Mass Media Omertà: Burying Al Jazeera’s ‘The Labour Files’
Media Lens
The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, ‘The Labour Files’, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of ‘democracy’ in the UK.
Based on the largest leak in British political history, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has exposed how Labour party officials smeared and intimidated rivals on the left of the party. The leaked data comprises 500 gigabytes of documents, emails, video and audio files from the Labour Party, dating from 1998 to 2021. They reveal:
- The weaponisation of antisemitism by the right-wing of the Labour Party to hinder Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of becoming Prime Minister.
- A ‘hierarchy of racism’ within the Labour Party disciplinary process which prioritises the investigation of alleged antisemitism cases over other forms of racism.
- Shocking examples of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism within Labour.
- The crushing of dissent within Labour under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. (...)
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Keir Starmer
The Al Jazeera (AJ) investigation showed that false accusations of abusive behaviour were hurled at Corbyn supporters in order to have them suspended or expelled from the party. At Labour HQ, party officials were tasked with trawling through members’ social media posts to find anything incriminating, particularly any material that could be deemed ‘antisemitic’.
Whistleblower Halima Khan, who worked as a Labour Party investigations officer, told AJ that ‘Palestine’ was one of the search terms used to find incriminating evidence. (...)
Starmer’s support of Israel, and rejection of it being labelled an ‘apartheid state’ by human rights groups including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own B’Tselem, is well-documented; as is the strength of the Israel lobby within Labour. (...)
Andrew Feinstein, a veteran anti-racist campaigner originally from South Africa who has written and lectured on genocide prevention, is shown in one AJ programme examining Labour’s confidential disciplinary files. Hundreds of party activists had been suspended on the basis of these files. Feinstein pointed to clear examples of real antisemitism. But there were also many examples of cases where ‘there was no antisemitism whatsoever’. These were typically people criticising Israel for its crimes. (...)
After 2018, once Corbyn was in control of the party bureaucracy, the disciplinary process improved dramatically. (...)
Feinstein emphasised that:
‘The key finding, backed up by the evidence, which we can see represented graphically here, is that the key failings of the Labour party on antisemitism took place in the period before April 2018 – before Jeremy Corbyn had control of the party bureaucracy [our emphasis].’
As the AJ narrator noted:
‘Yet Jeremy Corbyn has taken all the blame and his factional opponents within the party none at all.’
This rational honesty was notably lacking when BBC Panorama broadcast a hatchet job in July 2019, pitched as an ‘impartial’ investigation asking the loaded question, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ The programme was presented by BBC journalist John Ware who had previously made clear his antagonism towards Corbyn’s politics, not least in an earlier edition of Panorama. (...)
As we noted in a media alert shortly afterwards, Panorama was immediately followed by the flagship BBC News at Ten programme which gave it extensive coverage, pumping up the propaganda value of the fake ‘investigation’. (...)
By contrast, Peter Oborne told AJ in ‘The Labour Files’:
‘The BBC produced a documentary bearing directly on the character and fitness for office of the leader of the Labour Party, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, in a moment of intense constitutional crisis [over Brexit]. Now, that’s a momentous intervention in British politics. So, I do think the BBC have to look really carefully at their record here.’ (...)
One of the most disturbing aspects of the AJ investigation into the Labour Party is further evidence supporting one of the conclusions of the Forde report that:
‘The Labour Party is not a welcoming place for people of colour’.
This was an understatement, as we will see. (...)
In our media alert at the time, we noted that the leaked internal report revealed that senior Labour figures on the right of the party had actively tried to stop Labour winning the general election in order to oust Corbyn as party leader. (...)
Starmer essentially suppressed Labour discussion of the damning leaked document, attempting to defuse the situation by commissioning an independent inquiry. However, the Forde report would have made uncomfortable reading for Starmer and the current Labour management.
As Jonathan Cook summarised:
‘Despite its careful wording and bogus even-handedness, the Forde Inquiry conceded that the Labour right had indeed waged a dirty factional war against Corbyn and the left of the party, weaponizing antisemitism to tar them.’
Moreover, as the Forde report concluded, the leaked WhatsApp messages revealed:
‘overt and underlying racism and sexism’. (...)
The Forde Report even identified a ‘hierarchy of racism’ in which investigations of alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party took precedence over Islamophobia and anti-Black racism. (...)
‘The Labour Files’ revealed the particularly egregious case of Labour HQ targeting Muslim Labour activists in Newham in east London. A dossier on Labour Party Muslim members and their families in Newham, containing private information about their lives and activities, was sent to Labour Party HQ in London. (...)
Oborne, who has recently published a new book, ‘The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam’, told AJ:
‘I found this dossier completely unbelievable. Reading this is like reading some far-right tract by some demented American right-winger. And this is published or done inside the Labour Party. It’s terrifying.’ (...)
In March 2021, Newham’s two party branches were suspended. More than 5,000 party members, mostly Muslim**, were thus denied a voice in Labour Party democracy. (...)
And what has the ‘mainstream’ media response been to the damning findings of AJ’s careful, in-depth investigation? An almost complete blanket of silence. It really is a remarkable demonstration of the near-totalitarian behaviour of British ‘journalism’. (...)
In an article titled, ‘Al Jazeera’s Labour Files has blown a hole in the British media’s Corbyn narrative’, for the Middle East Eye website, Oborne observed:
‘The papers that banged on day after day, and month after month, on allegations that Corbyn was a racist have all but ignored the Al Jazeera reports. The same applies to the BBC, which played a major role in framing the understanding of Corbyn and antisemitism in the run-up to the 2019 election.’
He added:
‘it is impossible to justify the media omerta around the Al Jazeera films. It reminds me of the long refusal of the mainstream British media to engage with the phone hacking scandal involving criminality across large sections of the British media more than a decade ago.’ (...)
In our 2018 book, ‘Propaganda Blitz’, we detailed at length the cynical demolition of the prospects for socialism under a Corbyn-led government. There were the usual suspects at the far-right of the media ‘spectrum’ – the Sun, Daily Mail, The Times and Telegraph among them. But, perhaps more insidious – because of their supposed reputation for reliable, even challenging, reporting – BBC News and, especially, the Guardian, were in the vanguard of the attack. It is obvious that they would be reluctant in the extreme to revisit the scene of their crimes – which are ongoing. (...)
Cook summed up the media’s callous behaviour and suppression of any reporting or discussion of the Al Jazeera series:
‘Which BBC program will acknowledge Al Jazeera’s revelations, let alone pursue them further, when the BBC’s flagship news investigation program, Panorama, is deeply implicated in the very smears Al Jazeera exposed. The BBC would in effect be investigating its own malpractice.’
He added:
‘And similarly for the Guardian. To investigate the leaked documents would convict the paper – traditionally seen by many Labour voters as their house journal – of colluding in a bogus antisemitism narrative against the Labour left that it played a central role in building. The Guardian would expose itself not as it wishes to be seen – as a fearless, independent newspaper confronting the British establishment with uncomfortable truths – but as a key pillar of that very establishment.’ (...)
Concluding Note
Al Jazeera’s ‘The Labour Files’ is a must-watch series. For the state-corporate media, it’s a ‘must-ignore’ series.
All four episodes are available on YouTube:
Part 1: The Purge
Part 2: The Crisis
Part 3: The Hierarchy
Part 4: The Spying Game
Tags: #media #mass_media #labour #labour_party #corbyn #jeremy_corbyn #starmer #keir_starmer #journalist #journalism #antisemitism #racism #al_jazeera #panorama #bbc #news_at_ten #forde_report #the_guardian #Kuenssberg #mainstream_media #msm #propaganda #censorship #defamation