Ali “Abumination” Abunimah has his panties in a bunch again, this time after his minion Asa Winstanley received a press pass rejection letter….from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/labour-party-revokes-electronic-intifada-press-pass
Last month, the Labour Party approved a press pass for The Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley to cover its annual conference next month.
But last week the UK opposition party’s press team claimed in an email to Winstanley that “Your application has not been approved.”
This amounts to a revocation of an approved press pass without cause, and an undemocratic attack on media freedom.
This is the same Asa who was suspended by Labour for his ostensible antisemitism, and defended antisemite Ken Livingstone with his own antisemitic language.
Not to be outdone, the Abumination ups the ante (semitism):
The revocation of Winstanley’s press access appears to be part of an ongoing effort by factions within the party’s bureaucracy to silence critics of how it has handled largely bogus accusations of anti-Semitism targeting the left, supporters of Palestinian rights and prominent Black and Jewish members.
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Winstanley first learned about the investigation from information leaked to the Jewish Chronicle, a right-wing, pro-Israel publication that has fueled the campaign of false allegations that Labour is rife with anti-Semitism.
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Rather, the report attempts to spin incontestable and highly relevant facts, including the close ties between the Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel lobby group within the party, and the Israeli embassy.
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Winstanley’s work has often cited Al Jazeera’s documentary The Lobby, which exposed how the Israeli embassy, working with British Israel lobby operatives, tried to covertly create a fake grassroots organization called Young Labour Friends of Israel.
The documentary also exposes how Joan Ryan, then chair of Labour Friends of Israel, fabricated an allegation of anti-Semitism against a party member.
The secret coordination between groups including the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, on the one hand, and the Israeli government, on the other, has taken place against the background of Israel’s global covert war to sabotage and silence supporters of Palestinian rights.
This campaign has included inciting death threats against human rights defenders.
Despite being unable to point to errors in Winstanley’s articles, the Community Security Trust smears his reporting on the role of the Jewish Labour Movement in fueling the bogus anti-Semitism crisis as “a classic ‘dual loyalty’ trope, by which Jews (and other minorities) are often accused of not being fully loyal to the country of their birth.”
