| A prominent Israel lobbyist in the
UK has claimed credit for last month's electoral defeat of the Labour Party led by Jeremy
Corbyn. "The beast is slain," Joe Glasman delighted – Corbyn has been "slaughtered." He rejoiced that "we defeated him" in the election. "They tried to kill us," he ranted, but "we won." Glasman leads the "political investigations team" at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, or CAA – an influential anti-Palestinian lobby group. He made his comments in a bizarre video rant addressed to his team of supporters that he posted online during the holiday break. The video was soon set to private. But left-wing Labour activists managed to download a copy and posted it on the Barnet Momentum Facebook page. In the video Glasman claimed he and his supporters beat Corbyn through a coordinated campaign using methods including "our spies and intel." But he said his group were "not secret Mossad spies, they're just ordinary people." The video swiftly became an embarrassment. Other copies posted online have been taken down following copyright claims by Glasman. The Electronic Intifada is reposting the full video to our YouTube channel for news reporting purposes. Partisan "charity" After he was subjected to a four-year witch hunt targeting the left and Palestine solidarity activists over alleged "Labour anti-Semitism," Corbyn lost last month's general election. The Campaign Against Antisemitism was founded in 2014 during Israel's war against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, to counter rising criticism of Israel. It did so primarily by smearing critics as anti-Semitic. It has been one of the most active right-wing Zionist groups promoting the false notion that Labour became an anti-Semitic party after Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership in 2015. But as anti-Zionist Palestine solidarity campaigner Tony Greenstein recently put it, "The one thing that the Campaign Against Antisemitism doesn't do is to campaign against anti-Semitism." In fact, Greenstein argued on his blog, "anti-Semitism of the traditional kind is all but ignored by it, but [fake] ‘anti-Semitism' of the anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian variety is very much its concern." Despite being a registered charity, and thus supposedly non-partisan, the CAA openly campaigned against Labour and against Corbyn. It organized demonstrations against Labour, including one days before last month's general election. Greenstein has complained to the Charity Commission, calling for the regulator to remove the group's tax-exempt status. Anti-Palestinian agenda The Campaign Against Antisemitism habitually smears Palestinians and their supporters. In 2017, it attacked Malaka Shwaikh, a Palestinian from Gaza then running in student elections in Exeter. The attacks sparked a barrage of threats and harassment against her. Now a lecturer at the University of Leeds, Shwaikh told The Electronic Intifada at the time, "The right of free speech on campus has been threatened." |