Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
We can defeat the corporate media’s war to snuff out independent journalism
I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call the “mainstream” media.
Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media – in my case, the Guardian – and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.
More and more journalists are following a similar path today – a few out of choice, and more out of necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate themselves from the strictures of the old corporate media, that same corporate media is working very hard to characterise the new technology as a threat to media freedoms.
This self-serving argument should be treated with a great deal of scepticism. I want to use my own experiences to argue that quite the reverse is true. And that the real danger is allowing the corporate media to reassert its monopoly over narrating the world to us.
‘Mainstream’ consensus
I left my job at the Guardian newspaper group in 2001. Had I tried to become an independent journalist 10 years earlier than I did, it would have been professional suicide. In fact, it would have been a complete non-starter. I certainly would not be here telling you what it was like to have spent 20 years challenging the “mainstream” western consensus on Israel-Palestine.
Before the Noughties, without a platform provided by a corporate media outlet, journalists had no way to reach an audience, let alone create one. We were entirely beholden to our editors, and they in turn were dependent on billionaire owners – or in a few cases like the BBC’s, a government – and on advertisers.
When I arrived in Nazareth as a freelance journalist, though one with continuing connections to the Guardian, I quickly found myself faced with a stark choice.
Newspapers would accept relatively superficial articles from me, ones that accorded with a decades-old, western, colonial mindset about Israel-Palestine. Had I contributed such pieces for long enough, I would probably have managed to reassure one of the papers that I was an obliging and safe pair of hands. Eventually, when a position fell vacant, I might have landed myself a well-paid correspondent’s job.
Instead I preferred to write authentically – for myself, reporting what I observed on the ground, rather than what was expected of me by my editors. That meant antagonising and gradually burning bridges with the western media.
Even in a digital era of new journalistic possibilities, there were few places to publish. I had to rely on a couple of what were then newly emerging websites that were prepared to publish very different narratives on Israel-Palestine from the western corporate media’s.
Level playing field
The most prominent at the time, which became the first proper home for my journalism, was Al-Ahram Weekly, an English-language sister publication of the famous Cairo daily newspaper. Few probably remember or read Al-Ahram Weekly today, because it was soon overshadowed by other websites. But at the time it was a rare online refuge for dissident voices, and included a regular column from the great public intellectual Edward Said.
It is worth pausing to think about how foreign correspondents operated in the pre-digital world. They not only enjoyed a widely read, if tightly controlled, platform in an establishment media outlet, but they had behind them a vitally important support structure.
Their newspaper provided an archive and library service so that they could easily research historical and newsworthy events in their region. There were local staff who could help with locating sources and offering translations. They had photographers who contributed visuals to their pieces. And they had satellite phones to file breaking news from remote locations.
None of this came cheap. A freelance journalist could never have afforded any of this kind of support.
All that changed with the new technology, which rapidly levelled the playing field. A Google search soon became more comprehensive than even the best newspaper library. Mobile phones made it easy to track down and speak to people who were potential sources for stories. Digital cameras, and then the same mobile phones, meant it was possible to visually record events without needing a photographer alongside you. And email meant it was easy to file copy from anywhere in the world, to anywhere, virtually free.
Documentary evidence
The independent journalism I and others were developing in the early Noughties was assisted by a new kind of political activist who was using similarly novel digital tools.
After I arrived in Nazareth, I had little use for the traditional “access journalism” my corporate colleagues chiefly relied on. Israeli politicians and military generals dissembled to protect Israel’s image. Far more interesting to me were the young western activists who had begun embedding – before that term got corrupted by the behaviour of corporate journalists – in Palestinian communities.
Today we remember names like Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, Brian Avery, Vittorio Arrigoni and many others for the fact that in the early Noughties they were either killed or wounded by Israeli soldiers. But they were part of a new movement of political activists and citizen journalists – many of them with the International Solidarity Movement – who were offering a different kind of access.
They used digital cameras to record and protest the Israeli army’s abuses and war crimes from up close inside Palestinian communities – crimes that had previously had gone unrecorded for western audiences. They then sent their documentary evidence and their eye-witness accounts to journalists by email or published them on “alternative” websites. For independent journalists like me, their work was gold-dust. We could challenge Israel’s implausible accounts with clear-cut evidence.
Sadly most corporate journalists paid little attention to the work of these activists. In any case, their role was quickly snuffed out. That was partly because Israel learnt that shooting a few of them served as a very effective deterrent, warning others to keep away.
But it was also because as technology became cheaper and more accessible – eventually ending up in mobile phones that everyone was expected to have – Palestinians could record their own suffering more immediately and without mediation.
Israel’s dismissal of the early, grainy images of the abuse of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers – as “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) – became ever less plausible, even to its own supporters. Soon Palestinians were recording their mistreatment in high definition and posting it directly to YouTube.
Unreliable allies
There was a parallel evolution in journalism. For my first eight years in Nazareth, I struggled to make any kind of living by publishing online. Egyptian wages were far too low to support me in Israel, and most alternative websites lacked the budget to pay. For the first years I lived a spartan life and dug into savings from my former, well-paid job at the Guardian. During this period I also wrote a series of books because it was so difficult to find places to publish my news reporting.
It was in the late Noughties that Arab media in English, led by Al-Jazeera, really took off, with Arab states making the most of the new favourable conditions provided by the internet. These outlets flourished for a time by feeding the appetite among sections of the western public for more critical coverage of Israel-Palestine and of western foreign policy more generally. At the same time, Arab states exploited the revelations provided by dissident journalists to gain more leverage in Washington policymaking circles.
My time with Al-Ahram came to an abrupt end after a few years, as the paper grew less keen on running hard-hitting pieces that showed Israel as an apartheid state or that explained the nature of its settler colonial ideology. Rumours reached me that the Americans were leaning on the Egyptian government and its media to tone down the bad news about Israel.
It would be the first of several exits I had to make from these English-language Arab media outlets. As their western readership and visibility grew, they invariably attracted hostile attention from western governments and sooner or later capitulated. They were never more than fickle, unreliable allies to western dissidents.
Editors as sheepdogs
Again, I would have been forced to abandon journalism had it not been for another technological innovation – the rise of social media. Facebook and Twitter soon rivalled the corporate media as platforms for news dissemination.
