The Jewish Chronicle’s Contempt for its readership knows no limits – they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)

Political Correspondent ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin inflates the pre-war membership of Poale Zion (now the JLM) by tens of thousands

It was a pretty stupid mistake but then ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin, the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Correspondent is pretty stupid. He is used to getting his information from hacking into other peoples’ phones, hence normal journalism is alien to him. For those not aware, he was arrested by Police when working for the Daily Mirror but unfortunately he wasn’t charged.

In a puff piece in the Jewish Chronicle ‘Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn’ Liar Lee informed the Jewish Chronicle’s gullible readership that

‘While JLM once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday, the 3,000-strong membership list is the highest it has been over the past decade.’

I therefore wrote a simple letter to the Editor, the far-right Islamaphobe and member of the Henry Jackson Society, Stephen Pollard, also former editor of The Express, pointing out just a few of Liar Lee’s many inaccuracies

i. The JLM wasn’t in existence before the war. Poale Zion ‘the Workers of Zion’ was the name of the Israeli Labour Party’s British wing. It changed its name in 2004 as a cursory look at Wikpedia would have told LL.

ii. Far from its membership being in the ‘tens of thousands’ before the war, it barely reached 500! Jewish workers had contempt for Zionism. Zionism was a movement of the reactionary middle class not workers. Even after the war it only climbed to 1, according to Paul Kelemn’s authoritative British Zionism and the Left.

iii. I could have added that if the JLM boasts a membership of 3,000 then it is its highest ever. I doubt it had even 200 members a decade ago. It had been defunct and was only refounded in 2015 with the specific task of campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn. In short the JLM is an arm of the Israeli state inside the British Labour Party rather than an organisation of Labour supporting Jews. That is why it refused to support Labour in the last election.

iv. One should take the claimed 3,000 membership with a hefty dose of salt. As I’ve written before the majority of the JLM’s members are non-Jewish. So much for its claim to represent Jewish labour members. If more Jewish members are joining now, as Liar Lee claims, then it is highly unlikely they are Labour Party members or even supporters of the Labour Party (you don’t need to be a Labour Party member to join the JLM). Given the JLM’s campaign against Corbyn it is likely to attract the likes of Jonathan Hoffman and others closer to Zionism’s fascist wing.

Below is my letter to the Jewish Chronicle correcting a few of their mistakes. Unsurprisingly my letter was not published.

In my letter I too made a minor mistake. Phil Piratin was not the only Communist MP to have sat for an English constituency. In fact Shapurji Saklatvala was elected for Battersea North in October 1922, defeated in 1923 and was elected again from 1924 to 1929. However Saklatvala was endorsed by the then Labour Party in 1922 and de facto in 1924. Unlike the Jewish Chronicle, I admit to even the most minor of errors!

Given the lies that Liar Lee and his Editor have told for the past 4 years about Jeremy Corbyn and ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party LL’s ‘mistake’ concerning the JLM must be considered trivial indeed.

Tony Greenstein

The Editor
Stephen Pollard,
The Jewish Chronicle,
915 High Rd,
London,
N12 8QJ

Dear Stephen,

I realise that Lee Harpin has always had a tenuous grip on reality, hence his appointment as your political correspondent, however his claim [Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn, January 6^th 2020] that the Jewish Labour Movement ‘once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday’ , has taken his ability to invent facts to new, undreamt of heights.

I realise that you will consider me pedantic but prior to 2004 there was no JLM. The group was called, more accurately, Poale Zion, an organisation which all good class conscious Jewish workers avoided like the plague.

According to Paul Kelemen’s 2012 book ‘The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce’ the pre-war membership of PZ stood at 500 (see page 98) before increasing to 1,500 after the war. Much as you would like to rewrite history, so as to pretend that British Jews were always solid Zionists, the fact is that the Jewish working class of the East End was indifferent if not hostile to Zionism.

It was Jewish workers in the East End constituency of Mile End who voted overwhelmingly in 1945 to elect the only Communist MP that has ever sat for an English constituency, Phil Piratin. You see the anti-fascist struggle against the genuine anti-Semitism of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and support for Zionism did not go hand in.

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein