{"id":5739,"date":"2022-11-24T13:47:36","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T11:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5739"},"modified":"2022-11-28T14:35:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T12:35:28","slug":"david-baddiel-apology-jason-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2022-11-24\/david-baddiel-apology-jason-lee\/","title":{"rendered":"Baddiel\u2019s hollow racism apology to Jason Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><em><strong>Asked by the ex-footballer who his allies against antisemitism are, the Jewish comedian was flummoxed. That\u2019s because he has thrown his lot in with the racists<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You may not have heard of the Jewish comedian David Baddiel or the black ex-footballer Jason Lee. You may not care about either of them. But their first-ever encounter \u2013 aired in two different formats this week \u2013 should interest anyone concerned about how the discursive battle on racism and identity politics is manipulating our political life in increasingly malevolent ways.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The meeting ostensibly took place so that Baddiel could offer an apology to Lee 25 years after he repeatedly lampooned and bullied him in a BBC TV show called Fantasy Football League \u2013 in ways that even then were obviously racist. Baddiel blacked up as Lee, wearing a pineapple on his head to ridicule Lee\u2019s appearance because he wore dreadlocks tied atop his head for matches.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In one of those formats, Baddiel appeared on the launch show of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=he6Nq2lWLJ0\">Lee\u2019s new podcast channel<\/a>, which has currently racked up just over 700 subscribers, even with the help of Baddiel\u2019s appearance.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lee took the opportunity to make a moving case for why his and many other black people\u2019s lives were irreparably harmed by Baddiel\u2019s racialised ridicule back in the 1990s. Lee rapidly became the target of nationwide mockery, on and off the field. His young children were confused and frightened that every time they walked in the street with their father passers-by would shout out abuse. And other black children who had been encouraged by Lee\u2019s example to take pride in their cultural heritage suddenly faced taunts and bullying at school for the way they looked.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Some folks didn&#39;t get the significance of me presenting the news with my dreadlocks.<br \/>In my lifetime, TV was a place where the BBC, a public funding media, paid David Baddiel to do racist Blackface whilst mocking footballer Jason Lee&#39;s locks. <br \/>This dehumanised all black people 1\/4 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/tWPwupKIVb\">pic.twitter.com\/tWPwupKIVb<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Antoine Allen (@AntoineSpeaker) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AntoineSpeaker\/status\/1594993674928242689?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 22, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The second format was Baddiel\u2019s own. Since Fantasy Football League, the comedian \u2013 whose Twitter bio reads simply \u201cJew\u201d \u2013 has presented himself as something of an expert on racism. That self-assessment has been accepted with little resistance from pundits in the establishment media, even if some social media users have been less forgiving of his racist past.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A few years ago Baddiel wrote a seemingly influential book on antisemitism, and this week its thesis was given even more prominence in a Channel 4 documentary of the same name: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.channel4.com\/programmes\/david-baddiel-jews-dont-count\/on-demand\/73707-001\">Jews Don\u2019t Count<\/a>. Baddiel\u2019s argument is that Jew hatred is a unique and especially pernicious form of racism, not least because most Britons fail to acknowledge it in the way they do other forms of racism, such as racism against black and Asian communities.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel made this point more graphically and bluntly on Frankie Boyle\u2019s New World Order show in 2018 to general applause, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-07-29\/study-exposes-bbcs-deep-anti-corbyn-bias\/\">comparing<\/a> racism against Jews to cancer, and racism against other minorities to shingles.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Fanning the flames<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel certainly worked hard to make a good impression on Lee\u2019s podcast, offering a gushing apology for his long history of unthinking racism. He admitted fear and embarrassment had played a part in delaying his meeting with Lee for so long.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In his own documentary, Baddiel was a little less magnanimous in covering the same ground. He framed repeated criticisms on social media of his racism towards Lee, and his hypocrisy, as cyber-bullying \u2013 and used those examples to shore up the argument that his treatment, as a Jew, was exceptional and different.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Safely on the media turf he controlled, it sounded a lot more like Lee had got his belated apology only because Baddiel had been shamed into making it, or because Baddiel viewed it as the penitence needed before he could occupy the moral high ground on TV while demanding the right to be judged differently for his own racism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But back on Lee\u2019s podcast, Baddiel also conceded that it had taken personal experiences of racism to open his eyes to the humiliation and shaming Lee must have experienced as he was regularly pilloried on the BBC.