For the first time, it was possible for journalists to grow their own audiences independently of an outlet. In a few cases, that dramatically changed the power relations in favour of those journalists. Glenn Greenwald is probably the most prominent example of this trend. He was chased after first by the Guardian and then by the billionaire Pierre Omidyar, to set up the Intercept. Now he’s on his own, using the editorially hands-off online platform Substack.
In a news environment driven chiefly by shares, journalists with their own large and loyal followings were initially prized.
But they were also an implicit threat. The role of corporate media is to serve as a figurative sheep-dog, herding journalists each day into an ideological pen – the publication they write for. There are minor differences of opinion and emphasis between conservative publications and liberal ones, but they all ultimately serve the same corporate, business-friendly, colonial, war-mongering agenda.
It is the publication’s job, not the journalists’, to shape the values and worldview of its readers, over time limiting the range of possible thoughts they are likely to entertain.
Readers to the rescue
In the new environment of social media, that began to change. Not only have some journalists become more influential than the papers they write for, but others have abandoned the employee-servant model completely. They have reached the conclusion that they no longer need a corporate outlet to secure an audience. They can publish themselves, build their own readership, and generate their own income – freeing themselves from corporate servitude.
In the last few years, this is a path I have pursued myself – becoming mostly reader-financed. For most of us, it is a precarious option. But it is liberating too – in a way that no previous generation of journalists could ever have imagined possible.
We are subject to no editorial oversight or control, apart from our own self-imposed sense of what is right and fair, or in some cases what we think our readers are ready to hear. We have no bosses or advertisers to please or appease. Our owner are the readers. And with an owner that diverse and diffuse, we have been freed of the tyranny of billionaires and corporations.
This new model of journalism is revolutionary. It is genuinely pluralistic media. It allows a much wider spectrum of thought to reach the mainstream than ever before. And perhaps even more importantly, it allows independent journalists to examine, critique and expose the corporate media in real time, showing how little pluralism they allow and how often they resort to blatant falsehood and propaganda techniques.
The fact that a few journalists and activists can so convincingly and easily tear apart the coverage of corporate media outlets reveals how little relationship that coverage often bears to reality.
Reporters for hire
Corporate media took none of this lying down, of course, even if it was slow to properly gauge the dangers.
Dissident journalists are a problem not only because they have broken free of the controls of the billionaire class and are often doing a better job of building audiences than their corporate counterparts. Worse, dissident journalists are also educating readers so that they are better equipped to understand what corporate journalism is: that it is ideological prostitution. It is reporting and commentary for hire, by an establishment class.
The backlash from the corporate media to this threat was not long coming. Criticism – narratively managed by corporate outlets – has sought to character-assassinate dissident journalists and browbeat the social media platforms that host them. Reality has been inverted. Too often it is the critical thinking of dissident journalists that is maligned as “fake news”, and it is the genuine pluralism social media corporations have inadvertently allowed that is repudiated as the erosion of democratic values.
Social media platforms have put up only the most feeble resistance to the traditional corporate media-led campaign demanding they crack down on the dissidents they host. They are, after all, media corporations too, and have little interest in promoting free speech, critical thinking or pluralism.
Manipulated algorithms
What resistance they did muster, for a short time, largely reflected the fact that their early business model was to replace top-down traditional media with a new bottom-up media that was essentially led by readers. But as social media has gradually been merged into the traditional media establishment, it has preferred to join in with the censorship and to marginalise dissident journalists.
Some of this is done out in the open, with the banning of individuals or alternative sites. But more often it is done covertly, through the manipulation of algorithms making dissident journalists all but impossible to find. We have seen our page views and shares plummet over the past two years, as we lose the online battle against the same, supposedly “authoritative sources” – the establishment media – we have been exposing as fraudsters.
The perverse, self-serving discourse from establishment media about new media is currently hard to miss in the relentless attacks on Substack. This open platform hosts journalists and writers who wish to build their own audiences and fund themselves from reader donations. Substack is the logical conclusion of a path I and other have been on for two decades. It not only gets rid of the media’s sheepdog-editors, it dispenses with the ideological pens into which journalists are supposed to be herded.
Sordid history
James Ball, whose sordid history includes acting as the Guardian’s hatchet man on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was a predictable choice as the Guardian Group tried this month to discredit Substack. Here is Ball ridiculously fretting about how greater freedom for journalists might damage western society by stoking so-called “culture wars”:Concerns are emerging about what Substack is now, exactly. Is it a platform for hosting newsletters and helping people discover them? Or is it a new type of publication, one that relies on stoking the culture wars to help divisive writers build devoted followings? …
Being on Substack has for some become a tacit sign of being a partisan in the culture wars, not least because it’s a lot easier to build a devoted and paying following by stressing that you’re giving readers something the mainstream won’t.
Ball is the kind of second-rate stenographer who would have had no journalistic career at all were he not a hired gun for a corporate publication like the Guardian. Buried in his piece is the real reason for his – and the Guardian’s – concern about Substack:Such is Substack’s recent notoriety that people are now worrying that it might be the latest thing that might kill traditional media.
Notice the heavy-lifting that word “people” is doing in the quoted sentence. Not you or I. “People” refers to James Ball and the Guardian.
Severe price
But the gravest danger to media freedom lies beyond any supposed “culture wars”. As the battle for narrative control intensifies, there is much more at stake than name-calling and even skewed algorithms.
In a sign of how far the political and media establishment are willing to go to stop dissident journalism – a journalism that seeks to expose corrupt power and hold it to account – they have been making examples of the most significant journalists of the new era by prosecuting them.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been out of sight for a decade – first as a political asylum seeker, then as an inmate of a British prison – subjected to endlessly shifting pretexts for his incarceration. First, it was a rape investigation that no one wanted to pursue. Then, it was for a minor bail infraction. And more recently – as the other pretexts have passed their sellby date – it has been for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange could languish in jail for years to come.
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, a chronicler through his blog of the legal abuses Assange has suffered, has faced his own retribution from the establishment. He has been prosecuted and found guilty in a patently nonsensical “jigsaw identification” case relating to the Alex Salmond trial.
My talk has been recorded too early to know the outcome of Murray’s sentence hearing, which was due to take place the day before this festival [and was later postponed to Tuesday May 11]. But the treatment of Assange and Murray has sent a clear message to any journalist inspired by their courage and their commitment to hold establishment power to account: “You will pay a severe price. You will lose years of your life and mountains of money fighting to defend yourself. And ultimately we can and will lock you away.”
