Jewish Voice for Labour officer says MI5 beh

ONE OF the officers of the far-left fringe group Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) told fellow activists that he believed MI5 was behind investigations into the antisemitic behaviour of Labour Party members.

Mike Cushman, membership officer for JVL, told an appreciative audience that revelations of antisemitism from Labour members on social media — which he referred to as a “smear campaign” — require “serious, heavyweight artificial intelligence”.

Mr Cushman was speaking at the launch event for a new book, Bad News for Labour, which attempts to claim that the idea of Labour antisemitism is wildly exaggerated by a hostile media.

Held in Brighton during Labour’s conference in the city, it had needed to be rescheduled after the original venue, a Waterstones in the city, cancelled the launch after complaints.

In an audio recording of the event published by the Harry’s Place website, Mr Cushman can be heard saying, “I don’t know about anybody else but I can’t find a Twitter post I did a month ago, let alone what someone else did six years ago.”

He said he had always “naively assumed that the heavyweight IT behind this was coming from Tel Aviv, from Mossad because that’s the sort of thing they do.” But having read an article on a website called “OffGuardian” — which describes itself as having been started by five people who had “all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s Comment is Free sections” and claims to “provide a home for the comment and the facts you no longer find in the MSM” — he