New year, old smears - #37
Response to Emma Watson post shows Israel's anti-Semitism smears won't work forever.
Welcome to the first edition of the newsletter in 2022. I hope you managed to have a good holiday break with your friends, family and loved ones, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.
I had a lovely time with my family, am feeling rested and recuperated and am raring to go with more ground-breaking investigative journalism in the year to come!
I have some big projects in the works for 2022 and I can’t wait to tell you more about them when the time comes. But for now, let’s get into this week’s news.
We entered the New Year with the latest iteration of an old smear campaign: a supporter of Palestinian rights being falsely painted with the Israeli brush of “anti-Semitism”.
What else is new, right?
Well this time, I humbly submit that there was something a little different about Danny Danon’s attack on major Hollywood actor and liberal activist Emma Watson.
The anti-Semitism smears are beginning to lose their potency.
I emphasise beginning because the capitalist press, with wearying predictability, churned out highly misleading stories about a supposed “anti-Semitism spat,” Watson being “accused of anti-Semitism” and even the liberal Guardian claiming that there had been an “anti-Semitism row” over Watson’s post.
While technically not untrue, the headlines were nonetheless highly misleading. Once you get into the territory of an “anti-Semitism row,” you’re already giving undeserved credence to the smears. This is not objective journalism (if such a thing even exists).
What all these headlines carefully elided was the fact that Watson’s entirely uncontroversial Instagram post had been maliciously and deliberately smeared — entirely without factual basis — by an Israeli party official (and former diplomat) who is himself openly racist against Palestinians and Africans.
This is what I mean when I write that this time it was a little different. Watson’s post was in no way controversial, shocking or debatable. It was pretty vague, if I’m being frank. It was just a graphic saying “Solidarity is a verb” with Palestine solidarity protesters pictured in the background.
And that’s why Danon’s vicious attack on Watson was a bit of a self-own.
It gave the game away: Israeli and pro-Israeli allegations of “anti-Semitism” are 99.99% of the time entirely fabricated, simply as a way to attack and undermine Palestinians and their supporters in the West.
The bald-faced nature of the lie this time meant that some slightly more “mainstream” public figures felt able to defend Watson — in a way that they probably would not have done for Jeremy Corbyn, for example.
All of this is a sign that the wheels are beginning to fall off the anti-Semitism smears bandwagon. Long may it continue.
Read my EI colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman’s report about the smearing of Emma Watson here. You can also read my MEMO column on the issue (see below).
My Work This Week
Here’s my work which came out over the Christmas period, since the last edition of the newsletter was published two weeks ago.
You’ll no doubt remember that back in November almost the entire political and media class rose up in pearl-clutching outrage against a group of principled students who protested outside of the London School of Economics against the presence of Israel’s racist ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely.
Home Secretary Priti Patel herself (described by former minister Alan Duncan as a “compromised” asset of the Israelis) attacked the protesters and called for police to investigate.
But last month the university was (reluctantly) forced to admit that the protesters did absolutely nothing wrong. It’s still a disgrace that the university won’t make a public statement defending its own students. Read my full report here.
You can also read my opinionated take on these events here in my MEMO column:
Tzipi Hotovely is an arch Israeli racist. She is an outright Jewish supremacist who openly demands Palestinian villages in the West Bank be destroyed to make way for Israeli settlements. For decades she's been a right-wing settler activist, later recruited into the Likud party personally by Benjamin Netanyahu himself to shore up their hard-core West Bank settler vote…
In any civilised country (unlike in ours) Hotovely would be persona non grata. Instead, upon her arrival in this country last year she was welcomed with open arms by both the Tory government and the Labour “opposition”.
Just after Christmas, and a few days before New Year’s Eve, we managed to put out this wrap-up of 2021 on EI, in the latest episode of the EI podcast.
It’s a great episode with my colleagues Nora and Tamara, which features the podcast début of our colleague Maureen Murphy!
Watch it in the video above, download the MP3, listen via your preferred podcast platform, or even read the full transcript. See the episode page on EI for details.
Finally, here’s my MEMO piece about l’affaire de Watson, as trailed above:
The maliciously false allegations of anti-Semitism against Israel’s enemies have become so egregious that most people no longer believe them.
Weaponised anti-Semitism – a tool in the Israeli arsenal almost as powerful, in its own way, as the undeclared nuclear weapons it has – is beginning to lose its potency.