Peek behind the curtain
The west’s elites will not give up the corrupt institutions that uphold their power without a fight. We would be foolish to think otherwise. But new technology has offered us new tools in our struggle and it has redrawn the battleground in ways that no one could have predicted even a decade ago.
The establishment are being forced into a game of whack-a-mole with us. Each time they bully or dismantle a platform we use, another one – like Substack – springs up to replace it. That is because there will always be journalists determined to find a way to peek behind the curtain to tell us what they found there. And there will always be audiences who want to learn what is behind the curtain. Supply and demand are on our side.
The constant acts of intimidation and violence by political and media elites to crush media pluralism in the name of “democratic values” will serve only to further expose the hypocrisy and bad faith of the corporate media and its hired hands.
We must keep struggling because the struggle itself is a form of victory.
consortiumnews.com
Murray Sentenced to 8 Months in Prison
Craig Murray, the former British diplomat, has been sentenced to 8 months in prison for contempt of court during the 2020 trial of former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
May 11, 2021
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/05/11/m ... in-prison/
Craig Murray, an ex-British ambassador and blogger, has been sentenced to eight months in prison after being found guilty in March of contempt of court during the 2020 trial of former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond. He was given three weeks to turn himself into police, pending his appeal. Judge Lady Dorrian issued the sentence, she said, despite Murray’s health issues.
Murray faced up to two years in prison and unlimited fines.
Murray must surrender his passport making it impossible to travel to Spain on May 20 to testify in the case of UC Global spying on WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London. The court heard that remote arrangements to testify to the Spanish court would have to be made.
Murrray was charged with contempt for allegedly revealing the identity of four anonymous accusers indirectly; of writing about the exclusion of two jurors in violation of a court order and of allegedly prejudicing the case in Salmond’s favor. There was no pronouncement of guilt on the latter two charges. Salmond was acquitted at trial of 13 sex charges in March 2020.
Murray was found to have contravened an order by the Crown prosecutors to stop writing about the matter. Representatives of the Crown say Murray was warned of this in January 2020 and in August 2020.
Murray was charged in April 2020 with writing two articles on his website that led to the alleged prejudice in the Salmond case and to possible “jig-saw” identification, despite a court order of anonymity, of the women who alleged sexual assault against Salmond. The accusers’ identities were to remain anonymous by order of Lord Justice Clerk Lady Dorrian, who presided over both Salmond’s and Murray’s trials.
The 1981 Contempt of Court Act applies to “a publication which creates a substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced.” In the sentencing hearingg on Tuesday, which Consortium News had direct access to online, Dorrian called Murray’s contempt “grave” and on a “substantial” scale.
“Action in clear violation of the court even in a coded way needs to be treated as contempt in a grave way,” she said.
“He knew of jigsaw identification and relished in revealing it, thinking it was in the public interest,” she said. “In this he failed.”
Explosive Testimony
Murray testified in his case that he had evidence of a scheme against Salmond that involved Sturgeon’s chief of staff.
Murray’s sworn testimony outlined the alleged plot to silence himself and to apparently prevent Salmond from reentering politics.
Murray’s affidavits, if true, exposed deep corruption and collusion between the SNP, Crown prosecutors, Police Scotland and parts of the mainstream media.
Citing unnamed, insider sources that he says were in a position to know, Murray testified under oath that the sex crimes allegations against Salmond were an orchestrated attempt to destroy Salmond’s political career by rivals inside the Scottish National Party.
Murray testified that after reading of the allegations against Salmond in August 2018 he “made no attempt to discover the identity of the civil servant involved, but I did make strenuous efforts to discover who had leaked the story to the media.” After conferring with his contacts he “discovered with a high degree of certainty that the leaker was Liz Lloyd, Chief of Staff to Nicola Sturgeon.”
Murray testified that he called in an article for the sacking of two civil servants found in Salmond’s judicial review to have abused the process and that “if Nicola Sturgeon failed to act against them, it might indicate that she was herself involved in the campaign of false allegation against Alex Salmond.” Sturgeon’s spokeswoman accused Salmond of “spinning false conspiracy theories” to deflect attention from the accusations, even after he was acquitted.
Scottish Cabinet in 2007, with Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond in foreground. (Scottish government)
After this article appeared Salmond asked to meet Murray at the George Hotel in Edinburgh. “Here, for the first time, he told me that Nicola Sturgeon had been behind the process designed to generate false accusations against him,” Murray testified. He said that Salmon won his judicial review case because, “It was on the day that witnesses from Nicola Sturgeon’s private office were due to give evidence as to her own knowledge and involvement, that the Scottish Government suddenly conceded the case rather than have this evidence heard.”
Murray went on:
“Mr Salmond further told me that there was a massive police operation underway to try to get accusers to come forward against him. This was going to ludicrous lengths. He showed me an email from one woman to him, in which she stated that she had been called in and interviewed by the police because many years ago Alex Salmond had been said by another person to have been seen kissing her on the cheeks in a theatre foyer. The woman stated she had told them it was a perfectly normal greeting. She wished to warn Alex of the police fishing expedition against him. He understood that over 400 people had been interviewed by the police.”
Murray testified that he asked Salmond what the motive against him could be. “Alex replied that he did not know; perhaps it lay in King Lear. He said that he had genuinely intended to quit politics and had lined up a position as Chairman of Johnstone Press, which had fallen because of these allegations. But he had retired from the party leadership before, and then come back, and perhaps Nicola had concluded he needed a stake through the heart,” Murray said.
Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) came up one seat short of a majority in last week’s Scottish elections, but with eight Green Party seats will have a majority to call for a second independence referendum. She remains as first minister. Salmond’s Alba Party failed to win any seats.
In his testimony, Murray said that a source who had been present at a meeting with Sturgeon and some of her ministers told him that multiple charges had been brought against Salmond so that if just one conviction could be won Salmond would be destroyed as a sexual predator.
Armed with this information, Murray testified that he was faced with a dilemma. He wrote:
“To expose that it was Nicola Sturgeon who masterminded the conspiracy against him would be a real blow to the Independence movement. But to watch a plot to imprison an innocent man potentially for the rest of his life unfold before my eyes was also horrifying. Particularly as the most cynical part of the plot, to use the court anonymity granted to accusers of sexual abuse, to disguise who was actually behind the allegations, appeared to be working.”
