If you followed the UK media this week, you’d be excused for thinking Theresa May
was a freedom fighter and Corbyn a literal fascist.
“Has the world gone topsy turvy”
Well, no it hasn’t. You’re just being lied to.
On the right - a picture of Theresa May visiting the prison cell of Nelson Mandela.
It’s Captioned “May walks in Mandela’s footsteps”
Now, visiting Robben island is big statement. Mandela was there for 27 years, imprisoned
by South Africa’s all-white aparthied government. And In this photo, May is positioning herself
as a defender of social justice.
But what was May doing when Mandela was *actually* in jail.
That’s right, nothing. What’s worse, in the late eighties, when
May was already a Tory councillor, her party was actively blocking sanctions on South Africa,
as her leader branded Mandela a terrorist.
Now, who *was* standing up against apartheid in the 80s (i.e. when it mattered)
You guessed it. Jeremy Corbyn
Now let’s look at the other side of this front page:
While May is compared to Mandela, Corbyn is compared to…. Enoch Powell.
Powell was a Tory MP in the sixties who achieved infamy with a speech proposing the mass expatriation
of people of colour from Britain. Using incendiary language - Powell argued
demographic change would mean *“in 15 or 20 years' time the black man
will have the whip hand over the white man”*
So what could Corbyn have done to invite such a comparison. Did he, like Powell, tell migrants
to “Go Home”
no, that was May.
What he did do, was in a speech in 2013, say some pro-Israeli activists who had objected
to the Palestinian ambassador lacked “English irony”.
Perhaps a clumsy phrase, but ‘rivers of blood” it is not.
This bizarre comparison made the headlines because it was said by ex-chief rabbi, Jonathan
Sacks.
And fair enough, with that job title, you’d think this is a guy we should take seriously.
But let’s dig a little deeper
In 2017 Sacks was criticised for joining the “March of the flags”, where Israeli extremists
marched through muslim areas of Jerusalem chanting slogans such as “death to arabs”
Sacks also supports Israel’s Nation State law which formalises Palestinians status as
second class citizens - i.e Israeli Aparthied.
Closer to home, Sacks has promoted “the death of Europe” - a book by Douglas Murray,
which like Powell, argued demographic changes threaten white, christian Europe. In fact,
in the book, Murray actually references Powell approvingly!
This context matters. It’s not hard to imagine why a hard-right
public figure like Sacks might want to attack an anti-racist, pro-palestinian, politician
like Jeremy Corbyn.
Now - what do we we learn from this? This front page was on the Telegraph. It’s not
surpising that that Tory rag would mislead the public about Corbyn and May. But, The
BBC, Sky and Guardian all ran the Sacks story without mentioning his politics. Later in
the week, The Daily Mirror, supposedly a Labour paper, ran a story comparing Corbyn supporters
to literal Nazis. This is nothing but an attempt to discredit
a man and a movement that threaten Britain’s establishment and want to return power to
ordinary people. To try to stop this, the media will literally turn the world upside
down.
It’s fake news. It’s offensive. It’s time to call bullshit.