The Jewish Chronicle has truly lost the plot!

Oh the Irony! Only yesterday, I uploaded a short post to the Spotlight Facebook group encouraging honest, principled journalists to break off their shackles and create their own platforms, if they genuinely value their freedom of speech and their right to impartiality. Today we learn that, unbeknownst to me, on the same day I wrote that post, Professor Geoffrey Alderman reported that he had been no-platformed by the Jewish Chronicle.

The Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) wrote an article on the revelation at the time and expressed their shock that “a renowned historian of British Jewry, and author of many books including Modern British Jewry and British Jewry Since Emancipation…. a Professor Emeritus at the University of Buckingham…”, an author “awarded the Bermant Prize for Journalism” and a renowned journalist who has been writing for the Jewish Chronicle for 45yrs, could be so easily dismissed and without warning or explanation.

JVL speculate that Prof Alderman’s “stubborn independence”, his refusal to subscribe to “the community line on Jeremy Corbyn or the EHRC” and his decision to participate as one of the voices in the ‘Just Jews’ video series, will have set him directly at odds with the paper’s editor, Stephen Pollard (the Jewish Chronicle is a notoriously anti-Labour and militantly anti-Corbyn newspaper). In the video, Professor Alderman makes it clear how facts show that, in reality, Antisemitism is “wide spread in all political parties in this country” and he expressed grave concerns over how some prominent figures have singled out the Labour Party and deliberately chosen to “ignore the wider picture” in order to “present a very skewed view of Antisemitism in current British Politics”.

In Sept 2017, the ‘Institute for Jewish Policy Research’ produced an 85 page report following an investigation into the prevalence of Antisemitism in wider British society. It included a detailed study on levels of Antisemitism within political groupings (Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain) and revealed that Antisemitism was in fact far more prevalent on the right than on the left of the political spectrum.

It appears then that Professor Alderman’s decision to trust the academic data and to express an informed opinion on the subject does not ‘fit in’ with the overtly bias political narrative of the Jewish Chronicle.