In the sixth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we chart the involvement Labour Against Antisemitism – which would quickly lead to the involvement of Rachel Riley. This is the second part of Chapter Two.

To recap: it is wrong to say that there was no antisemitism in the Labour Party. But it is also wrong to say that every allegation of antisemitism in the Labour Party was true. Questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in the party remain a difficult, but important and necessary, subject for rational debate. The charge of ‘denialism’ killed this nuance. It demanded that anyone exercising scepticism be ejected from the political and moral community as anti-Jewish bigots – even when the sceptics in question were themselves Jewish.

The crusade against ‘denialism’ also upped the stakes. It became nearly impossible for well-meaning people to sift through the welter of claims about antisemitism and to have a reasoned discussion about what conduct was truly antisemitic. It chilled into frosty silence precisely the discussions that needed to be had. It created a sense of panic and fostered a political environment in which the safe option for many people was to tactically concede that, for example, robust criticism of Israel was antisemitic, or to cede the ground on that issue and not engage at all. It also incentivised party officials to err on the side of unfairly sanctioning members because it was more politically expedient to deliver ‘results’ than it was to properly examine the cases against them.

It is perhaps for this last reason that Corbyn’s faction would eventually over-compensate for earlier procedural failings, rushing to discipline members even where the evidence against them was scanty – or where accused individuals merely had the temerity to question a flawed narrative, some of which was being written, behind a veil of anonymity, by a Labour Together Project that ‘despised’ Corbynism itself.

Labour Against Antisemitism and the Zionist fringe

One more feature of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ needs to be understood before moving on to the nuts and bolts of Labour Together’s interventions in this arena: the role played by the online group Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS). The astroturf project that the Labour Together Project created would succeed with the support of LAAS activists and supporters. Its most prominent cheerleader was the British television celebrity Rachel Riley, who was also close to LAAS activists.

LAAS formed around late 2016 or early 2017 as a loose network of affiliated activists. An open letter of LAAS members, signed in March 2018, suggested it had at least fifty-five members at the time.

The primary (but not exclusive) focus of LAAS’ work was to engage in deep digs into the social media histories of real or apparent Labour Party members to discover alleged evidence of antisemitism. This evidence would be compiled into dossiers that were sent into the Labour Party demanding the expulsion of alleged antisemites.

An audit of complaints files for Al Jazeera’s 2022 documentary, The Crisis, found that approximately 12% of all antisemitism-related complaints submitted to the party during Corbyn’s leadership had come from LAAS-affiliated actors.

When the party failed to expel and suspend LAAS’ targets, LAAS would inform the media that it had made thousands of complaints that had been ignored. This, in turn, would drive the key narratives that the party was both overwhelmed with antisemites and that it was failing to meaningfully deal with complaints. Party files, discussed below, suggest that far more critical scrutiny should have been applied to LAAS’ allegations.

Fake Jewish-sounding personas to make antisemitism allegations

LAAS was controversial for two reasons. The first was that the organisation and its members had a history of attacking the conduct of left-wing and non-Zionist Jews and accusing Jewish figures of antisemitism. Many of these allegations were made by non-Jews.

In 2022, Al Jazeera reported on documents leaked from the Labour Party which showed that LAAS’ spokesperson and one of its most well-known activists, Euan Philipps, had created a fake persona called ‘David Gordstein’, which many readers would take to be a Jewish name. Philipps is not Jewish. Philipps admitted to Al Jazeera that he was David Gordstein but insisted that “he never claimed to be Jewish when doing so”. ‘David Gordstein’, as shown below, would play a material role in the success of the astroturf campaign that was incubated by the Labour Together Project. Philipps remained a prominent member and spokesperson of LAAS even after his Gordstein persona was exposed.

Previously unseen documents from the Labour Party show that the Gordstein persona was used to make hundreds of complaints of antisemitism to the Labour Party between 2017 and 2021. The reports are detailed, but perhaps the most important feature was the number of times the persona was used to accuse left-wing Jews of antisemitism. The outrageous story of Gordstein’s complaint about the elderly Jewish party member Riva Joffe, which led to the party investigating her on her death bed, is dealt with in Part Three below.

Miriam Margolyes calls it what it is

One of the more absurd Gordstein complaints was directed against Miriam Margolyes, the idiosyncratic national treasure and garlanded Jewish actress who played Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the film adaptations of Harry Potter.

One of Margolyes’ allegedly antisemitic acts, according to ‘Gordstein’, was to use her Facebook profile to share an impassioned article written in 2019 by the highly regarded Jewish social anthropologist and London School of Economics professor David Graeber. Graeber challenged aspects of the mainstream narrative alleging a ‘crisis’ of antisemitism in the Labour Party. He argued that the way the Labour Party ‘antisemitism crisis’ had been covered was itself antisemitic, because it generated unjustified “rancour, panic and resentment” that “creates terror in the Jewish community”. Ironically, Graeber had written in despair about how many of the “protagonists” of the antisemitism crisis “were not Jewish”.

So, to recap: an invented Jewish-sounding persona (Gordstein), created by a non-Jew, charged a Jewish actress with antisemitism, because she had shared an article by a left-wing Jewish academic, which argued that non-Jews telling scare stories about antisemitism was itself a form of antisemitism. This same non-Jewish activist would play a key role in amplifying the astroturf Stop Funding Fake News campaign, also led by non-Jews, that would implicitly accuse media outlets of being antisemitic for interviewing and recording the views of Jewish people who questioned aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’. That astroturf campaign was run by an organisation established by the Labour Together Project.

