My Encounter with Dr Rosena Allin Khan MP – another Palestinian Zionist – she runs with the foxes & hunts with the hounds!

You can no more support Palestinians & Zionism than you could support Black Africans & Apartheid or the Jews & the Nazis! @drrosena finds this ‘disgusting’

I guess my encounter with Dr Rosena Allin Khan MP must have been her lucky break.  She has garnered more publicity from meeting me than anything else she has done during her campaign for leadership.

Dr who you may ask?  She is running to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. As Lyndon Johnson, US President once observed, Vice President isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

At the Brighton Kemptown nomination meeting 2 weeks ago she was the only candidate to turn up.  She needed the nomination desperately because no union and virtually no CLPs had nominated her. Knowing fully well that Brighton Kemptown was a left-wing CLP she was determined to put on a left face. What she didn’t mention was that the organisers of her campaign are Tom Watson and former Labour General Secretary ‘crooked’ Iain McNicoll.

I was giving out leaflets for Rebecca Long-Bailey (v. reluctantly) and Richard Burgon. She saw my Palestinian badge and came over and congratulated me on wearing it. Clearly she was eager to please

Dr Rosena introduced herself to me and no doubt expected I would be bowled over and flattered. I wasn’t.  I knew who she was and wasn’t impressed after I’d already heard about her opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. anti-racism in Labour. I responded that if she supported the Palestinians why then did she sign up to the Board of Deputies 10 Commandments. 

She stuttered and mumbled and failed to give any coherent reply, as a bundle of witnesses will confirm. She quickly moved on! I thought that it might be a good idea to give some publicity to this hypocrite who runs with the foxes and hunts with the hounds. So I sent out a tweet on Twitter, prompting a response from Rosena

Now she was full of righteous thunder. People shouldn’t associate with expelled members (as the Board has instructed). Perhaps they/she thinks they will catch something contagious (like fresh ideas?). Quarantining ideas is a particularly fascist concept that it should not be necessary for me to elaborate. Dr Rosena seemed oblivious to the fact that she had approached me!

Dr Rosena is not unique.  In fact she is extremely commonplace.  Hypocrites who pretend to support you and suggest they are on the left are two a penny in the Labour Party. Dr R did not of course berate me that night because she needed the nomination (which foolishly the CLP gave her out of a mixture of kindness and pity).

Both the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle have seen to publicise our encounter. I can only assume that in the wake of their massive loss in the libel courts that the Jewish Chronicle is eager for any news that is cheap at the price.

But at least the Jewish News’s Jack Mendel, with whom I have clashed before, had the decency to send me an email querying the facts, print much of my response and check that what I had said was on the record.

It is a long time since the Jewish Chronicle has followed what is good journalistic practice and actually contacted the person they are writing about. I remember when the Jewish Chronicle was a decent paper that Bernard Joseph or Martin Brighton or whoever would ring me up before going to print. Propaganda newssheets don’t need to check their facts.

After all, if the JC’s Political Correspondent, ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin were to contact his targets he wouldn’t be able to lie so frequently. But then again the Jewish Chronicle would not have to pay out so many libel damages either!

As for Dr Rosena? I harbour no grudge against her. She needs all the publicity she gets. That she is a lightweight politically is obvious. Scoring points off her is like taking candy from a kid. And as anyone with a sense of decency will tell you, that is unsporting.Tony Greenstein