The EHRC Report on Labour Antisemitism is a Mockery of Justice
By: Matthew Waterman
Tags: Anti Semitism, UK Politics, Labour Party, Politics, Jeremy Corbyn

What’s remarkable about this story is that breakdowns of sanity occurred at so many distinct junctures:

The acceptance of the notion that a public institution should “investigate” political statements as potential violations of the law

The fallacious analyses of Bromley and Livingstone’s comments

The leap from public comments by two individuals to the charge of institutional “harassment” perpetrated by the party as a whole

The leap from the bureaucratic incompetencies underlying the latter two charges to institutional antisemitism

The eager embrace of these accusations by Starmer and his acolytes

And finally, the suspension and “investigation” of Corbyn for expressing the mildest of dissent.

Here, I will focus on the contents of the EHRC report. The following Facebook posts and comments by Councillor Pam Bromley are the evidence the Commission presents against her:

‘Some time back I got hammered for posting an anti-Rothschild meme. However here they are again. We must remember that the Rothschilds are a powerful financial family (like the Medicis) and represent capitalism and big business — even if the Nazis DID use the activities of the Rothschilds in their anti semitic [sic] propaganda. We must not obscure the truth with the need to be tactful’ (post, 8 April 2018)

Notably, the most antisemitic post on Bromley’s page very well could have been the one referenced in that post but not included in the report: the Rothschild meme.

Conspiracy theorists often use the Rothschilds, an ultra-rich Jewish family that amassed much of its fortune in banking, as a stand-in for all Jews in antisemitic narratives about Jewish power.

A Rothschild meme that isn’t at least implicitly antisemitic is quite difficult to imagine. Yet the irony here is that what Bromley actually says about the Rothschilds in the post cited above is a concerted effort to talk about the Rothschilds without being antisemitic. Bromley correctly observes that they are a relatively powerful family, compares them to the Medicis (who are not Jewish), and acknowledges the fact that the Nazis used the Rothschilds in their antisemitic propaganda.

I mildly disagree with Bromley’s opinion that criticizing specific families just for being rich and powerful is a helpful way to criticize capitalism itself, and I would argue that singling out the Rothschilds without feeding into antisemitic narratives is virtually impossible. The question of the appropriate response to Bromley’s post will be returned to below.

‘A huge sigh of relief echoes around Facebook’ (comment accompanying a shared BBC News story with the headline ‘Israeli spacecraft crashes on Moon’, 12 April 2019).

The report’s implication that Bromley’s joke about an (unmanned) Israeli spacecraft crashing shows that without acknowledging it, the report uses Israel as a stand-in for Jews. All one has to ask oneself is, would the British press, the British public, or the EHRC consider it a case of “unlawful harassment” if the same joke were made about the spacecraft of another country, such as Russia or China?

‘This is what’s behind all the false accusations of antisemitism. This is what, despite international condemnation, Israel does to its neighbour Palestine … All hidden behind a fog of fake accusations of antisemitism’ (comment alongside a post about injuries in Gaza, 12 April 2019). ‘Looks like fake accusations of AS [antisemitism] to undermine Labour just aren’t working, so let’s have Chris Williamson reinstated’ (post, 20 April 2019). ‘Are you losing the argument? Or is it that you have nothing of value to add? Why not call your opponent an… anti-semite! This will make you feel like you have won the argument and you wont [sic] need to provide any evidence’ (post, 15 May 2019). ‘My major criticism of him — his failure to repel the fake accusations of antisemitism in the LP [Labour Party] — may not be repeated as the accusations may probably now magically disappear, now capitalism has got what it wanted’ (post, 15 December 2019).

The fact that these four quotes from Bromley are implied to be antisemitic rests on what is perhaps the most Orwellian aspect of the whole report (and that’s saying something): the maxim that disputing the veracity of antisemitism complaints or arguing against the media orthodoxy that Labour faces antisemitism at crisis levels is itself antisemitic.

Rossendale Councillor Pam Bromley forms exactly half of the EHRC’s case that Labour “harassed” its Jewish members.

The report lists two categories of antisemitic conduct it found the Labour Party responsible for. The second category is:

2. Suggesting that complaints of antisemitism are fake or smears. Labour Party agents denied antisemitism in the Party and made comments dismissing complaints as ‘smears’ and ‘fake’.

In other words, allegations of antisemitism are essentially self-substantiating. If one is accused of antisemitism and accepts the accusation, the accusation is validated. If one disputes the allegation, one has then engaged in antisemitism simply by denying it. It was therefore logically impossible for there to be no Labour antisemitism crisis, according to the EHRC’s analytical framework.

The final post from Bromley forms the centerpiece of the EHRC’s argument against her:

‘Had Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party pulled up the drawbridge and nipped the bogus AS accusations in the bud in the first place we would not be where we are now and the fifth column in the LP would not have managed to get such a foothold … the Lobby has miscalculated … The witch hunt has created brand new fightback networks … The Lobby will then melt back into its own cesspit’ (post, date unknown).

The EHRC says the above post “refer[s] to Jewish people being a ‘fifth column’.” This is at best an amateurish misreading and at worst a malicious lie. Bromley quite simply did not say it.

The fact that a fifth column was present in the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership has been proven definitively. That fifth column consisted not of Jewish members, but of right-wing members who saw Tory governments as far preferable to their own party taking power with a radical platform.

An 860-page draft of an internal report leaked in April documented extensive efforts by Labour officials to sabotage their own party’s electoral outcomes with the goal of ending Corbyn’s leadership. The report included WhatsApp conversations in which senior officials actually rejoiced at drops in their own party’s poll numbers, joked about hanging and burning Corbyn, and derisively referred to members who didn’t ferociously oppose Corbyn as “trots” (as in “Trotskyites”).

The narrative that Labour faced crisis levels of antisemitism was not the motivation for the activities of Labour’s fifth column; it was merely an important weapon in their arsenal. For them, the antisemitism furor had nothing to do with the welfare of British Jews, nor the state of Israel; it was a means to the end of overthrowing the leadership.

So Bromley’s assessment wasn’t only not antisemitic, but actually more than plausible. The existence of historical tropes about Jews being a fifth column in Christian societies is not a justification for pretending Bromley said anything remotely close to the idea that Jews were a fifth column in Labour.

Her references to “the Lobby” are antisemitic only if one denies the objective fact that there is an Israel lobby in the UK and it played a central role in igniting the British media’s histrionics over Labour antisemitism.