as far as what his approach should be in the face of these accusations? Well, what I would say to that is the sorrow voices clearly says all along to, let's just sweep this under the rug, let's just apologize, cut it off and then we can move on. That never worked. Time and time again, they just had to keep coming back to the issue. So I'm afraid there's no other way around it than just calling it out for what it is, which is a cynical, weaponized form of anti-Semitism and that this is a smear campaign, you know. the whole weaponized anti-Semitism was such a circular logic. It became this neat sort of circular logic, whereby if you did that and you said, well, this isn't true. And that was then further evidence of anti-Semitism.

So, yeah, he would have, if he did that, he would have been attacked more. But there's no way around it. You just have to say this is untrue. I'm being attacked for, it's not about real anti-Semitism. Yes, real anti-Semitism exists on the right. and we condemn that and we work against that and no one has worked against that more than me but we also condemn weaponised

false accusations of anti-Semitism and you just have to do that you just have to be able to say that he should have said I'm being attacked for my criticisms of Israel I'm being attacked because I'm a Palestine solidarity activist he did do it occasionally it has to be said to give him credit he did do it

there was a couple of times he did do it There was a case during, and I mentioned this in the book, in 2018, of course you'll remember the demonstrations by Palestinians in Gaza where they were doing peaceful demonstrations and our demonstration, I mean, you can't really call them peaceful because they were gunned down by the Israelis, you know, so it wasn't peaceful in that sense because it was attacked, but the Palestinians were unarmed and they went peacefully to the borderline with. with the Israeli occupation forces and they demonstrated against it and they wanted to go back to their homes because of course, you know, the majority of people in Gaza are refugees and the descendants of refugees expelled

from historic Palestine what's now called Israel by some. And so they were demonstrating to go back to their homes. Well, the response in 2018, they were just brutally guned down by Israeli snipers. and there was a window there where it was condemned by even politicians in the West, even by some politicians in America.

And Benjamin Netanyahu at that time was attacking quite openly, rather than just sort of the Israelis deploying their Israel lobby organizations as they do. He was openly on Twitter attacking Jeremy Corbyn as quote-unquote anti-Semitic and all this kind of stuff. and Corbyn, to his credit, on his Twitter, and by that point, everything, you could tell everything Corbyn posted on his social media was being vetted by his team. So to his credit, he did fight back against that particular tweet and he said, he didn't get into addressing the details of the allegation, just said it's untrue, which is the right thing to do. There's no point. But I, I mean, I had to do it as a reporter, and I do get into the ins and out of a lot of these allegations in the book. I kind of had to do that.

But obviously, as a politician, probably the best thing to do is just say, this is a lie. Just say this is a lie. He did that. He said, this is Benjamin Netanyahu's allegations. You know, he's Jeremy Corbyn, he's a nice guy. He's not going to just say, fuck off.

You're talking about bitch. He said, Benjamin Netanyahu's allegations against me are untrue, but what should be condemned is the gunning down of 200 Palestinians or whatever it was in cold blood. That was good. You know, that was really good. That was effective. And it worked at the time, but unfortunately, that was more the exception than the rule.

I mean, that was such an obvious case of the actual Prime Minister of Israel. But he should have been able to do that against the pro-Israel lobby groups as well. And he didn't, you know, he didn't do that. He just sort of said, oh, we condemn anti-Semitism. He should have said, yes, we all condemn the anti-Semitism, which overly comes from the right, from the far-right groups. But we also condemn the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. these allegations against me are true and they're being deployed because I am a

Palestine solidarity activist because I support the right of Palestinians to live in equality you know he could still carry on using his human rights framework which you know as we know is it has limits and certain problems and so forth but nonetheless you know it's not always wrong to you know yes Israel is violating Palestinians human rights that's a fact obviously And so, you know, he continued using all this kind of narrative, but fighting back, you know, because you can't, at the end of the day, you can't win an election if you don't, if you're not seen by most people, by most working class people as a winner. And you have to be able to win and fight back. And I think that was a large part of his weakness. You know, he was seen as someone who was kind of climbing down in a way.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that's the main advice is you've just got to fight. If he don't fight, you're going to lose. You might not win. You might not have won if he'd fall back. But you're definitely going to lose if you don't fight. And on that issue, particularly the issue of weaponized anti-Semitism, he didn't fight back. And this issue of the far right, anti-Semitism on the far right, that was something as well. You know, you're right to raise this because he could have used that too.