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel noted one incident on the football terraces in the late 2000s: someone had recognised him and repeatedly shouted the word \u201cYid\u201d. His brother had briefly been embroiled in a threatening altercation with the racist fan. Baddiel indicated that it was at this point he began to appreciate just how dangerous his own fanning of the flames against Lee had been.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That raised a point Baddiel did not address on Lee\u2019s podcast or directly in his own documentary. How had the comedian managed to survive so long before experiencing the kind of visceral, menacing, personal racism \u2013 separate from that faced by his ancestors and Jews historically \u2013 that gave him a taste of what it was like to be Lee?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jason Lee &amp; David Baddiel Discuss Fantasy Football Blackface Sketches | AbsoluteLee Podcast Ep. 01\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/he6Nq2lWLJ0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Murdered by the Klan<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I raise this not to be vexatious, but as the context for exploring a challenging point raised by Lee. He asked Baddiel who the comedian had \u201callyship\u201d with: who did he think of as allies in the fight against racism? It was the one moment \u2013 more so even than when he had to apologise \u2013 that Baddiel looked genuinely flummoxed. Who exactly <em>did<\/em> he see as allies in the struggle against racism?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel rowed back to note that in the 1960s and 1970s Jewish and black communities stood shoulder to shoulder in the civil rights struggle in the United States. Rabbis marched with Martin Luther King in Selma against white supremacists, he pointed out. In Jews Don\u2019t Count, he and the US actor David Schwimmer further noted that in 1964 two young Jewish men were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan when they headed to the Deep South to assist a black civil rights activist \u2013 an incident that was turned into a Hollywood movie, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6eRcgaBxXoo\">Mississipi Burning<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel conceded that this type of solidarity had been largely lost, adding that he did not entirely understand why. In an unusually inarticulate section of the podcast, he wondered whether it was because race \u201chad become polarised in America particularly \u2013 and that\u2019s where all that stuff seems to originate\u201d. He added: \u201cIt [the allyship] can come back, but at other times it seems that relationship isn\u2019t what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In seeking an answer, he returned to the horrors faced by his mother\u2019s family in Nazi Germany. Those scars left Jewish communities, he argued, especially sensitive to the discrimination faced by others: \u201cIn the 1960s and 1970s, because of that experience that a lot of Jews had had, a feeling of seeing that black people were being discriminated against violently, particularly in America, they [Jews] wanted to reach out with their own experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But almost like a nervous tic, Baddiel then detoured straight to Whoopi Goldberg, the black American actress turned TV talk show panellist, to berate her for her muddled comments about the Holocaust, in which she suggested the Nazis\u2019 industrial-scale genocide was not about race. I have dealt at length before with the furore provoked by Goldberg\u2019s comments and the problematic backlash from Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, so I won\u2019t revisit that episode here. You can read the original article.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">My latest: Whoopi Goldberg and the racists who hide behind the Holocaust <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/pnCiDxiHNm\">https:\/\/t.co\/pnCiDxiHNm<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jonathan_K_Cook\/status\/1489615534744350720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">February 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Unlike in Lee\u2019s podcast, the issue of the breakdown in allyship between Jewish and black communities in the fight against racism got no mention in Baddiel\u2019s documentary. And that may be because it looks like the key to unlocking a lot of the confusion exhibited by Baddiel and the Jewish liberal allies he interviewed for his TV programme.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Circle of oppressors<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Early in Jews Don\u2019t Count, Baddiel gets to the nub of what seems to bother him about antisemitism in Britain. It chiefly involves leftwing progressives and black anti-racists, not the people who attack synagogues, though they are mentioned too.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Footage from the Labour party conference of 2019 shows a speech made by Dawn Butler, a black MP who was then Labour\u2019s shadow secretary of state for women and equalities. In it, she lists many vulnerable and disadvantaged groups Labour hoped to welcome as part of an electoral coalition to defeat the ruling Tory party. She expressly included those in social housing, the gay, lesbian and trans communities, the working class, the disabled, under-18s, and\u00a0blacks, whites and Asians. But absent, as Baddiel emphasised, was any mention of Jews.