The documentary is constantly held up to 'prove' there is an Israeli plot to interfere in British politics. It doesn't
July 15, 2019 15:59
As the Labour antisemitism storm has reared its ugly head again following a BBC Panorama documentary, in their attempt to defend the Labour Party, hardcore Corbynites have been flagging up a different documentary - a four part ‘expose’ by Al Jazeera called The Lobby.
People determined to rubbish claims of Labour’s now glaringly obvious antisemitism problem are citing The Lobby as evidence that the crisis is not the fault of its racist members but Israeli determination to interfere in British politics.
Since it was some time ago, it is worth revisiting what the Al Jazeera documentary actually ‘uncovered’ after six months of secret filming.
It presented its programme with a gusto that suggested it had footage of Benjamin Netanyahu flying into London on a private jet and handing cash-filled envelopes to Israel-friendly Labour MPs in a disused London underground station.
The allegation was that Israel was engaged in plots to bring down government ministers it did not like or thought were unsympathetic to its aims.
Unfortunately it was nowhere near as exciting or ‘Homeland’ as it sounds. It had filmed two Israeli junior aides with close to zero influence, boasting about how much power they had over a lunch with an undercover reporter.
The documentary famously showed embassy employee Shai Masot eating with an aide to a junior minister. The Israeli was filmed saying how difficult Sir Alan Duncan was and how they’d rather he wasn’t in office.
In another piece of footage, the same Israeli told the chair of Labour Friends of Israel that the Israeli government was making funding available for young activists to visit Israel – a trip that was openly arranged, advertised by and paid for by the Israeli Embassy. In the meeting, the LFI chair simply recommended people who might be appropriate to go on such a trip. That trip – which never even took place - had nothing to do with MPs’ delegations or LFI.
Fans of the documentary have taken this mundane exchange to mean the Israeli Embassy was nefariously offering to pay LFI bundles of cash (£1 million has been suggested) to fund its own trips, which is entirely false. The documentary makers had literally taken a well-known and public fact (that most other countries do) and presented it as a closely guarded secret, because you know, Israel.
I often wonder if presented with the other fact that in 2014 Jeremy Corbyn attended a similar type of trip to Iran as part of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Iran, Labour members’ heads might explode.
Then there was the attempt to ensnare Ella Rose – a former Union of Jewish Students president who worked at the time as director of the Jewish Labour Movement – and was shown by Al Jazeera in tears after repeated clashes with anti-Israel activists.
The frankly creepy filming of Ms Rose as she recounted how the online anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada revealed details of her former employment at the Israeli Embassy, did not seem to bother fans of The Lobby.
Her tears for them were a sign of her ‘guilt’ in presumably having had a job once.
The documentary showed how Ms Rose became the subject of an attack by Jackie Walker – now expelled from Labour for making comments that were “prejudicial” and “grossly detrimental” to the party.
Never mind that Ms Walker, the former Momentum vice chair, has claimed that “many Jews” were “financiers” of the African sugar and slave trade, or wrongly suggested Holocaust Memorial Day did not commemorate other genocides, or say she could not find a definition of antisemitism that she could work with, because a Jewish woman having had a job is literally all the evidence people seem to need to blindly ignore the above.
Now, two years on from The Lobby, Labour members are so staggeringly comfortable with their hostility towards Jewish ‘comrades’ concerned about racism that one Labour member had the confidence, live on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show, to turn to Stratford Councillor Joshua Garfield, who was sharing his experience of anti-Jewish racism within the Labour Party, and accuse his “people” of making it up.
Catch a Labour member refer to the Al Jazeera ‘Lobby’ doc, turn to me and say ‘one of your people’ (i.e. Jews) on live Telly this morning.@etft24 and I commented to each other that the show felt like our twitter timeline brought to life.#VictoriaLIVE #LabourAntisemitism pic.twitter.com/mph4Ed1lmr
— Joshua Garfield (@JoshuaGarfield) July 11, 2019
With the kind of language Nick Griffin could be proud of, a Labour member responded to evidence that cranks such as NEC member Pete Willsman have alleged antisemitism is made up by Israel, to say, not, “Oh god what a craven conspiracy theorist,” but “Yeah have you seen The Lobby”?
As the cameras rolled he was so at home in his antisemitic conspiracy that he turned to the Jewish Labour member behind him and uttered the words, “One of your people was seen actually taking bribes.”
And herein lies the problem. Antisemitism has always existed on the left but under the current leadership it has been allowed to flourish.
Which means that left wing antisemites today are no longer confined to dilapidated community hall fringe meetings, they are invited on national television and given a mic.
