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A LABOUR councillor has been suspended after sharing a blog that claimed Rachel Riley works for “the Israeli state propaganda machine” and that her actions could lead to “another Jo Cox moment”.
Lisa Lewis, a councillor for Southbourne in Dorset who has been given antisemitism training by far-left fringe group Jewish Voice for Labour, retracted the retweet after Ms Riley posted a screenshot of it alongside excerpts from the blog post.
The Countdown presenter tagged the Labour Party with the remark: “Found another one of your racist councillors for you.”
The anonymous blog post, posted on the website of ‘citizen media magazine’ the Dorset Eye, named Ms Riley — who has suffered antisemitic abuse for campaiging against Jew-hate in Labour — in a rant about “goons” who criticise Labour.
It said: “At some point another Jo Cox moment will happen but this time it will not just be MPs who are at great risk. Rachel Riley and her goons will only have themselves to blame if some loose cannon stoops to another loathsome low.”
Since Ms Riley’s tweet, Cllr Lewis edited her Twitter biography so it no longer says she is a Labour councillor or CLP Women’s Officer. She also added the disclaimer “retweets [are] not always an endorsement”.
In previous tweets, Cllr Lewis appeared to indicate she had been trained by JVL, the fringe group whose members have repeatedly denied or downplayed antisemitism within the Labour party. “They showed us articles, cartoons, pictures and guided us in which were anti-Semetic [sic] and why”, she tweeted last year.
But on another occasion, Cllr Lewis shared a petition to “stop Rachel Riley from smearing UK Labour”.
Commenting on the criticism levelled at Jeremy Corbyn for liking an antisemitic mural, Cllr Lewis said in a previous tweet: “When I first saw the mural I honestly though the men were Iranian or Pakistani”.
The JC understands Ms Lewis has now been suspended from the party pending an investigation.
IF YOU have spent any time on social media debating antisemitism in the Labour Party, you will probably recognise the surreal nature of arguments on Twitter, where facts don’t matter, evidence is ignored, abuse is commonplace and nobody leaves the conversation feeling like they have persuaded anybody of anything.
For Jewish MPs, celebrities or community leaders, especially if they are women, the abuse can be horrific and relentless. And all the time, alongside the antisemitism and the lies, is the constant refrain that this is all a smear: that antisemitism is no worse in Labour than anywhere else and anyone who says otherwise is probably in the pay of the Israeli embassy.
CST teamed up with data science company Signify to see what we could learn about how this atmosphere is created. We looked at 1.5m tweets and over 16,000 articles that had been shared on social media, accumulating more than 10m social media engagements — tweets, retweets, likes, mentions and so on — over four years. Based on this hard data, we found 36 key Labour-supporting Twitter accounts that drive and shape online conversations about Jews, antisemitism, Zionism and related topics in connection with Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.
These 36 Twitter accounts are mostly not run by well-known people and several are anonymous. But they are influential — and what they have to say about Labour and antisemitism is troubling.
For starters, these accounts have all contributed to the widespread belief amongst Corbyn supporters that allegations of antisemitism are exaggerated, weaponised or blown out of proportion, or even that they are part of a calculated smear campaign against Mr Corbyn and Labour.
At the heart of the “evidence” for this supposed smear campaign is AlJazeera’s 2017 documentary The Lobby, which claimed to expose sinister goings-on within Britain’s pro-Israel organisations. Clips, quotes and memes taken from this programme cropped up repeatedly in the social media feeds of these 36 accounts.
A third of the accounts had also tweeted explicitly antisemitic material, including references to a “Jewish lobby”, denigration of UK Jewish organisations as “traitors” or as agents of a foreign country, conspiracy tropes about the Rothschild family or tweets equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
These accounts shun traditional media like the Guardian or the BBC, preferring partisan websites like The Canary or Electronic Intifada. And they are prolific, influencing wider social media as a result: we found that since 2016, when social media interest in Labour antisemitism was at its most intense, at least a third of the top ten most shared articles on all UK social media came from alt-left or anti-Zionist sites.
The Labour Party has not been slow to recognise the power of these online activists. In his speech at party conference last year, Mr Corbyn praised his supporters for using social media, which he called “the mass media of the 21st century” to counter the mainstream media’s “propaganda of privilege”. Labour now intends to formalise its relationship with its social media cheerleaders, by creating a new post for a Digital Officer who will build “Labour’s online voice” by working with a “grassroots online community”, using precisely the techniques identified in our report.
There is nothing wrong with Labour wanting to use social media to spread its message; any modern political party should do the same. Their problem is that the most influential pro-Labour grassroots voices on Twitter are also the ones pushing the narrative that talk of antisemitism is a smear, and attacking anyone — including Labour’s own Deputy Leader, Tom Watson — who criticises the party’s record in this area. Expelling these people from the party won’t help, because some of the most influential accounts are run by people who have already been expelled. Nothing short of a change of political culture will do — and social media is an essential part of this struggle.
At the heart of the ‘evidence’ for the smear campaign is documentary
Dr Dave Rich is Director of Policy for the Community Security Trust