Murray went on:
“The Crown can release salacious detail about attempted rape while lying naked on top of somebody in bed, and the media can echo this to the heavens. But from that moment, nobody can publish anything to contradict the Crown without being in contempt of court. It seemed to me that, in these circumstances, the Crown ought to have been a great deal more restrained in the amount of salacious detail it was making available. Certainly, there was nothing in what was happening which would contradict the information I had been given of the Crown Office being party to a political plot to destroy Salmond.”
Murray said he became knowledgeable of a meeting in which women were being pressured by SNP leaders to accuse Salmond.
“In or around March 2019, and from time to time over several months thereafter, I became aware of information tending to show that senior members of the SNP had sought improperly to involve themselves in the Salmond case. This included meeting with women to urge them to make or persevere with complaints to the police, coordination of complainers and their stories, liaison with the police over charges and attempts to persuade individuals other than the complainers to come forward as witnesses to allegations, which attempts were unsuccessful.”
The Trial
High Court building in Edinburgh. (Scottish Courts and Tribunals.)
The Crown alleged in Murray’s one-day trial on Jan. 27, conducted entirely online and observed by Consortium News, that identifying characteristics Murray provided in his articles could be pieced together to reveal the identity of four of Salmond’s nine accusers, all of whom on March 10, 2020 were ordered to remain anonymous.
The prosecutor, Alex Prentice QC, advocate depute for the Crown, told the court Murray’s writings, as well as reader comments on his site, allegedly led to a “risk of prejudice” in the Salmond case, even though he admitted prosecutors never warned the court until after the Salmond trial was over. Murray’s articles in question were published in August 2019 (“The Alex Salmond Fit-Up”) and in January 2020 (“Yes Minister Fan Fiction.”)
Lady Dorrian, who is leading the tribunal in Murray’s case, asked Prentice why the court was not informed before Slamond’s trial of the possible prejudice by Murray’s writings. “If the Crown was of the view that these articles pose a substantial risk to the proceedings it seems strange that the Crown did not take any action at that time, or even bring it to court?” Dorrian asked.
“I accept that,” Prentice replied. “There were a number of considerations, but the Lady is right and I recognize that is a factor the court can take into account in assessing this.”
Dorrian replied: “I understand that material written after the order may attract a certain shading in conjunction with an earlier article. My difficulty is that those earlier arguments could breach an order that wasn’t issued until March 10.”
“At the time it didn’t apply, but [the articles] are still available so they can be taken into account,” Prentice argued.
Lady Dorrian also challenged that putting identifying characteristics of an unnamed accuser in a search engine would bring up different results over time. Prentice maintained that Murray’s writings must be seen together, not in isolation, acting as “magnet” to draw together “needles in a haystack” to identify the anonymous accusers.
Murray’s counsel, John Scott argued before the tribunal that Murray’s response to the Crown’s letter in March was to seek press accreditation to cover the Salmond case, which he was denied. Instead Murray relied on the reporting of other journalists to write analyses of the trial. Murray had redacted the names of the anonymous accusers, Scott argued.
On the jig-saw matter, Scott said “it is clear that he was aware of the names of the complainers and his sworn evidence is he was aware of them before the court order, but that it would not be responsible journalism to name them. …If he had wanted to do what the Crown says he did he could have done so.”
On the issue of prejudicing the trial, Scott said that if the Crown was “worried about the case they ought to have brought this to the attention of the court. … It is too late after trial. … They can’t wait to see how it developed and after acquittal then say there was prejudice.”
On the matter of the juror, Scott said Murray’s article only speculated on why the jurors were excluded and did not report the actual reasons. The Crown called Murray’s speculation “bizarre and unfounded,” while at the same time saying it violated the prohibition on mentioning the actual “issues raised by the Advocate Depute” in support of removing the the jurors.
Accusers’ Identity
Murray’s attorney told the court that mainstream media had reported details of the accusers. The BBC reported, for instance, in April: “The women who made the allegations against Mr Salmond included an SNP politician, a party worker and several current and former Scottish government civil servants and officials.” In his affidavit, Murray testified:
“If they genuinely thought my article might influence a jury, given they were well aware of the article and wrote to me about it, the Crown Office had an obvious public duty to act before a trial to prevent that evil. I would have happily turned up in court and argued my case. To wait until long after the trial, after it is far too late to avert the evil they purport to be concerned about, and then make that allegation against me, is plainly pointless and vindictive and, again, sinister.”
Murray may have been a Crown target for the contempt conviction because he was among few writers defending Salmond and was vindicated by Salmond’s acquittal. Murray’s writings and his affidavits also revealed the troubling evidence of a conspiracy against Salmond, possibly including Scotland’s top political leader.
Murray has been a thorn in the Establishment’s side since he blew the whistle on Britain’s acquiescence of torture in Uzbekistan in 2002. He later testified about it to a parliamentary committee.
Since then, Murray has been a fierce advocate for his friend Julian Assange, the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher, whom the United States is trying to extradite from Britain. Murray’s accounts of Assange’s extradition hearing appeared on Consortium News. Murray is also a strong supporter of Scottish independence, which the British establishment vehemently opposes.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
Fair Trial - Complaint against Roddy Dunlop QC.
Extract
To: Roddy Dunop QC
From: Tom Muirhead of the Fair Trial Project (Registered Charity SCO48283).
Subject: Complaint: Advocates are failing to disclose that Scotland’s judges lack independence and impartiality.
I am the Chief Executive Officer of the Fair Trial Project. We believe that no one in Scotland has ever had a fair trial. The primary reason for this is that Scotland’s judges lack independence and impartiality.
The complaint is that you have failed in a) your duty to your clients to inform them of this; and b) your duty to the court and the public to raise this issue.
The Fair Trial Project contends that your failure to disclose a) the lack of open justice created by the exclusion of the public from the courts during the coronavirus pandemic; and b) the lack of independent and impartial tribunals is criminal and civil fraud.
The following papers on our web-site list and explain the matters that you are failing to disclose. Please see:
(1) ‘Why the Faculty of Advocates is a Criminal Organisation’ at https://fairtrialproject.org/why-the-fa ... vocates-is a-criminal-organisation/.