I contacted Margolyes for this book to get her response to the Gordstein complaint. In an entertaining potty-mouthed tour of world politics, Margolyes bemoaned the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On Gordstein she was amusingly frank:

I’m an old cunt and I know what’s what, and if he thinks I’m an antisemite he is speaking out of his bottom.

Mocking anti-Zionist Jews

Another, previously unseen document indicates that contempt for left-wing Jews emanated not merely from this or that LAAS figure but was one of the group’s core commitments. It is one page of a longer text, prepared with a LAAS logo, which appears to be a training document or a preparation of press lines. The document endorses the use of the phrase ‘as a Jew’.

This is a derogatory play on how (often progressive or non-Zionist) Jews might open their critique of Israel, or some other related matter, with the qualifying clause: ‘As a Jew . . . ’. Some Jews find the phrase hurtful, even offensive, as they feel it can imply an accusation that they only recognise or inhabit their Jewish identity when it is politically convenient to do so.

LAAS was apparently very comfortable with deploying the as-a-Jew epithet to mock Jewish people guilty, in their view, of either engaging in or defending antisemitism. Thus, under the heading ‘As-a-Jew antisemitism’, the LAAS document alleges that:

racist Jews tend to underline their identity as a defence and to separate themselves from non-Jewish antisemites.

An illustrative example tells the reader that:

Jackomi and her friends commonly say they are talking “as a Jew” – as if that gives them more authority to make antisemitic statements.

This is quite something from an organisation whose most prominent spokespeople and many of whose most active members were not Jewish.

In May 2023, Novara Media broke the story of how Julie Cattell, a LAAS member, had been selected by the Labour Party as a councillor candidate in Brighton and Hove to contest the 2023 elections – despite a history of using the phrase ‘As a Jew’ on Twitter. In one 2019 exchange, Cattell was asked why a range of Jewish public figures – such as Noam Chomsky, John Bercow, and Miriam Margolyes – questioned aspects of the mainstream narrative of the antisemitism crisis. “I asked for proof. Not a list of AsAJews”, she responded. Cattell is not Jewish.

LAAS’s links to the far-right

The second controversial aspect of LAAS was that it was connected to a group of fringe pro-Israel activists who had historical links to the far right. One of those activists was a man called Jonathan Hoffman, who was an early advisor to LAAS. The same 2022 Al Jazeera documentary that exposed David Gordstein also established Hoffman’s links to figures on the far right. It included footage of Hoffman and a fellow member of this fringe network called Damon Lenszner hectoring a Palestinian woman in 2018, for which they were both convicted of “aggressive, bullying behaviour” in a North London court the following year. Hoffman was connected to a broader group of equally fringe pro-Israel activists who harboured what some might call robust opinions about Muslims.

To give a flavour of Hoffman’s milieu: in 2010, he was pictured protesting alongside a woman named Roberta Moore. Moore was one of the founders of the far-right English Defence League (EDL). She parted ways with the EDL in controversial circumstances in 2011, the year after she was pictured with Hoffman. Moore would claim that she quit the EDL because of ‘Nazi elements’ within it. But this had come after the EDL’s leadership rebuked her for developing a working relationship with the far-right American Jewish Task Force, whose leader had been imprisoned for terrorism offences.

When the photo of Hoffman and Moore was published, Hoffman attempted to claim in his Jewish Chronicle blog that the photo was a photoshopped fake, but embarrassingly he was forced to retract the claim. Moore would subsequently write articles trying to contextualise the murderous attacks by Anders Breivik, the terrorist who killed dozens of children and teenagers on the Norwegian island of Utoya, which she described with near-comic understatement as “regrettable”. “I hold the same amount of sympathy for those on Utoya as I would if somebody committed this act on a Hitler Youth camp in the 1940s”, she would write.

Attacking pro-Palestine meetings

Moore was an assiduous contributor to the comment section of a blog run by a man called Richard Millett, who worked closely alongside Hoffman for years. Moore posted repeated rants using Islamophobic slurs on Millett’s blog. She also referred to liberal or anti-Zionist Jews as ‘kapos’, a reference to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.

Together, Hoffman and Millett formed a double team: Hoffman would disrupt pro-Palestinian meetings, provoking confrontations that Millett would record. Millett would then post the recordings on his blog. During the ‘antisemitism crisis’, Hoffman and Millett’s videos and stories were the source of a number of scandalised articles targeting the Labour Party and Corbyn. Indeed, Hoffman and Millett were at the centre of one of the defining scandals of the ‘antisemitism crisis’: the unearthing of a video (albeit not sourced from Millett or Hoffman) that showed Corbyn telling an obscure meeting in 2013 that certain “Zionists in attendance” at a previous meeting did not understand “English irony”.

Corbyn was referring to four individual ‘Zionists’, two of whom were Hoffman and Millett. Much media coverage was canny in cutting up Corbyn’s comments to make it seem as if he was casting aspersions against all Zionists, rather than four specific people, at least two of whom (Hoffman and Millett) had a history of disruptive behaviour at pro-Palestine events.

LAAS advised by director of UK Lawyers for Israel

Another key advisor to LAAS was the libel lawyer Mark Lewis, who was also a director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) between 2014 and 2017. Mark Lewis’ role in advising LAAS was not well known until 2023, when a video of LAAS activists speaking on a platform in 2020 was discovered. A LAAS spokesperson confirmed during the event that:

we could not have functioned without him.

After the video was discovered by journalists in 2023, it was quickly set to private on YouTube. Richard Millett was appointed the operations manager of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) in February 2020.

Lewis also represented, amongst others, Rachel Riley, who would play an important role in amplifying the work of Stop Funding Fake News – something she agreed to do after meeting directly with McSweeney and his closest collaborator, Imran Ahmed, in February 2019.

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

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