PS: Smearing by Mensch, an afterthought

I haven’t written anything about the Hugo Awards on this blog, despite having a vote at the 2015 Worldcon, because the extraordinary mess that a few hundred people made of a popular-vote award really seemed to have nothing to do with UK politics, which is, mostly, what I write about here.

The Hugo Awards are a set of science-fiction awards nominated and voted for by members of the World Science-Fiction Society (WSFS) annually, and presented to the winners at the World Science-Fiction Convention (the Worldcon). Any paid-up member can nominate any eligible work: the works that receive the most nominations are short-listed (generally five works to a short-list, though a tied vote can give six to a short-list). Any paid-up member can vote for any or all of the works short-listed in any category, and the work that receives the most votes wins the Hugo Award for that category. They’re called Hugo Awards after Hugo Gernsback, who is generally acknowledged to have founded modern science-fiction.

The goal of the Hugo Awards is for fans to choose the best works published over the previous two years.

Smearing by Mensch, 4: conclusion

Since Monday I’ve been working on a three-part response to Louise Mensch’s blog of Saturday night.

• Part 1 deals with Mensch’s distorted and dishonest assertions about Corbyn’s views on ISIS, and questions her claims of his involvement with CEC Australia.

• Part 2 deals with Mensch’s declaration that Corbyn must account for attending commemoration events for Deir Yassin, any and all encounters with his constituent Paul Eisen, and whether an audience member is responsible for researching the political beliefs of a jazz saxophone player who is said by Mensch to be “one of the world’s leading anti-Semites”.

• Part 3 deals with the theological and geopolitical complications of Stephen Sizer’s opposition to the anti-Semitic beliefs of John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, about Israel: Jeremy Corbyn’s defense of Sizer for posting a Facebook link: and briefly with Dyab Abou Jahjah.

Smearing by Mensch, 3

Jeremy Corbyn is a backbencher Labour MP who was elected to Islington North in 1983. He has won every election in his constituency since then: he’s been in Parliament for 32 years. Most MPs have to travel back to their constituency at the weekends and somehow make time for a family life: MPs in a London constituency have more time to go to meetings and events. Jeremy Corbyn has been, everyone says, a very active MP. So how many people has he met in 32 years as an MP?

Without knowledge of Corbyn’s desk diary over the past thirty-two years, it is impossible to say, but, as a low-ball speculation, if Corbyn had been invited to speak at thirty events each year, where he was on a panel to speak with at least three other people, with an audience of fifty or so, over thirty-two years he would have been on the same panel as 2880 people, and 48,000 people could say “I was at such-and-such an event with Jeremy Corbyn”. That is an intentionally low guess: I think it likely, especially as Corbyn became known as a left-wing MP who consistently opposed the Iraq war, that he would have been invited to far more events than a mere thirty a year: and certainly many Stop The War events in London had audiences of far more than 50.

Last Friday night Louise Mensch – New York’s Sun on Sunday columnist, inveterate Twitterer, blogger, and occasional guest on Have I Got News For You, had an embarrassing incident involving a sewer, a screenshot, and a search mistake, detailed in part 1.

Mensch then took less than 24 hours to write a long blog of recycled smears and rage about Jeremy Corbyn on the Saturday night after her Twitter fail: part 2 is here.

The third part of this debunk deals with Mensch’s assertion that if out of the thousands of people Corbyn has met in the course of his work as an MP, even two are anti-Semitic, Corbyn must himself be tainted by association with those two and needs to explain himself.

In effect, when you think about the numbers involved, this kind of smear answers itself. As Owen Jones notes in the Guardian today:

The Labour leadership frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, has been a long-term supporter of the Palestinian justice movement. He could not possibly have known the personal backgrounds of every individual who has joined him at the many rallies he has attended over the years. Some of these people were antisemitic. And while the vast majority of people involved in the movement are – like myself – driven by a passionate support for self-determination, there is a minority that indulges antisemitic tropes. These ideas have to be defeated.

Smearing by Mensch, 2

There’s a solid 19-point guide at the This-Is-Not-Jewish tumblr, on how to criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic. I have a quibble only over point 5: “Zionism is no more a dirty word than feminism.”

Feminism is the peaceful worldwide revolution for women’s rights and to end the patriarchy. Zionism is the movement, founded in the late 19th century, for the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael / “the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel”.

The two are not the same. The equivalents would be the peaceful revolution to end anti-Semitism worldwide or the foundation of a matriarchal state.

The problem with founding a homeland is that in any habitable part of the world, there are people already living there. (The same tumblr also discusses this in how to support Israel without being racist.)

Deir Yassin was a village in what was Palestine. On 9th April 1948, around 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi groups (which were “paramilitary” or “terrorists” depending on your viewpoint) attacked the Deir Yassin village, killing over a hundred people, many of them women and children, and drove out the survivors.

In Kelvingrove Park, there is a plaque in memory of the massacre, unveiled on the 40th anniversary by the then-Lord Provost Robert Gray. At a memorial event on 7th April 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, the STUC General Secretary Bill Spiers said:

“But in the midst of this brutal madness in Palestine there is a glimmer of hope which links April 1948 to April 2002.
“We know what happened in Deir Yassin in 1948 in part because of the eyewitness testimony of Jewish villagers, who had lived peacefully alongside their neighbours until the Zionist terrorists arrived. And more ­ the slaughter was actually stopped by courageous protesting Jews from the nearby village of Givat Shaul.”

Last Friday night Louise Mensch – former Tory MP, current Sun on Sunday columnist, and author of Sparkles, Glamour, Glitz, Passion, Desire, and Destiny, had an embarrassing incident involving a screenshot and Twitter’s auto-complete function, detailed in part 1. I am posting these as a series of debunking reports of the long blog Mensch posted on unfashionista the Saturday night after her Twitter fail.

Louise Mensch, like the Telegraph, started out seeing Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for leadership as a very good joke, since obviously Labour members and supporters would never actually elect him: and then as it became clear that he might just win, that Jeremy Corbyn could be Leader of the Opposition in September, Mensch and the Telegraph appear to be as one on this one thing: Corbyn must be stopped.

On Thursday 13th August, a follower responding to Louise Mensch’s tweet “Christ on a bike. Antisemites for Corbyn” coined the first use of the hashtag #antisemitesforcorbyn. (In the same tweet, he also coined #inbredforcorbyn and #thickasminceforcorbyn.)

Louise Mensch didn’t immediately pick up on this hashtag. Nobody did.

Smearing by Mensch, 1

Last Friday night, Louise Mensch – former Tory MP, former novelist, currently a columnist for Rupert Murdoch (she took the trouble to praise Murdoch highly when she was an MP and the Murdochs were being investigated by Parliament for phone-hacking) – came unstuck in her hashtag-related attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn when she confused Twitter’s autocomplete function with Google’s autocomplete function.

Google’s autocomplete function, while targeted towards you based on your location and search history, gives you an idea of what other people are searching on.

Twitter’s autocomplete function simply remembers your own previous searches. Louise Mensch had been searching Twitter for references to Liz Kendall (@LizForLeader) combined with “zionist”, “nazi”, “jewish”, “jews”.

When Mensch noticed this coming up in her Twitter autocomplete, she concluded the only reason someone would be doing this kind of search was because they were an anti-Semitic supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. She therefore screenshotted this and posted it on Twitter – to have it pointed out to her that she was condemning her own search history as a “sewer”.