Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, swimming with the antisemites

Last week, the anti-antisemitism ‘circus’ went to Manchester. This time with Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Ben Jamal as the headline acts (PDF of event flyer). By ‘circus’, I refer to public events (currently on national tour) put on by a handful of organisations, like ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ (JVL), the ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign’ (PSC) and ‘Labour against the Witch-hunt’. Events that are actually opposing ‘anti-racism’. Think about that.

The theme and content are already familiar to anyone who is fighting rising antisemitism. A fringe group of Jewish people, most of whom have no ties to the Jewish community, are trying to mobilise in defence of Jeremy Corbyn. To do this they have deployed their Jewish identity as a weapon:

This ’empowerment’ is at the root of the usefulness of these activists. In a recent scoop, Harry’s Place ‘stumbled‘ across a list of eighty-five JVL goals. Goal number four reads ‘empower non Jewish Labour Party members‘. It is for this reason, that they are so important to Jeremy Corbyn. However few in number they may be, they empower many. This symbiotic relationship gives fringe extremists a voice beyond their number. In return antisemites are given cover to air racist views. Neither group has any chance of making waves without the other and so the relationship is a critical one. It is a key reason why members of JVL, despite being Jewish, are so blind to, and tolerant of, antisemites.

Roland Rance, a long-time activist and anti-Zionist Jew, posted this after I published my report exposing the antisemitism in Palestine Live:

This is Roland Rance calling Palestine Live an ‘antisemitic cesspit’. Yet almost *ALL* of those who founded ‘Free Speech on Israel’ and then JVL have not only been active participants of Palestine Live, but are still members today. Seven months AFTER I published my report. Like Wimborne-Idrissi for example.

As a point of fact, the domain for ‘Free Speech on Israel’ was purchased on 28th April 2016. THE SAME DAY that Ken Livingstone made his comments about Hitler and was immediately suspended from the Labour Party. There is no coincidence here, the defence of antisemitism is integral to the cause.

The lies of the circus

I understand the frustration that Director of the PSC, Ben Jamal must feel. After all these years of research, I now have great confidence in my central findings:

1. 40%+ of the central anti-Israel activists share hard-core antisemitic ideology
2. There is a disturbing correlation between motivation levels of activists and antisemitism
3. 20%+ buy into Holocaust revisionism if not outright denial

Jamal must be aware of this. Unless he is stupid, he has to know that he cannot cleanse the anti-Israel group of this antisemitism, because it would fall apart. Rid of its antisemites, there would be nobody left to man the PSC stalls, or turn up at demos. It is why major-league conspiracy theorists like Tony Gratrex are always at the PSC AGM (Tony was one of the admins of Palestine Live and is dealt with extensively in the report).

Or if we move further up the food chain, take PSC Director Tapash Abu Shaim. Tapash was seen at one of the circus events in North London, that myself and other Jewish members were ‘blocked from attending‘. Tapash attends the Labour Party Conference and was given a tour of Westminster by none other than Jeremy Corbyn:

Yet we know Abu Shaim peddles antisemitic conspiracy theory. Along with at least 40% of PSC activists. This just one of his many, many conspiratorial posts:

And this next example has him sharing an article from Veterans Today. VT is a conspiracy / Holocaust denial outlet that has been described as a ‘virulently antisemitic website‘:

Yet Tapash can sit undisturbed as a Director of PSC and Tony can attend the AGM, because the entire cause is ‘antisemitism-dependent’. The anti-Israel narrative is historically twisted and any balanced research would soon expose fundamental flaws in the pillars holding the argument aloft. No target audience is as ready to buy into every lie about Israel than the antisemites. Just as JVL and the antisemites need each other, so too the PSC are trapped with the same handicap. This is precisely why attempts to curb antisemitism in the Labour Party are seen with such fear. JVL, PSC, Corbyn’s Labour are therefore all engaged in the same fight. A fight to oppose anti-racism. Hence I understand Jamal’s frustration.

The childish hate of Naomi Wimborne- Idrissi

And then there is Wimborne-Idrissi. There is neither consistency or inherent logic to Idrissi’s arguments. Idrissi smears at will, but the main conclusion I come to whenever I hear her speak is how immature her politics are. As with many of the JVL leaders, they all seem to be working through unresolved childhood family issues.

The beginning of her speech at the event, referenced the pre-Holocaust Labour Bund movement. This historical revisionism is often repeated by the JVL supporters. Jacqueline Walker just made that same revisionist mistake in a post today:

These people (JVL) are not Bundists. If we were to try to to weakly apply the Bundist label to any of today’s Jewish community, we could perhaps turn to Jewdas, but not JVL. JVL are assimilationists, the Bundists were certainly not. Being proudly Jewish, following tradition, the promotion of Yiddish, elements of autonomous-rule. The Bundists saw Jews as a nation, but believed Europe could offer safe haven. Given that Bundists were so catastrophically wrong, it is somewhat sickening that people use some of the victims of the Holocaust as a means to attack Jews. The Bundist argument died in Auschwitz. In essence it is little different from the attempt by those like Greenstein who obsess in trying to distort the relationship between the Zionists and Hitler’s Germany during the 1930’s.

