Jonathan Pie is a gem.
For me, the re-reading Orwell’s ‘1984’ and other text has never felt more relevant, or important at this moment in time.
Is this show still broadcast on Russia Today?
As for what RBL did wrong...
1) she publicly endorsed an interview with an activist who explicitly said that the killing of George Floyd in the USA was explicitly tied to the military training provided by the state of Israel. Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic unless you are saying that Israel has no right to exist. It turns out that Israel do provide training for police forces from the USA and many other countries but so so many other nations. There’s no suggestion that any of the Minnesota police involved in the killing of Floyd visited Israel or received training from Israeli forces. Moreover there are plenty of photos of law officers kneeling on the neck of victims the world over - some of which predate the institution of the state of Israel.
2) this particular fiction however does tap into a deeply anti-Semitic trope - that the Jews/Israeli state are responsible for many of the bad things in the world. You’ve likely heard the stories of Jewish workers in the World Trade Center getting messages not to go to work on September 11, that type of thing. Or how recessions were caused by certain banks or a particular family of bankers who control the world elite. They also cause pandemics and try to control the world’s development through secret cabals and clubs and vaccines and technology etc etc etc. This trope suggests that Jews and the state of Israel are directly responsible for the systemic racism that has characterised the US incarceral state for centuries. Again before Israel was a thing. it offers a cheap (and nasty) explanation for systemic racism that lets some obvious candidates off the hook while blaming some very usual suspects.
3) when this was highlighted to RLB she refused to take down the endorsement. RLB (who alongside Richard Burgon refused to sign up to the Intenrariknally recognised definition of anti-semitism during the labour leadership campaign) said she didn’t endorse everything in the article which she said was a clarion call for Labour unity. This is tosh, Maxine Peake actually said in the same article - Anyone who didn’t vote for Labour because of Corbyn basically voted Tory and should be ashamed of themselves (I’ve only added the last few words).
4) finally the labour leadership needs to keep the pressure up on the Tories. They’ve performed weakest in recent weeks on their confusion on whether labour want schools to reopen - and RLB as Educ Shadow might take some responsibility there. Also they want to keep asking why Robert Jenrick hasn’t been sacked. RLB would have been the “what about” answer to any question on this.
so TLDR
She endorsed a particularly stupid article that wasn’t true and repeated tropes that were sensitive for Labour coming out of the Corbyn years.
She refused the opportunity to take down her tweet. And doubled down on what the interview said and in doing so highlighted another area of controversy.
She was doing a pretty poor job as Shadow Educ Sec and got caught up in other politics too.
