A bit of a rant about bias.

Well, I have finally got round to a bit of a rant about bias. I have been ignoring it for a while.

We’re seeing a lot in the news about the chief rabbi condemning Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for antisemitism. Nobody, at the BBC at any rate, seems to be making the connection that the chief rabbi appears to be a bit of a Tory and regards Boris Johnson as a friend. But then the Archbishop of Canterbury has come down on their side as well. It begins to look as though once you are accused of something there is no real way of getting out of it. You have been tarred with that brush and the tar has stuck.

People should take a look at this.

I am continually amazed at people’s capacity to believe one-sided stuff in the newspapers, given that so many drivers see the road closed sign a few hundred yards away from our house and disbelieve it completely. They carry on driving and are seemingly astounded to find that just beyond our house the road, the A62, is in fact closed. There is simply no way through or round the barrier. I am seriously considering having a notice put up by our garden gate giving directions for driving through the village and then back to the A62 to get back onto their originally planned route!

There may not be much in defence of Jeremy Corbyn on the television news but in the bits of social media that I see there is quite a lot. 

Here’s part of what Noam Chomsky had to say about the anti-Corbyn campaign in an article in The Canary.

“The smears against Corbyn rely heavily on misrepresentation. For example, mainstream outlets spent days accusing Corbyn of hosting an ‘antisemitic’ event in parliament in 2010, because speakers compared the actions of Israel to the Nazis. But at the meeting, a Jewish Holocaust survivor was addressing a room of predominantly Jewish people.

Broadly speaking, the total cases of antisemitism in Labour represent less than 0.1% of around 540,000 members.

With that in mind, widespread smears undermine the genuine instances and genuine concerns about antisemitism in Labour and wider society.

On 16 September for instance, Conservative environment secretary Michael Gove refused to condemn the openly antisemitic and Islamophobic far-right leadership in Hungary.

That’s after the Conservatives whipped MEPs to back Viktor Orbán’s dangerous platform in a vote at the European Parliament. This has received far less media coverage than allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn and Labour that just don’t stack up.”

Note the statistics in there: “Broadly speaking, the total cases of antisemitism in Labour represent less than 0.1% of around 540,000 members.”

And Michael Rosen had this to say:

“Has the Chief Rabbi expressed concern over Boris Johnson's time as editor of the Spectator, when he was editing the raving antisemite Taki? Has he commented on Johnson's silence over Rees-Mogg's antisemitic jibes (calling Letwin one of the 'illuminati', and using the Soros slur), retweeting a tweet from the Alternative für Deutschland,  hanging out with the far-right Traditional Britain Group? Or Johnson's congratulations of the election of Orban in Hungary - someone who again uses the Soros trope in order to flag up hostility to Jews?”

And then there is this stuff about the Conservatives and Islamophobia.

There does seem to be a bit of bias out there.