Because A, that's something you want to campaign on. anyway, because the far right, the racism of the far right, including anti-Semitism, is obviously something that needs to be fought and opposed. But he could have used it as a way to deflect this issue of weaponized anti-Semitism as well. Because more often increasingly in the modern world, the far right is actually embedded with the state of Israel itself. And these far-right forces are then often still anti-Semitic and pro-Israel at the same time. And, you know, they will then use Israel, the state of Israel, their support for

the state of Israel, as a deflection against their historic and current genuine anti-semitism, or they say, oh, well, we can't possibly be anti-Semitic because we support Israel. We'll scratch the service and we know that's actually not true. And we see that in examples, especially in places like Ukraine, where, you know, the Aztele battalion is historical, and currently anti-Jewish but yet is receiving support from the state of Israel and is supporting

in turn the state of Israel itself and so there was all kinds of possibilities there which were just not explored and were not tried. There was all kinds of you know PR I mean look I'm a journalist at the end of the day it's not really my role to kind of

advise politicians in that way but even I as a journalist can see there were so many possibilities there that were not done. Yeah, and really quick, just to kind of double down on what you said, like, you know, you could say something like, we condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms, we condemn it on the far right and their versions of conspiracy theories and all this other stuff. We condemn the Israeli government, not Jewish people, but also you could say part of condemning anti-Semitism is condemning the cynical weaponization of it against your political opponents.

That is a form of anti-Semitism, and we stand against it. That would be a great line. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think that that's a great note to end on, actually. This is a really tremendous work. I want to encourage all of the listeners to pick up the book. As Anon said earlier, it's a great work of history, even if it's a modern history.

But this is something that we really need to take in to learn from, as Asa was talking about in this last answer, how we can learn from the experience of the Israel Lobby, bringing down Jeremy Corbin in the UK, and learn how to combat similar attempts as we go forward because it's inevitably going to be weaponized once again. So again, the title of the book is weaponizing anti-Semitism, how the Israel Lobby brought down Jeremy Corby. It's available from OR books,

and I really do encourage everybody to pick it up. Thanks a lot for coming on, Asa. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and your excellent work. Like I said, I've been following you for years, and if the listeners have not been reading you before, now is the time to start. Thank you very much for saying that.

My book is available in all good bookshops and some bad ones as well. But you can get it direct. You can support independent radical publishing by buying it direct from the publisher, so at our books.com. And you could follow all my work by subscriber to my Substack newsletter, ASAWinstanley.substack.com.

There's free and paid subscription options there. So everything that I write goes out there. And most of my media appearances, podcast appearances, I try and link to them or we publish them there in some way, although there's been a lot at the moment. So it's hard to keep up with them all. but generally speaking, you can follow my word. I mean, I'm on Twitter as well, but, um, yeah,

Hesley.com and O.R.Bugs.com for the book. Yeah, fabulous. Definitely recommend the listeners to do that. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? And I am really encouraging them to check out your other podcast if they're interested in that IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and the conversations that you had surrounding it because, as we mentioned, you have a couple of episodes devoted to that. Yeah, well, listeners can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and as you've mentioned, Henry, they can check out the M-U-L-L-L-S podcast, M-A-J-L-I-S.

We haven't had a new episode in a little while. Hopefully in the fall that will change, we'll pick up again. But you can look at our back archive, especially the two and maybe three, I think, discussions we've had at different phases of attempts to, establish the IHRA definition as the official definition in the province of Ontario and various struggles around that and analysis of it. So do check out the mudgeless MHA LIS. Yeah, absolutely. Brett, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent shows online? And you might as well tell them what you're recording right after we record this episode because this episode will be coming out next week. Fair. Yeah, you can find everything I do politically at

Revolutionary Left Radio.com. And the thing that we're working on now is a series on W.E.B. DeBoise, having several scholars on to address different aspects of his work. I really think it's important for the American left, in particular to study De Bois and understand the unique history of anti-black racism in the U.S. and how it's tied to capitalist development. And so, yeah, Gerald Horn is going to be our first guest on that series, and I'm really looking forward to it. So you can check that out at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. And of course, I had you mention that because, as the listeners know, Gerald Horne is a friend of ours. He's been on our show several times, and we always get really great feedback when

Professor Horne is on the show, and so certainly they will be interested in listening to him discuss W.E.B. Du Bois, the person who he's written, I think two biographies on already. So, you know, who better to start that series on? So definitely check that out. As for me, listeners. You can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. As I mentioned earlier in the episode, the translation that we did of Domenico Lassardo-S-L Stalin, History and Critique of a Black Legend, has open for pre-orders now. You can find that information on iskerbooks.org, which is the publisher of that book. Pre-orders are open on Amazon and we'll be coming to bookstores near you very soon.

And of course, you can support guerrilla history by going to patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. That allows us to continue doing the episodes like this that we have been doing and bringing you new content basically every week. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with what we're putting out at Gorilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.