(2)The unlawful exclusion of parts of the media and the public from the courts. https://fairtrialproject.org/open-justice/
(3) Judges unlawfully working outside of their judicial role at: ‘https://fairtrialproject.org/judges-unlawfully-working/’
(4) Complaint made against Lord Carloway at: https://fairtrialproject.org/complaint- ... -carloway/
(5) Scottish Judges lack of independence and impartiality due to conflicts of interest at: https://fairtrialproject.org/judges-wit ... -interest/
(6) See https://fairtrialproject.org/campaign-overview/ for a full list of our campaigns.
One example, where you failed in your duty to disclose relevant matters to your client, and raise these matters with the court, is the recent contempt trial of Mr Craig Murray. At this trial you failed in your duty to disclose your links to Lady Dorrian. This is fraud.
You know that Lady Dorrian is a non-practising member of the Faculty of Advocates and that you are the Dean of Faculty.
www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/05/chilling-not-in-a-good-way/comment-page-2/#comment-990741
Chilling – Not In a Good Way
May 21, 2021 by Craig Murray
Dave Llewellyn sat next to me in the public gallery of the Salmond trial as we witnessed the defence witnesses – largely female – who shredded the prosecution case. A few weeks ago, seven detectives of the Serious Crime Squad raided Dave’s home at 5am, handcuffed him and questioned him over conspiracy to murder – in relation to a public Facebook post. Dave has now been charged with a lesser but still imprisonable offence.
You will recall Mark Hirst, friend of both Dave and I, being charged with threatening communication for using the expression “reap the whirlwind” in a political sense – a charge from the Crown Office so outrageous that it was eventually thrown out by the court as “no case to answer”. Well, the Dave Llewellyn case is extremely similar.
Future poet laureate John Betjeman should have been hung, drawn and quartered, oh at least three times, for writing in his famous poem “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough”, if the standard of pretend literalness and credulity being applied by Police Scotland and the Crown Office had been applied to Betjeman. (And no, Dave’s post does not reference bombs.)
The truth is that in Scotland we now have a police, prosecutorial and justice system which is at the disposal of the Sturgeon clique for the pursuit of their private vendettas against political opponents. The fact that I am set to be jailed for “jigsaw identification”, when I demonstrably and provably did far less of this difficult to define activity than the mainstream media, who have not been prosecuted, is further evidence of that, as were the charges against Mark Hirst, and indeed Jeremy Gilchrist.
Please note that all of these political prosecutions have been based on thought crime. People in a small and definable political group – all people I know – are being prosecuted merely for publishing or saying things which annoy somebody in the Sturgeon clique. This is even before the Hate Crime Act, with its further swingeing restrictions on free speech, comes into effect. These are very dangerous times indeed to be any kind of dissident writer or campaigner in Scotland. The interesting thing, of course, is that the political orthodoxy being enforced is superficially liberal-left; a set of right-on beliefs whose exponents are so convinced of their own morality, they are happy to jail anybody who differs.
My personal crime against this orthodoxy is not to accept the mantra that all men accused of sex crime are automatically guilty, and that the “victim” must always be believed, whatever the evidence to the contrary. I also think people accused of serious crime should have the right to be judged by a jury of their peers. These are seriously unfashionable opinions.
On Tuesday I wrote a different post to this. It actually gave the detail of what David Llewellyn posted, and examined it. My article also revealed who was behind the complaint against him, and referred to some interesting history of Llewellyn’s own investigations.
However I received strong advice that to publish my article might itself be construed contempt of court, and that I ran the risk of being instantly jailed rather than free pending appeal, and further that to publish may attract yet another political prosecution from the Crown Office. I therefore did not publish and cannot give you the detail of the Llewellyn case, at least until after its conclusion.
I find this deeply depressing. I should not, in normal circumstances, have had the slightest hesitation in giving you the detail of what is happening to Dave Llewellyn, and more importantly why, in the same way I did with Mark Hirst. I find the notion that my own journalism is successfully being “chilled” in this way highly worrying, and this adds to the sense of injustice I feel in my own case. In fact anger and perhaps even humiliation at the powerlessness – and fear I am becoming a coward – has pretty well prostrated me for three days. I feel somewhat recovered now, and determined to fight on. But for the first time I find myself seriously considering, after my case is concluded, leaving my beloved Scotland and going to live in a country which does not jail dissident writers.
Craig Murray’s Trial: What Happens Next
Post By Kirsten MacDonald
June 4, 2021
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... pens-next/
On Monday morning, Lady Dorrian and two supporting judges will hear the application from Roddy Dunlop QC for Craig Murray to be allowed to appeal to the UK Supreme Court against both their verdict of contempt of court for jigsaw identification, and against the disproportionate sentence.
It is widely expected, given the obvious animus against Murray she has shown throughout the proceedings, that leave to appeal will be refused and Lady Dorrian will commit Craig Murray to jail, probably from Wednesday 9 June. At that stage, Murray’s legal team will have to apply direct to the UK Supreme Court to grant him an appeal, but his eight month sentence will likely be served before the Supreme Court even looks at whether to consider it.
For comparison, the English High Court has not yet decided whether to hear the United States appeal against the decision to refuse extradition of Julian Assange, even though Assange remains in Belmarsh prison while they decide whether to take their case. Murray languishing in Saughton or Barlinnie is unlikely to be a consideration for the Supreme Court.
There is no precedent for an appeal against conviction for contempt of court in Scotland to be heard by the UK Supreme Court; we are in uncharted waters. It is possible for Lady Dorrian to grant interim liberation so that Murray is not jailed pending a decision on taking his case by the UK Supreme Court, and then further until they had decided the case. The UK Supreme Court does not itself have power to grant liberation.
But anybody who heard Lady Dorrian interrupt Roddy Dunlop QC six times in the opening four minutes of his mitigation plea, and heard her tone of voice in the sentencing remarks, would view it as very unlikely she will delay imprisonment. One experienced reporter said to me that they had never heard any judge so “emotionally invested”.
There was one moment at the end of the sentencing hearing when there was consternation among the judges, noted by those with videolink access. When Roddy Dunlop QC stated that they would seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, Lady Dorrian’s air of stern control dissipated momentarily and there was a moment where all three judges were visibly, physically shifting around uncomfortably.
