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The extent to which the anti-Semitism thing was engineered by Labour’s right appears shocking, but I’m still not convinced there was no issue. It is also an area I’m not sure how impartial a Qatari news channel would be. I’m not taking this second episode without a pinch of salt given its one-sided nature, but the inner workings of the party do look pretty much as Alexi Sale describes above. The thing that really stood out for me was Starmer and the court case towards the end. That was all new to me and his decision really speaks volumes. See my view on digging holes.
Certainly an interesting documentary and only active reinforcement that Labour isn’t for me.
Very few people claim that there was no issue. The debate is really about the nature of the issue and its extent.
The key claim for me is that the extent of anti-Semitism in the party was overstated for factional reasons. At this stage, I think that, by any objective standard, that is beyond dispute.
Because I'm a physicist, I tend to look for reliable quantitative data to support any claim. I have maintained for a long time that there is no reliable quantitative data that shows anti-Semitism to be more prevalent in the Labour Party, than it is in society as a whole, and I have seen nothing to alter that conclusion. Of course, I would like there to be fewer anti-Semites in the Labour Party, but that requires an approach that ackowledges all of the complexities involved and is respectful to all participants in the debate (this is pretty much what the Forde report said). In particular, targetting left-wing Jewish members because they are "the wrong kind of Jew" is deeply sinister and only reinforces the suspicion that a factional vendetta is being conducted under the guise of fighting ant-Semitism.
About that quantitative data... I knew of a few polls that showed the Labour Party was not "overrun with anti-Semites" but finding them again online was almost impossible because any search involving "Labour" and "anti-Semitism" throws up so many results from clearly factional sources, not to mention the far-right press. Therefore, I was delighted when Jewish Voice for Labour published this article recently:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.or...-labours-antisemitism-problem-was-overstated/
You might not agree with the argument, or the way the author interprets the data but the good thing about this article is that it contains links to pretty much all of the surveys I know of. In that sense, it's a valuable resource, when it comes to sifting fact from fiction.
For what it's worth, I too will watch the AJ with a critical eye, and be on the lookout for the usual journalistic tricks (omission, elision, ambiguity and so forth). I'm pretty good at this now, having become painfully familiar with such deceitful practices in The Guardian's reporting on anti-Semitism, and the Corbyn era generally.