This Rachel Shabi article is the first proper attempt, I be…

Shabi takes the EHRC and its report entirely at face value: a “sobering verdict”, no less. This is not the first time she’s done this: she also uncritically endorsed the claims made in the BBC’s Panorama documentary in July 2019. 2/

She then scolded the Labour leadership for stating that the central claims made in that documentary were demonstrably untrue and indeed the opposite of the truth, something that has become even more obvious since. 3/

As Richard Sanders & Peter Oborne pointed out, the findings of the EHRC report itself on Labour's disciplinary process tacitly contradict the Panorama documentary. It’s logically impossible to endorse both. 4/

https://t.co/rIFZFHxGhf

Instead of pointing out this discrepancy, Shabi simply moves on, seemingly with no reflection, to uncritically endorse the EHRC, ignoring the evidence of its crude partiality. 5/

https://t.co/XHSFrgu5iX

She does note the EHRC’s refusal to investigate Tory racism at the end of the article, but attaches no weight to this, or to the damning criticisms of the EHRC by a Westminster committee, or to many other pieces of evidence that undermine its credibility. 6/

Many of the EHRC’s conclusions are eminently disputable: its claim to have identified “unlawful harassment”, for example, is based on a tortuous chain of logic that would be very unlikely to hold up in court. 7/

Even so, the EHRC report clearly doesn’t come anywhere close to substantiating the dominant media narrative about “Labour antisemitism”, which is what Corbyn was really challenging with his statement. Shabi reproaches him for doing so. 8/

She falls back on a now-familiar evasive formula, railing against “those leftists who dismissed the entire problem as a smear campaign”, as if there are many people who believe there wasn’t a single case of antisemitism in the Labour Party. 9/

It was the media narrative around “Labour antisemitism” that was a smear, or rather a compendium of smears, major and minor, empirical and conceptual. The Panorama programme that Shabi uncritically endorsed was the flagship of this effort, but there were countless others. 10/

Shabi does refer to one example of “gross exaggeration”, Simon Heffer’s “reopen Auschwitz” comment. But Heffer just took the standard media narrative one step further. All of the most important claims of that narrative were grossly exaggerated or simply false. 11/

There was no dramatic upsurge in antisemitism under Corbyn’s leadership; antisemitism was not endemic in Labour; Corbyn did not encourage it or protect the guilty parties; Labour was not a “cold house for Jews” (still less an “existential threat to Jewish life in Britain”). 12/

Shabi archly dismisses “the numbers game”, as if it makes no difference whether there were 50 or 50,000 virulent antisemites in the Labour Party. In effect, this means dismissing the idea of any empirical controls for the media narrative. It's a surrender to irrationality. 13/

This is frankly asinine: Ilhan Omar was bullied into apologizing for a reference to AIPAC’s lobbying power that wasn’t remotely “offensive”. 14/

https://t.co/2QksXfUePu

Omar is still facing disingenuous, bad-faith attacks from the US political counterparts of the groups that denounced Corbyn. 15/

https://t.co/ZAwNDeFEXe

The AJC, keen to accuse Omar of antisemitism on the most implausible grounds, was just as keen to avoid levelling that charge at Trump, even when he said that American Jews should vote for him because they were all rich and greedy. 16/

The main difference between the US and British cases is that Ilhan Omar stopped apologizing for things that didn’t merit an apology (or never happened in the first place), and for the most part the US left rallied combatively behind her. 17/

Corbyn’s statement was right in every respect, and frankly it ill behoves people who thought that Iain McNicol & Sam Matthews were trustworthy sources to wag their finger at him while triangulating between truth and fiction. 18/

The main effect of this article, if taken at face value, will be to discourage people on the British left from stating the facts, and to encourage people on the US left to follow an approach of appeasing bad-faith actors that has already proved disastrous in Britain. 19/

The idea that the EHRC report & the processes surrounding it can be a "positive step" for anti-racism in Britain is for the birds. The "Labour antisemitism" media narrative has functioned to protect & strengthen racism in British politics, as was always likely to be the case. 20/

This Rachel Shabi article is the first proper attempt, I believe, to articulate in detail a certain line (“Corbyn shouldn’t have been suspended, but his statement on the EHRC report was still wrong”). So it’s worth looking at properly. 1/

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