Lady Dorrian replied that any appeal would be to the nobile officium, an ad hoc court peculiar to the Scottish system which is brought into being where no other appeal route exists. That appeal would in effect be to Lord Carloway, Chief Justice of Scotland and an extremely close friend as well as colleague of Lady Dorrian, supported by a panel of judges all of whom work under Lady Dorrian, the Lord Justice Clerk.
The Murray team had decided such an appeal would be utterly pointless. There is very serious concern that the system of justice in Scotland has been corrupted, as expounded this week in the House of Commons by no less than Scotland’s former Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill MP:
Since the days of learning about the Gordon Airs case, HM Advocate v. Airs, I always assumed that those who were seeking to put forward information that was appropriate and fair would be protected. Yet in Scotland, in the fallout from the Alex Salmond affair, we have seen Mark Hirst, a journalist, prosecuted. The case, in which he was supported by the NUJ, was rightly rejected by the presiding sheriff in the borders. We have seen Craig Murray, a blogger and former British senior civil servant, now facing a prison sentence of eight months. That is not only shocking, but drives a coach and horses through a position brought in by the Scottish Government that there be a presumption against a sentence of imprisonment for less than a year. Their absence of criticism and their failure to comment has been quite shocking.
It is not simply cases brought by the Crown. It is the cases that have been pursued by the police, where people so much as tweeting anything that might be seen as possibly identifying a witness have faced a knock on the door from the police. That is fundamentally damaging to Scottish democracy. It is not what I expect and it has not come about by happenchance. It has been deliberate. It has been targeted. It is being driven by the Crown Office. If we are to have a free press, there has to be free reporting. That has to apply to bloggers as much as it applies to the mainstream press.
That people have been charged in Scottish courts and have faced possible terms of imprisonment for simply doing exactly the same as the mainstream press has done but not faced prosecution is simply unacceptable. There is also a reason that I am required to raise it here: it is that the position of the Lord Advocate of Scotland is no longer tenable. There has to be a separation of powers of having one individual who is both a legal adviser to the Scottish Government and also the head of the prosecution service in Scotland. That is no longer appropriate
Murray’s legal team effectively decided to break for the border and get the case out of corrupt Edinburgh. Roddy Dunlop QC argued that, by statute, the appeal against any ruling of a panel of two or more Scottish High Court judges is to the UK Supreme Court. There had been some legal consternation as to why Murray’s contempt case was heard by a panel of three judges in the first instance, which is unusual. It was perhaps intended to increase the thin veneer of respectability of these highly political proceedings, but it seems they may have shot themselves in the foot by providing an escape route away from the nobile officium, which plainly caught Dorrian completely off guard when Dunlop first raised it. Lord Turnbull looked around as if an answer to this development might be lurking somewhere behind him in his study. It was the most bizarre moment in these entirely bizarre virtual proceedings.
So Monday will be about the denial to Murray of the right to appeal. That a blogger might be jailed with no jury and no right of appeal, for a jigsaw identification which few other than Lady Dorrian were able to perceive, is a stain on the reputation of Scotland.
But not necessarily a black mark for Lady Dorrian. Many believe her ambition is to replace Lord Carloway, who retires shortly, as Lord President – Scotland’s top judge. The appointment will be made by the Queen on the recommendation of Nicola Sturgeon.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/professor-david-miller-fired-after-israel-lobby-smear-campaign
Professor David Miller fired after Israel lobby smear campaign
Asa Winstanley, 1 October 2021
The University of Bristol has fired Professor David Miller, a leading UK critic of Israel and its lobby.
After a years-long campaign of smears by that same lobby, the university said on Friday that, “Professor David Miller is no longer employed by the University of Bristol.”
The statement said only that Miller “did not meet the standards of behavior we expect from our staff,” though it did not elaborate.
Miller told The Electronic Intifada he would be appealing and “fighting it all the way.”
Yet the statement appeared to exonerate Miller from the Israel’s lobby’s deliberately false allegations of anti-Semitism.
An “independent report” by an unnamed lawyer had found that “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech,” the statement acknowledged.
Miller said the report had actually gone further and that the lawyer’s report had “explicitly determined” his remarks “were not anti-Semitic.”
The Support David Miller Campaign, which has been rallying around the professor, responded that the university was sending a message that “it will protect racists, and [that] Muslims, Black students and Palestinians are not welcome at Bristol.”
In a statement sent to The Electronic Intifada, the campaign said that the university’s decision was “designed to send a chill down the spines of academics around the world who expose Zionist racism.”
The campaign said that Miller’s sacking had come after a “pressure campaign by Israel’s assets in the UK” and accused the university of collaborating with the Israel lobby.
For his part, Miller said that the decision to fire him was “taken under pressure from the Israel lobby” which he said “lobbies for a hostile foreign state. The university has embarrassed itself.”
Appeal
The university said in its statement that Miller “has a right of internal appeal which he may choose to exercise and nothing in this statement should be taken to prejudge that.”
The university “does not intend to make any further public comment at this time,” it said.
Bristol University further claimed that it was committed to an environment preserving “academic freedom.” But in what seemed a Freudian slip, it also said that “we take any risk to stifle that freedom seriously.”
An academic expert in propaganda and political pressure groups, Miller has been a key critic of the Israel lobby for the last decade, as well as of Zionism, the state’s racist official ideology.
At the start of 2021, pro-Israel lobby groups ramped up their campaign against him.
These included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Zionist Federation, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Community Security Trust.
At the end of February, Israel itself also got involved, mobilizing one of its online troll armies to flood social media conversations with calls for Miller to be fired.
Act.IL – which is directed and funded by an Israeli ministry – issued a mission calling for attacks on an opinion piece published by Al Jazeera defending Miller.
With no evidence, the troll army’s operators smeared Miller as guilty of “blatant Jew-hatred” and called on their users to attack the Al Jazeera piece online.
Lobby campaign
A who’s who of right-wing figures, anti-Palestinian activists and Israel lobbyists made a massive effort to push for Miller to be fired, with even British politicians piling on.
Soon after, the university announced it had launched an “investigation” into Miller.
More than 300 academics and public intellectuals pushed back, signing an open letter to the university in support of Miller and his work.
Signatories included Noam Chomsky, Palestinian scholar and activist Sami al-Arian, dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, filmmaker Ken Loach and comedian Alexi Sayle.