People like Walker and Wimborne-Idrissi push the Bundist nonsense as a way of legitmising an illegitimate position. They clearly do not understand the pre-Holocaust Jewish community at all, and seek to rationalise it without the necessary tools to do so. The result is pure poppycock.

Once she had finished with her historical revision, Wimborne-Idrissi turned her attention to smearing me:

‘David Collier hates the Labour Party.. he is a far right racist who gathers with people who go on EDL marches wrapped in the Israeli flag because they are so Islamophobic.’

I don’t need to waste much time rejecting those accusations. There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, of me that is either far right or racist, so then the question then becomes – why does Wimborne-Idrissi need to lie?

Desperation and the real truth

This desperation by anti-Israel activists to paint me as racist or extremist, highlights the weakness of their argument, and the difficulty they have trying to explain away my research. I am not alone. Just today, Raphi Bloom from North West Friends of Israel won ‘significant libel damages‘ from Random House over false allegations about him published in a book.

Wimborne Idrissi even tries to ‘tie me’ into the EDL. How she manages to keep a straight face when she then goes on to suggest I work on ‘guilt by association’ is beyond me:

He produces lengthy dossiers, in which he manages to link the name of Jeremy Corbyn, to a Facebook Page on which three years ago, a person, posted something that was actually retweeted from another site where they has been something antisemitic on it… It’s guilt by association about fifteen removed, and this person gets quoted as if they are an authority’ 

This is not the forum to address the slander, I want to focus on the dismissal of my research. Because that’s Wimborne-Idrissi’s point. My research has exposed uncomfortable truths, so first she needs to lie about my own positions, before she attempts to ridicule the research. Yet hers is clearly a nonsense statement by someone who is denying the truth. There is no ‘fifteen-removed-guilt-by-association’ essence to anything I have ever done. Jeremy Corbyn himself was inside Palestine Live, mixing it up with hard-core antisemites. Let us just revisit one example of this:

This is a post by Jeremy Corbyn in a Facebook Group where 60%+ of the active contributors were found to share antisemitic material. Inside this group his own office arranged for Max Blumenthal to be given a meeting room in Westminster. The person Blumenthal used as the ‘middle-man’ for arranging the event was Elleanne Green, the founder of the group and the person who had added Corbyn as a member. In this visible thread, Corbyn is sandwiched between Green and Sandra Watfa. Both of these people have shared endless amounts of vile antisemitic material. It is like seeing Theresa May fraternising in a secret Facebook Group about white supremacy with a bunch of KKK members.

I’ve previously posted far too much on both Green and Watfa to need to provide many examples. Here are just two posts from Watfa. One on Holocaust Denial and the other with the ‘imaginative hashtag #jewnitedstates:

And one from Elleanne Green cosying up to Holocaust Denier Paul Eisen as they discuss ‘standing up to the Jews’. Green ‘liked’ both of Eisen’s comments:

 

These are the people Corbyn DIRECTLY associates with.

Wimborne-Idrissi in Palestine Live

Wimborne-Idrissi travels around the country downplaying antisemitism. In the ‘Free Speech on Israel’ submission to the Chakrabarti report there is this outrageous comment:

‘The collective experience of our group, spanning life experience running into thousands of person-years, includes only a very small number of experiences overt antisemitism, and none of them in the Labour Party‘. 

This from people like Wimborne-Idrissi who have been members of the ‘antisemitic cesspit’ Palestine Live for years. I only need to provide one example here because of its sickening nature:

As someone Jewish, the idea of Naomi collecting information about Jews from within a group of radical antisemites, is unsettling. These were the first five people to respond (Naomi aside):

Five people. Elleanne Green (who has shared Holocaust Denial and white supremacist websites) John Drier, Bev Krell, Aleksandra Davies and Sandy Cheyne.

John Drier:

And just in case we didn’t get the message, this is how he responded to a post with a cartoon figure of Ben Gurion:

That he thinks Israel is behind 9/11 is a given:

There is no need to post several examples of antisemitism from each of the posters. This is Sandy Cheyne:

This from Aleksandra Davies:

Hypocrisy and hanging out with racists

Four of the five people who responded to Wimborne-Idrissi share antisemitic posts. Unlike Naomi’s claim about distant guilt by association, this post is evidence of Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, inside an antisemitic sewer, asking for information on Jewish activists. At the same time as she hangs out with antisemites, Naomi goes onto television and suggests there is almost no sign of antisemitism on the left. Even insisting that she, along with other JVL members, have seen no examples of antisemitism in the Labour Party. That’s a strange claim to make considering Palestine Live has so many Labour members. There are even some in that example above.

This connection is absolute. Jewish Voice for Labour, the PSC, other anti-Israel movements and elements of the Corbyn faction in the Labour party are existentially dependent on Jew-haters. It is why they will lie and smear and deny anti-Jewish racism, even as they all swim together in the same antisemitic swamp. Drain that swamp and they’d all cease to function.

 

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