To my last piece debunking the claim by Ephraim Mirvis that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is anti-Semitic one person, Jack Mendel, included my blogpost in one of his tweets.
His accompanying comment was to the effect: “Ooh look an antisemitic article about why Jeremy Corbyn’s antisemitic Labour Party is not antisemitic.” I might be paraphrasing but not by much.
When I asked him on Twitter in what way my piece was antisemitic, rather than providing an answer he first: deleted my tweet; second: blocked me.
So much for free speech!
Before that I had no real interest in somebody sharing my post whether they agreed with it or not. Afterwards I was bemused that Jack – if he was convinced that the statement made and the ground he stood on was worth defending – would not want to discuss or explain in what way he deemed my article anti-Semitic.
I wrote in my previous piece “There is an old adage that if you say something often enough people will start to believe it.” In essence Jack Mendel appears to be following that same meme. Put another way certain people who have no argument can get away with labelling someone anti-Semitic instead of an argument.
Before it was deleted my tweet in response to Jack’s comment in sharing my piece had 15 views. Perhaps somebody wiser than Jack had pointed out to him that there was nothing anti-Semitic in the article.
Who is Jack Mendel? He is the online editor of Jewish News, a tabloid, which, according to his LinkedIn page has a distribution of 25,000 with an additional 500,000 hits online. It is aimed at the Jewish community. Most people from the Jewish community are as fed up with the memes of “anti-Semitism” and “Holocaust denial” as we non-Jewish people, who are usually the targets of these venomous comments. It seems from the few Jewish News headings I have seen (including the featured image) that it has an agenda. That agenda is to keep labelling people without argument hoping that eventually some of the muck will stick.
Jack, you have a degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of Reading, and presumably in getting that degree you had to argue from more than one point of view, yet now you have become a person with power – indeed, little more than a dictator, who can decide which voices get heard and which are discriminated against. Your alma mater will be proud of you – if it uses the same criterion for argument – but I very much doubt it does.
All the Goss 
Perhaps it is time for someone to ask ,”At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
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