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel hoped to frame this as a minor but telling example of unthinking antisemitism. Labour\u2019s rainbow electoral coalition under former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was intentionally inclusive except, argues Baddiel, when it came to Jews. He asks rhetorically why Jews don\u2019t count for the progressive left.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is indeed an interesting ommission. But I suspect it does not illustrate what Baddiel imagines it does \u2013 and may offer a clue as to why Jewish and black communities have lost that allyship they enjoyed back in the 1960s and 1970s. Or put another way, why for someone like Dawn Butler, Jews like Baddiel are subsumed in the category \u201cwhite\u201d, just as Sikhs, Buddhists and Chinese are in the category of \u201cAsian\u201d.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel argues that \u201cthere are lots of answers\u201d to the question of why Jews are overlooked by the progressive left, but the most important is apparently this: \u201cJews are the only objects of racism who are imagined as both high and low status.&#8221; They are seen as both \u201cdirty, thieving, stinking, vile\u201d, but also as \u201cmonied, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For this reason, Baddiel concludes, the progressive left deny Jews a place \u201cin the circle of the oppressed\u201d. In fact, he continues, they are often considered more firmly to be \u201cin the circle of the oppressors\u201d. Progressives think they are punching up. Baddiel disagrees.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Teflon coating<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Naturally, the Guardian\u2019s TV reviewer loved Baddiel\u2019s documentary, impressed by what she called its \u201call-star cast\u201d of Jewish cultural figures who echoed Baddiel\u2019s argument. The paper\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/tv-and-radio\/2022\/nov\/21\/david-baddiel-jews-dont-count-review-a-doc-so-shocking-it-sounds-like-a-siren\">headline<\/a> described the programme as \u201cso shocking it sounds like a siren\u201d.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But it is notable that the liberal Jews Baddiel cites in making his case \u2013 and the liberal non-Jews at whom his documentary is firmly aimed \u2013 seem as unconcerned as Baddiel himself by the fact that the most prominent targets of his \u201cJews don\u2019t count\u201d thesis are leftwing progressives and ethnic minorities, particularly black community leaders.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel seems far more concerned to lambast them by imputing to them intentional or unthinking antisemitism than to spend too much time worrying about racist thugs on the football terraces or a figure like Boris Johnson whose political rise was entirely unharmed by \u2013 maybe benefited from \u2013 writing a novel whose central, Johnsonesque character believes Jews have hooked noses and control the media.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Interestingly, a Guardian reviewer of the book managed to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2019\/jul\/17\/boris-johnson-seventy-two-virgins-novel\">miss Johnson\u2019s antisemitism<\/a>\u00a0even as late as summer 2019, when antisemitism was making daily headlines as the media battered Corbyn and the Labour party into the ground.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel could have interpreted that confluence of facts rather differently from the way he chooses to. He could have understood it to mean that Jews don\u2019t count only when it is in the interests of the British establishment \u2013 from Boris Johnson to the Guardian \u2013 that they do not count. They very much count when the same establishment wants them to count, as the progressive left found out as soon as Corbyn was elected Labour leader.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And here\u2019s another thing. Johnson\u2019s Teflon-coating against allegations of racism echo Baddiel\u2019s own success in avoiding paying a price for his long history of racism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The political commentator Ash Sarkar makes this point well:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The fact that [Baddiel\u2019s own racism] never affected him invalidates his thesis that Islamophobia, anti-blackness, certain kinds of xenophobia enjoy a privileged status compared to antisemitism \u2013 because his career has never been impacted by any of these things.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, there was so little impact of his own history of racism that he was then able to become an expert on racism. \u2026 He is a walking, breathing, talking rebuttal to the idea that anti-blackness is taken so seriously in progressive circles and antisemitism isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">&quot;I think his [Baddiels] argument is invalidated by his own career&quot;.<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AyoCaesar?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@AyoCaesar<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/novaramedia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@novaramedia<\/a> tonight. Spot on. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/7eRUkPFADB\">pic.twitter.com\/7eRUkPFADB<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SaulStaniforth\/status\/1594784561975726100?