Baroness Royall, who this week joined the Chakrabarti Inquiry as co-vice chair with Professor Feldman, and today released an executive summary and recommendations of her report into antisemitism at OULC, has taken the extraordinary step of writing a lengthy and exclusive post on the Jewish Labour Movement’s website. JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organization, and has proposed a rule change to the Labour Party Membership rules that could see anti-Zionists suspended for using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative.
Chair of Jewish Labour Movement, Jeremy Newmark – whose evidence of ‘institutional antisemitism’ at UCU was found in 2013 by an employment tribunal judge to be “false, preposterous, disturbing and arrogant” – has proudly announced on Twitter this potentially partisan move on behalf of Royall.
Read Baroness Royall’s blog post here
If Labour NEC had the guts to publish the full report, including the report of incidents of antisemitism at OULC, she wouldn’t have needed to blog.
Just publishing the summary, which probably greatly waters down the actual report, is a tactic straight out of “yes minister”. It doesn’t fool anyone
There are a number of extraordinary things about Baroness Royall’s blog, the first of which is its very appearance, which seems calculated to prejudice the larger Chakrabarti inquiry. Then there is the extraordinary assertion that “I know that you will share my disappointment and frustration that the main headline coming out of my inquiry is that there is no institutional Antisemitism in Oxford University Labour Club”. How can it be frustrating and disappointing that there is no institutional antisemitism at OULC? Surely, that should be something to rejoice about. Can it really be that Baroness Royall would have preferred to have been able to report that OULC is a hotbed of Jew-hatred? Why would that be?
Baroness Royall bends over backwards to praise the Jewish Labour Movement, a branch of the World Zionist Organisation, which has adopted the Jerusalem programme as part of its constitution. This document says that as a Jew, the State of Israel should be central to my life, and that I should be working to encourage all Jews to emigrate their. This is not an organisation that I, a non-Zionist Jew, would wish to join.
Then there is the worry expressed by Baroness Royall that Jewish students fear that they are ridiculed when they preface their remarks with the phrase “as a Jew”. I don’t know what the situation is at Oxford, but I could report such a phenomenon to the Baroness myself. On May 5th David Aaronovitch devoted his Jewish Chronicle column to attacking Jews like me who have written to newspapers criticising Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights. His main complaint is that we often preface our remarks with the phrase “as a Jew”. In fact he has decided to call us “Asajews”, and says that we “wear [our] Jewishness very lightly considering how often [we] bring it out for rhetorical use”. I have never met David Aaronovitch, so I don’t know how he knows about my Jewishness and how I wear it. I wonder if this sort of Jew-baiting will be examined in the wider enquiry.