BLOGS

Blogs

Comrade Maccoby on the Class Struggle across the Pond

January 16, 2019

In Blog News

Maccoby writes:
Rachel Riley is a British Jewish TV celebrity with over 600,000 followers on Twitter.  She is a star presenter of “Countdown”, a very popular TV game show, featuring letters and numbers games.  She has recently been sending out numerous tweets saying or implying that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party in general, Noam Chomsky and others are anti-Semitic.  After receiving the inevitable barrage of tweets in response (of course including genuine anti-Semitism, but many of them just calling out her own slanderous verbal abuse, which she seems unable to recognise for what it is), she is now claiming to be a victim of anti-Semitic bullying.  When George Galloway tweeted: “Dumbfounding. She calls Chomsky an anti-Semite and slanders half the Labour Party as the same”, she tweeted back: “F*** off George Galloway.  Today is not the day I’m going to be polite to antisemite scum”.  Karl Hansen, a Shadow Cabinet policy adviser, tweeted: “Rachel is a celebrity with 604k followers who smears her political opponents as antisemites and boosts troll accounts that are notorious for targeted claims of harassment.  She isn’t standing up to bullying she is a bully”.  The JC has of course accused him of antisemitism and linked him with Corbyn.
The JC has recently published on its website no fewer than seven articles about the alleged anti-Semitic victimisation of Rachel Riley.   The JC claims that the “abuse” started in December after Riley shared a video about antisemitism in football.  In fact, as my links show, the Twitter reactions began in September, after Riley’s slanderous tweets about Corbyn and the Labour Party.
The links are on this Twitter thread (though there were so many articles that my Countdown initially omitted one; it is in the top tweet below). Click on “show this thread”, scroll up and read from the top.