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 21, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Consider the ease with which both Johnson and Baddiel have evaded any political or media reckoning for their well-documented racism: in Johnson\u2019s case for his antisemitism, and in Baddiel\u2019s for his anti-black racism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Then contrast that with the demonisation of Corbyn, who was brought down by years of evidence-free antisemitism allegations that the Labour party had become institutionally antisemitic during his tenure.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those allegations were given life by smears from a toxic combination of the Tory party, the establishment media, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.middleeasteye.net\/opinion\/forde-inquiry-exposes-labours-biggest-problem-keir-starmer\">rightwing bureaucracy of Corbyn\u2019s own Labour party<\/a>, and liberal Jews like Baddiel. All felt threatened by Corbyn\u2019s anti-imperialism, especially, in the case of large sections of the Jewish community\u2019s organised leadership, his criticisms of Israel and its apartheid policies towards the Palestinians. And most feared his moderate socialist programme that might put a stop to rampant inequality.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>\u2018Israel, Schmisrael\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It does not seem to occur to Baddiel or the other liberal Jews he interviews that they may not look like allies to the progressive, anti-racist community, or to the black community, for a very simple reason. Because Jewish leadership bodies that claim to represent the vast majority of British Jews \u2013 like the Board of Deputies, the Community Security Trust, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Jewish Labour Movement, the list goes on \u2013 all keep trumpeting that Jews are not allies of progressives.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">So when it comes to antisemitism, Labour puts aside the view of every mainstream Jewish organisation in the UK, 68 rabbis from every strand of Jewish life, the view of governments across Europe &#8211; and decides it knows better <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/D7fjsYCvXn\">https:\/\/t.co\/D7fjsYCvXn<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jonathan Freedland (@Freedland) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Freedland\/status\/1019250513261596672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 17, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The organised Jewish community\u2019s leadership, as well as prominent commentators like Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, claim over and over again that polls show <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2016\/apr\/29\/left-jews-labour-antisemitism-jewish-identity\">nine out of 10 British Jews<\/a> support Israel \u2013 even if many apparently dislike its current government, the one before it and the one after it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They support Israel, it seems, as some kind of permanent abstraction, even as it openly and ever more ostentatiously oppresses and dispossesses the Palestinian people, besieges and intermittently kills civilians in Gaza, and is declared an apartheid state by leading human rights groups. That makes as much sense as if I had supported apartheid South Africa 40 years ago but insisted I was not racist because I opposed the P W Botha government.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Not only that, but Freedland and other liberal Jews strenuously argue that Israel is at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2016\/apr\/29\/left-jews-labour-antisemitism-jewish-identity\">core of their identity<\/a> and that to criticise Israel is to criticise them. They argue that opposition from the progressive left to the political ideology of Zionism \u2013 an ideology that has entailed the colonisation of the Palestinians\u2019 homeland and the dispossession of its people \u2013 is equivalent to hatred of Jews.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If this view is not widespread among the Jewish community, then either the media or the Jewish community itself have done an extremely good job of misleading us. Those Jews who take a contrary position, like those who supported Corbyn, invariably find themselves decried by other Jews, either explicitly or implicitly, as self-hating or the \u201cwrong kind of Jew\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SjhHhL_15Nw?start=1\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those \u201cwrong Jews\u201d, as Al Jazeera recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=elp18OvnNV0\">documented<\/a> in graphic detail, are currently being systematically purged from Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s Labour party \u2013 and there is not a peep about it from Baddiel or any of his liberal Jewish friends.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Further reinforcing the confusion, Israel itself demands recognition as the state of all Jews around the world. Israel\u2019s laws declare that all Jews belong to the so-called \u201cJewish state\u201d. Israel claims to speak for all Jews. It expressly holds all its territory \u2013 even Palestinian territory \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/2018-03-18\/why-israel-is-an-apartheid-state\/\">in trust for Jews everywhere<\/a>. When Israel carries out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it does every day, it does so in the name of David Baddiel \u2013 whether Baddiel likes it or not.