A short article in the Sept. 5th print edition of the Scottish Daily Express framed British director Ken Loach as a victim in a dispute he has with Campaign Against Antisemitism.
Here’s the article, written by Ellie Iorizzo:
First, Ken Loach is not merely someone who “backs Palestinian rights”, but has a record of antisemitism going back several decades.
Loach was among the loudest of those who dismissed the antisemitism crisis within the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn as nothing but a right-wing smear campaign, and even called for the party to expel Labour MPs who complained about antisemitism. He continued to characterise the antisemitism crisis in Labour under Corbyn as smears, even after the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in 2020, found the party guilty of unlawful harassment and discrimination against its Jewish members.
Just yesterday, Loach, who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2021, said, in response to the row over CAA and the BBC, that antisemitism “was weaponised to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the left in general, and to inhibit criticism of Israel.”
In 2009, Loach said, in response to the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency reporting an increase in European antisemitism, that the rise in antisemitism was “understandable” given Israel’s actions, and called the report a “red herring” designed to “distract attention” from Israel.
He also once suggested it was legitimate to discuss whether the Holocaust happened (before backtracking upon criticism), and, earlier in his career, peddled what Dave Rich aptly characterised as the Stalinist lie that Zionism and Nazism collaborated in the murder of European Jewry, when he directed a play called Perdition. As Rich commented, “The play itself had a very clear ideological purpose which was to equate Zionists with Nazis”.
Finally, the Scottish Daily Express article errs in the last paragraph by claiming, as if it were a fact, that Loach was expelled from Labour “in a purge of Jeremy Corbyn’s allies“. As other articles on the row make clear, this is merely the wording used by Loach himself to describe his expulsion. He was expelled for his involvement with an antisemitic organisation called Labour Against the Witch-hunt.
We’ve complained to editors asking for a correction to that sentence.
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Another one who does not realise Palestine is a diversion and a displacement agency. While he is being outraged by a sideshow used as a crowbar to score Cold War points, millions of others are killed and scatttered as refugees – largely in the Arab World (Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Saharawi…) and the broader Moslem sphere: Nigeria, Sahel, Horn of Africa, East Timor and Pakistan.
Worse while he is collecting self satisfaction at pretensions to do something over Palestine nothing changes there nor here except to revive Antisemitism which will eventually lead to the aliyah of Western Jews and the final eviction of Arab Palestine to Gaza the original Philistia.