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Thursday 26 April 2018

Telegraph Anti-Semitism Hypocrisy

The increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph has used its front page today to claim that the Labour Party is deep in anti-Semitism, homing in on Union boss Len McCluskey and his clear disdain for the deliberate attempts by a handful of MPs to undermine the party leadership. But while the Tel is pretending that it’s all Labour’s fault, what they are not telling is that they have been dabbling in anti-Semitism themselves.
Splashed across the page we see “They will be held to account … As the Labour anti-Semitism row deepens [!], union baron [!] threatens five MPs who challenged Corbyn on the issue”. McCluskey is quoted as saying “I look with disgust at the behaviour of the Corbyn-hater MPs”. Sadly, though, the impact of this attack has already been dulled.

We know this because the Tel has been indulging in anti-Semitic dog whistling so bad that even sham press non-regulator IPSO has declined to wipe its arse. After the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (itself no stranger to the endorsement of bigotry) complained about an online article titled “What’s missing? The countries with no airports, railways, trees and World Heritage Sites”, IPSO had no option but to find against the Tel.

Why should this be? This is what the press regulation people found: “The article was published in the publication’s travel section. It contained a number of lists of countries apparently lacking a certain characteristic. For example, it contained a list of 5 countries without airports, 15 countries with no mountains, and 9 countries without rivers. Under the subheading ‘no banks’, the article stated: ‘Only three countries on the planet don’t have a central bank owned or controlled by the Rothschild family’, and listed: Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.” Rothschild, like Soros or Globalist, is code for Jews or Jewish.
So it was no surprise that “The complainant said that the claim that these three countries are the only countries which do not have a central bank controlled by the Rothschild family, was inaccurate, and a modern version of the antisemitic myth that this particular Jewish family are behind the word’s ills, and part of a global Jewish conspiracy”.

The Telegraph was caught bang to rights peddling anti-Semitic tropes. Its excuse was utterly lame: “a regrettable error, arising from momentary carelessness”. Not momentary interest, then? And it’s not the Tel’s first foray into using anti-Semitic tropes to flog a few more papers: in February they brought us the infamous blaming of the non-existant “plot to thwart Brexit” on George Soros - another anti-Semitic dog-whistle.

Then, the paper summoned hacks for an all hands meeting at which senior staff told that the splash was not anti-Semitic, honestly. Nick Timothy, the man who lost Theresa May her majority, dismissed claims of dog-whistling, demanding withdrawals and apologies. Timothy has, after he was caught lying in his attempts to defend Theresa May over the Windrush débâcle, seen his reputation go down the pan.

The Telegraph is making a habit of peddling anti-Semitic material. And trying to tell readers to “look over there at Labour” is not going to help its cause. What a bunch of bigots.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd love to see the Telegraph propaganda clerks try to take on McCluskey face-to-face.

They won't of course because they'd have their arses kicked from Canary Wharf to Westminster and back again. Which means they'll stay hunkered down in their far right bunker. The gutless meffs.