“We feel duty-bound to express our solidarity with Professor Miller and to oppose such efforts to crush academic freedom,” the letter stated.
It says that Miller is the target of “well-orchestrated efforts” to misrepresent his views “as evidence of anti-Semitism.”
In February, Miller wrote in a piece for The Electronic Intifada that “Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates.”
“Meaningful conversations about anti-Black racism and Islamophobia have been drowned out by a concerted lobbying campaign targeting universities, political parties, the equalities regulator and public institutions all over the country.”
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-10-14/israel-lobby-academic-left/
After Corbyn, Israel lobby turns its guns on UK academia
by Jonathan Cook, 14 October 2021
The Jewish Chronicle warns that the dismissal of Prof David Miller is ‘just the beginning’
The Israel lobby appears to be readying for a campaign to root out leftwing academics in the UK critical of Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinian people – echoing its efforts against the previous leader of Britain’s Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn.
As with the attacks on Corbyn, the assault on academia is being led by the Jewish Chronicle, a UK weekly newspaper that speaks for the most ardent supporters of Israel among the UK’s Jewish community.
The move follows the lobby’s success this month in pressuring Bristol university to sack one of its professors, David Miller, even after the university’s own investigation – headed by a senior lawyer – concluded that claims of antisemitism against Miller were unfounded.
Miller was formally dismissed on the unexplained basis that he “did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff and the University”.
The lobby has struggled to disguise its glee that, apparently fearful of bad publicity, Bristol university capitulated to a campaign of unsubstantiated claims Miller “harassed” Jewish students.
A sociologist, Miller had been at the forefront of research into the sources of Islamophobia in the UK. His work includes a detailed examination of the Israel lobby’s role in fomenting racism towards Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians.2. The CST claim this slide showed ‘mainstream UK Jewish orgs & individuals in a network under "Israel government". In context of a lecture about Islamophobia this echoes conspiracy & dual loyalty tropes’ pic.twitter.com/cHdiRKNcYo
— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) September 13, 2019
Israel has long promoted the idea that it is a bulwark against supposed Islamic savagery and terrorism, in what it and its supporters have presented as a “clash of civilisations”.
More than a century ago, Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, argued in the colonial language of the time that a Jewish state in the Middle East would serve as “a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”.
This was a key argument the Zionist movement used to lobby the great powers of the day, chiefly Britain, to help remove the native Palestinian people from much of their homeland so that a self-declared Jewish state of Israel could be established instead.
To this day Israel encourages the view both that it is under permanent existential threat from a supposedly irrational hatred and bigotry from Muslims and that it plays a critical, first-line role defending western values. As a consequence, the Palestinians have found themselves diplomatically isolated in the west.
‘Tip of the iceberg’
Signalling the likely direction in which the lobby intends to head next, the Jewish Chronicle published an editorial last week headlined “Miller’s sacking should be the beginning, not the end”. It concluded: “Miller is not some lone voice but representative of a school of thought embedded in almost every part of academia.”
At the same time, under the headline “Miller is gone but he is only tip of the iceberg” its news pages reported that scholars in “74 separate British higher education bodies” had signed a letter of support for Miller earlier in the year, revealing “the extent of the network backing him at universities across the United Kingdom”.
Those signatories included, it noted, “a significant number representing Russell Group establishments, some of the UK’s most prestigious higher education institutions”.
The Chronicle highlighted the fact that 13 of the signatories were from Bristol university, and identified several academics by name.
The barely veiled implication is that there is an antisemitism crisis in British universities, which is being tolerated by senior staff.
The lobby used the same argument with Corbyn, claiming, despite a dearth of evidence, that he and his inner circle were indulging a supposed explosion of antisemitism within the party – with the strong implication that they were encouraging it.
The lobby’s claims were eagerly amplified by the billionaire-owned media and by a rightwing Labour party bureaucracy deeply hostile to Corbyn’s socialism.
Playbook revived
Over the past three years, the Chronicle has had an astounding number of rulings against it from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the newspaper industry’s feeble, self-appointed “press regulator”.My latest: The Jewish Chronicle has lost four libel cases and broken the editor's code 28 times in three years. Yet it's faced no sanctions from the press 'regulator' because those deceptions lay at the heart of the establishment campaign against Corbyn https://t.co/FCBP61NLRp
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 2, 2021
Most of those misrepresentations relate to the earlier campaign against Corbyn that the Jewish Chronicle played a central role in advancing. It regularly claimed that there was a plague of antisemitism on Britain’s political left.
In fact, the Chronicle appears to be reviving the playbook it and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby used against Corbyn – an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights – that saw him and large numbers of Labour members smeared as antisemites.
Famously, the Chronicle and two other Jewish community newspapers shared a front-page editorial in summer 2018 claiming that Corbyn posed an “existential threat” to Jewish life in the UK.This is the single most astonishing front page we’ve run at @JewishChron in my decade here. It is totally without precedent. Our paper has been published since 1841. @JewishNewsUK and @JewishTelegraph are our rivals – in name, in business, and on stories pic.twitter.com/peRUPRnqIX
— Marcus Dysch (@MarcusDysch) July 25, 2018
The editorial was published in the wake of a general election the previous year in which Corbyn fell short by only a few thousand votes from winning a majority of seats in the British parliament. With the ruling Conservative party mired in permanent crisis at that point, it looked like a rerun election was imminent.
The stakes for the lobby were high. Had he won, Corbyn looked like he might be the first leader of a major European state to recognise Palestinian statehood and impose sanctions on Israel – including a ban on arms sales – of the kind used against apartheid South Africa.
Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, has been waging a war on the party’s leftwing, again using antisemitism as the pretext, cheered on by the Chronicle and others.
The paper’s misrepresentations of the Labour party – which repeatedly fell foul of press regulator IPSO – are now being pressed into service against academia.
The Jewish Chronicle’s two-step manoeuvre in the Miller case is familiar.
First it has suggested that the professor lost his job because the university concluded that his actions were antisemitic – when, in fact, all indications are that its investigation found in Miller’s favour.
And second, the paper has strongly implied that the more than 200 scholars who signed a letter to Bristol expressing concerns about Bristol’s investigation of Miller share his supposedly antisemitic views.
