The monstering of Clive Lewis

An Israeli airstrike on a school-turned-shelter killed more than 70 people on Saturday. Israel has claimed without evidence that the school was being used as a “Hamas control centre” (there are apparently an infinite number of these in Gaza). They also dispute the death toll and are insisting they used “precise munitions”. I suspect this is cold comfort to the families of the large crowd of civilians who were precisely killed during their morning prayers.

In the aftermath of this slaughter Labour MP Clive Lewis wrote:

The link between the daily inhumanity being meted out to Palestinians and rising Islamophobia in the UK, are not unconnected. The inhumanity being shown to one is giving ‘permission’ for the other. These actions diminish us all.

It’s my view that what makes this post unforgivable is the clumsy double-negative, but Britain’s ​​pro-Israel campaigners took a different stance. They called it a “highly irresponsible” and “antisemitic” post that “blames Jews for the outbreak of riots across the UK” and should result in Lewis’s “immediate suspension” from the Labour Party. This is, of course, vexatious nonsense, but the press ran with it anyway. What the press haven’t done is:

• Interrogate whether the campaigners’ arguments are sound.

• Inform their audience about the background of these campaigners.

Let’s do their job for them.

Do the campaigners have a point?

No. Lewis is criticising the policies of the Israeli government and these campaigners are cynically conflating all Jews with those policies. The risk that this false conflation poses to Jews is well documented.

It’s common sense that seeing Israel treat Muslims inhumanely (to put it mildly) and face zero consequence emboldens bigots in our own country. There is even a direct connection between anti-Palestinian prejudice and the race riots that took place in the aftermath of the Southport attack: the misinformation that spread quickly after the attack baselessly claimed that the killer was a Palestinian immigrant.

This isn’t the only connection between the rioters and pro-Israel campaigners, but that’s a blogpost for another time. I have seen some dimwitted speculation on social media that Israel incited these riots. This is foolish: Britons do not need external incitement to be racist.

It’s worth noting that Lewis is not the first victim of the vicious smear campaign against people who see Palestinians as people. It’s targeted actors, athletes, activists, broadcasters, directors, journalists and more. This campaign is so shameless and scattershot that it once labelled a journalist a terrorist on the grounds that he happened to be born on October 7th, decades before the atrocities committed on that day in 2023. A threat that’s emblematic of the whole rotten business is:

I would be very wary of trying in any way to contextualize the atrocities of October 7th.

This advice was issued by then Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy to Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy. It’s a warning against the dangers of thought. It rather gives the game away doesn’t it?

Who is demanding Lewis be expelled?

• Broadcaster Peter C. Barnes, who thinks that British racist Enoch Powell was right.

• Journalist Nicole Lampert, who described the N-word as free speech and once wrote a eulogy for a Sun journalist who'd killed his wife.

• Broadcaster Josh Howie, who promoted the Pallywood conspiracy theory that crisis actors are faking the horrors they're experiencing in Gaza. He once looked at an image of a dead Palestinian child and declared that it was actually a silicone doll.

• Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS): a pro-Israel pressure group who, despite their name, are not officially recognised by the Labour Party. LAAS frequently campaigns against Labour politicians and lodges antisemitism complaints against Jewish members of the Labour Party. The anti-Palestinian bigotry of some of the organisation’s founders has seen them kicked off of social platforms.

• LAAS spokesperson Euan Philipps, who is not Jewish so adopted a Jewish pseudonym to lend faux-semitic credence to complaints that he submitted to the Labour Party.

• North West Friends of Israel & Sussex Friends of Israel who persistently claim against overwhelming evidence to the contrary that there is “no famine in Gaza”

  • Notably, these organisations features on a list of pro-Israel organisations compiled and promoted by Labour MP Luke Akehurst. Akehurst is yet to distance himself from the groups attacking his parliamentary colleague.

These are not serious people. They are chancers and opportunists enabled by a British press that’s too cozy and too right-wing to take them to task. They have found a win-button and they are going to continue mashing that button until it stops delivering the outcome that they want.

Conclusion

My Jewish son is none of your business but, given the propensity of these vicious bastards to smear anyone standing up for Lewis, I feel compelled to invoke him here. Cynical false accusations cheapen the term antisemitism, detracting from the necessary work of combating it.

Every time that these charlatans tell their lie the world becomes less inclined to believe my son when he invariably faces bigotry. Every day that the rampaging pariah state commits another war crime and falsely claims to be doing so in the name of my son, it puts him in the crosshairs of people stupid enough to believe them.

Solidarity with Clive Lewis • With love to my boy • Free Palestine