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which is a point Baddiel might have raised with the writer Howard Jacobson during their interview when Jacobson claimed Israel would be hated whatever it did, even if it were Switzerland. It would, he argued, be \u201chated in the language that people used about Jews 2000 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Instead, Baddiel skips over British Jews\u2019 relationship to Israel with a dismissive \u2013 and convenient \u2013 \u201cIsrael, Shmisrael\u201d.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Profits from war<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel is right to point out that it is antisemitic to hold Jews responsible for Israel\u2019s actions, or to expect them to criticise Israel. But then interviewees like Jacobson and US comedian Sarah Silverman complicate his argument by choosing to express their support for Israel on camera, arguing that it is their state and a supposed \u201csafe haven\u201d for Jews while also demanding that they share no responsibility for its actions in making the same territory extremely unsafe for Palestinians.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">It&#39;s called ethnic cleansing <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/qyWKuMbLYc\">https:\/\/t.co\/qyWKuMbLYc<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jonathan_K_Cook\/status\/1595514271600971776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 23, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So which is it? Is Israel a state representing all Jews, as Israel claims?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or is it a state representing only those Jews like Freedland, Jacobson and Silverman \u2013 and all of Britain\u2019s major Jewish organisations claiming to speak for the Jewish community \u2013 that say Israel is at the centre of their identity?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or is Israel wrong and it represents only Jews who are Israeli citizens \u2013 and not those, like Jewish reporters for the liberal New York Times in Jerusalem, who have chosen over the years to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/2010-02-25\/ethan-bronner-and-conflicts-of-interest\/\">send their children<\/a> to fight in Israel\u2019s army?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel may prefer to avoid tackling that question, but progressives don\u2019t have the same luxury when they decide who to count as political allies. The left correctly struggles to determine who it has allyship with when the very organisations that claim to represent Britain\u2019s Jewish community, including liberal Jews, keep issuing statements excusing Israel as it murders children in Gaza or label progressives as antisemites for campaigning to stop Western collusion in that murder.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel isn\u2019t responsible for Israel\u2019s actions, but he is responsible as a Jew with a prominent platform for remaining silent when the Board recruits him and most other Jews to Israel\u2019s oppression of Palestinians or when it weaponises antisemitism against those who adopt progressive, anti-imperialist causes.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">A spokesman for Keir Starmer says the Labour leader agrees with <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Baddiel?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@Baddiel<\/a> that parts of the left have a blind spot when it comes to antisemitism. \u201cI think sadly we\u2019ve seen that be the case\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ben Kentish (@BenKentish) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BenKentish\/status\/1595453448001945605?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 23, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Israel is flooded with Western arms, aid, trade deals and diplomatic support as it commits its crimes against the Palestinians in the name of every Jew in the world. Israel\u2019s outsize military, largely paid for by the US, intermittently rampages across the Middle East claiming its role as the region\u2019s gendarme. It maintains a simmering Cold War with Iran that could explode into conflagration at any moment. It battle-tests its weapons on Palestinians and its Arab neighbours to benefit Western armies and arms dealers. It exports its cyber-weapons to dictators that use them to surveill dissidents. And increasingly it helps to prop up equally ugly Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia\u2019s with vital intelligence.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So the question for progressives as they pick their allies is who is with them in the fight against a West that profits from endless resource wars, that enables continuing colonialism, that treats much of the rest of the world as on the wrong side of a supposed civilisational divide, and that embeds Israel deeply into this web of interests?<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Hierarchy of racism<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maybe the ambivalence of the left and black community about allyship with the Jewish community \u2013 as opposed to individual Jews \u2013 reflects this confusing picture, a confusion Jewish leaders and Israel have actively fostered.