Placating the lobby
Just as the Chronicle sought to create the impression of a plague of antisemitism in the Labour party under Corbyn, despite the lack of any evidence, it now hopes to suggest that antisemitism is rampant in British universities.
In fact, even those who signed the letter do not necessarily share Miller’s views about Israel or its role in fomenting Islamophobia. The letter chiefly defends the principle of academic freedom and Miller’s right to pursue his research wherever it leads him, without fear of losing his job. No one signing it has to agree with all of his findings or everything he has said.
What is truly shocking is that more academics have not come to his defence – especially given the fact that the allegations against him made by the Israel lobby were discounted by Bristol university’s own investigation.
Corbyn and his inner circle chose a similar course of action to Bristol’s, seeking to placate the lobby. But Corbyn’s office found every concession they made to the antisemitism smears only fuelled the lobby’s belief that its intimidation campaign was working and that the net could be widened further.
Soon the lobby was not only claiming that widespread support on the Labour left for the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s decades of belligerent occupation was antisemitic, but that anyone denying that it was proof of antisemitism was also outed as an antisemite.
As with its attacks on Corbyn, the Chronicle’s claims against Miller are hyperbolic, with the paper reporting uncritically that members of the Union of Jewish Students at Bristol had accused the professor of “harassment, targeting, and vicious diatribe”.
In fact, this supposed “harassment” refers either to a lecture about propaganda by Miller, based on his research, that cited the Israel lobby’s promotion of Islamophobia, or to critical comments he made about Zionism and the Israel lobby in forums outside the classroom.
Miller did not harass anyone. Rather, those who identify as Zionists – for whom Israel is an abiding political priority – have chosen to take offence at his findings. They have not been bullied, intimidated or threatened, as the Chronicle implies. Their political beliefs about Israel have been challenged by Miller’s academic work.
Notably, Miller’s research also shows that conservative movements like the ruling party in the UK have played a central role in promoting Islamophobia, as several key figures in Britain’s Conservative party such as Baroness Sayeeda Warsi have repeatedly warned.Breaking news –
Another dossier of Islamophobia within @Conservatives consisting of 25 current and former Councillors is presented to my Party today
Disgraceful that denial and lack of an enquiry has meant others are left to collate and present evidence https://t.co/0xfpN7BQOR
— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) November 12, 2019
But would Bristol have seriously investigated claims by Conservative party students, for example, that they were being “harassed” by Miller for presenting his research in class or his speaking at political events outside the classroom? Would the university have considered sacking him based on those claims?
The question does not even need posing. The political nature of the complaints – and their threat to academic freedom – would have been instantly obvious to everyone.
And therein lies the Israel lobby’s special usefulness to the establishment. The lobby’s own highly partisan, politicised campaigns against the left can – perversely but all too often effectively – be disguised as anti-racism or the promotion of human rights.
Mounting scrutiny
But, as the Chronicle implicitly recognises in its call for the targeting of a much wider circle of British academics, ardent Zionists are facing a much bigger challenge than a single political leader or a single professor.
They feel personally affronted as their political passion project, Israel, comes under mounting scrutiny. Like the Chronicle, Zionists hope to reverse various political developments over the past decade or two that have made it much harder for them to publicly defend Israel.
Those developments include:
* The success of Palestinian civil society’s calls since the mid-2000s for an international boycott of Israel to end its oppression of Palestinians;
* The horrifying images of Israel’s repeated military assaults on a Palestinian population in Gaza besieged by Israel for 15 years, living in what has become effectively an overcrowded, open-air prison;
* Israel’s sabotaging of a two-state solution offered by the Palestinian leadership by illegally building ever more settlements on Palestinian land, while also rejecting the alternative of a single state guaranteeing equal rights for Jews and Palestinians in the region;
* and recent reports, from Israeli and international human rights groups, clearly making the case that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state.
The Chronicle and the ardent Zionists in the UK it speaks for feared that Cobyn represented the moment when this view of Israel broke into the political mainstream.
And now they fear that, unless drastic action can be taken, scholars like Miller will introduce a more clear-eyed discourse in academia about Israel, exposing the lobby for the anti-Palestinian racists they are.
Financial penalties
Under threat of financial penalties from Johnson’s rightwing government, dozens of British universities have been pressured to adopt a new definition of antisemitism.
This was the prize the lobby sought against Corbyn. He was forced to accept not just the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s imprecise definition of Jew hatred but also 11 appended examples, most of which openly conflate strenuous criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The lobby has argued that any denial that these examples amount to antisemitism is also a form of antisemitism.
In detailing how Israel is an apartheid state in recent reports, both the New York-based Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights organisation, would have fallen foul of the IHRA’s claim that it is antisemitic to describe Israel as “a racist endeavour”.
Similarly, large numbers of Israeli scholars – and almost all Palestinians and their supporters – would breach the example against requiring of Israel “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”.
They question the notion that Israel is a democratic nation. Israeli scholars have instead termed it an “ethnocracy” because it mimics a democratic state while actually according rights and privileges to one ethnic group, Jews, that it denies to another, Palestinians.
Corbyn quickly found himself trapped by the IHRA defintion and its associated examples. Any meaningful support for Palestinians against Israeli oppression – including his past actions, before he became Labour leader – could be twisted into evidence of antisemitism.
And any argument that antisemitism was thereby being weaponised by the lobby could be similarly adduced as proof of antisemitism. It provided perfect conditions for a witch-hunt of the Labour left.
Now, the lobby hopes, the same conditions can banish scholarly criticism of Israel.
One of the early targets for the lobby’s new campaign is likely to be the University and College Union (UCU), a higher education union representing over 120,000 academics and support staff. It has so far held out against the pressure campaign.
Its resistance appears to have galvanised some academic bodies to stand their ground too. Notably, in February the academic board of University College London revolted against the adoption of the IHRA definition by the university’s governing body, calling the wording “politicised and divisive”.
A report by the UCL board in December had warned that the IHRA definition conflated prejudice against Jews with political debate about Israel and Palestine. That, it said, could have “potentially deleterious effects on free speech, such as instigating a culture of fear or self-silencing on teaching or research or classroom discussion of contentious topics”.
That is exactly what the Israel lobby, and its activists in the Union of Jewish Students that targeted Miller, will hope for. With their new war on academia – assisted by a rightwing government – they may be able to inflict as much damage on academic support for Palestinians as they did political support.
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