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maybe the fact that progressives view the Jewish community both as vulnerable and powerful at the same time is less a reinvention of an age-old antisemitism than a conundrum posed by the preferred allies of supposedly representative Jewish leadership groups like the Board of Deputies. They have sided with a nuclear-armed regional bully, Israel, while also allying with a British establishment only too keen to weaponise antisemitism as a smear to disappear a progressive left from British politics \u2013 something Starmer is carrying out right now on the establishment\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel explains in his documentary the weakness felt by Jews, especially faced with a supposed plague of Labour antisemitism under Corbyn\u2019s leadership. But the progressive left in Britain has to see these events through a very different lens.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For example, they had to watch powerlessly as a Jewish Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth, led what looked disturbingly like a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2018-04-26\/labour-anti-semitism-mps-lynch-mob\/\">lynch mob<\/a> of some 50 other Labour MPs \u2013 Jews and non-Jews alike \u2013 against an isolated, vulnerable, veteran black anti-racism campaigner, Marc Wadsworth, requiring the party expel him as an antisemite.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">My latest: 50 Labour MPs escorted Ruth Smeeth to a party hearing that they expect will expel black anti-racism activist Marc Wadsworth. The MPs wanted to give the impression they were serving as a bodyguard. In fact, they looked more like a lynch mob <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/C8QB4IK9BP\">https:\/\/t.co\/C8QB4IK9BP<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jonathan_K_Cook\/status\/989608189846020098?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 26, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wadsworth\u2019s crime was to <a href=\"https:\/\/skwawkbox.org\/2018\/04\/25\/video-for-transparency-marcwadsworths-actual-words-re-ruth-smeeth\/\">accuse<\/a> Smeeth of doing exactly what it appears she was doing: briefing the billionaire-owned, rightwing Telegraph newspaper \u2013 the beating heart of the establishment \u2013 against Corbyn, her party\u2019s elected leader, to help bring him down.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What was the progressive left supposed to conclude about \u201callyship\u201d during that episode?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel rightly notes how much fear \u2013 the fear of a new Holocaust, of renewed expulsions \u2013 continues to grip Britain\u2019s Jewish community. But he ignores the fear that grips a progessive left that has barely registered in British politics for more than half a century, apart from its accidental and short-lived rise with Corbyn, and is currently being <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=elp18OvnNV0\">snuffed out<\/a>\u00a0for another generation by Starmer.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The progressive left, like Jews, are also made out \u2013 by the same establishment \u2013 to be weak and powerful at the same time. Starmer knows he can eradicate the left from Labour at no political cost, because the media will cover his back as he does so. But at the same time, the left is presented as so powerful that it supposedly poses an \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2019-11-27\/chief-rabbi-mirvis-antisemitism\/\">existential threat<\/a>\u201d to the Jewish community in Britain. If Corbyn had won power, he was apparently going to turn Britain into the Third Reich.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">&#39;United We Stand&#39;: Jewish newspapers warn against Jeremy Corbyn&#39;s &#39;existential threat&#39; to community in unprecedented joint front page message <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/14VbTiT5Du\">https:\/\/t.co\/14VbTiT5Du<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/0dsHGYNimo\">pic.twitter.com\/0dsHGYNimo<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; ITV News (@itvnews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/itvnews\/status\/1022431126881804288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 26, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baddiel uses his documentary, once again, to reinforce a hierarchy of racisms, to plead Jew hatred as a separate category. His special pleading on antisemitism is evidence of the privilege he expects and the allyship he spurns.<\/p>\n<p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\">The reality is that weak, vulnerable communities need to stick together, and when they are under attack \u2013 whether a black footballer like Jason Lee, an anti-racism activist like Marc Wadsworth, the \u2018wrong Jew\u2019 like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, or a Palestinian child like the pupils of Masafer Yatta \u2013 they need our solidarity, not our scorn. They precisely need allyship, premised on equality. And that was exactly what Corbyn was offering.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jason Lee asked Baddiel who were his allies. Baddiel did not know how to respond. And in that very moment, Lee got his answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Asked who his allies against racism are, the Jewish comedian was flummoxed. That\u2019s because he\u2019s thrown his lot in with the racists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,6,30],"class_list":{"0":"post-5739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-israel-lobby","9":"tag-media-criticism","10":"tag-zionism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5739"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5751,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5739\/revisions\/5751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}