Authors Daniel Finn

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Daniel Finn
Daniel Finn
@DanFinn95
Some familiar figures are pushing the absurd and defamatory claim that Ken Loach supports Holocaust denial. The story of this bogus talking-point, which relies upon multiple layers of falsehood and guilt-by-association, makes for a revealing case-study. 1/

It dates back to the 2017 Labour conference. In a NYT op-ed, Howard Jacobson claimed that “a motion to question the truth of the Holocaust was proposed” from the conference floor—a crude fabrication, which the NYT sanctioned in its pages. 2/


If you follow the link supplied by Jacobson or his editors, you’ll see that he was wrong on 3 counts: it wasn’t a motion, it wasn’t at the conference, and it wasn’t in favour of Holocaust denial. Quite the hat-trick! 3/

At a fringe meeting, granted no official status by Labour, an Israeli-Jewish speaker, Miko Peled, had said that he didn’t think Holocaust denial should be a criminal offense (which it is in some European countries). 4/

This is a perfectly reasonable position to hold—that opinions, no matter how wrong-headed or morally objectionable, should not be a matter for the criminal law—and of course it does not mean that Peled himself questions the truth of the Holocaust. 5/
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Daniel Finn
Daniel Finn
@DanFinn95
This Rachel Shabi article is the first proper attempt, I believe, to articulate in detail a certain line (“Corbyn shouldn’t have been suspended, but his statement on the EHRC report was still wrong”). So it’s worth looking at properly. 1/


Shabi takes the EHRC and its report entirely at face value: a “sobering verdict”, no less. This is not the first time she’s done this: she also uncritically endorsed the claims made in the BBC’s Panorama documentary in July 2019. 2/


She then scolded the Labour leadership for stating that the central claims made in that documentary were demonstrably untrue and indeed the opposite of the truth, something that has become even more obvious since. 3/


As Richard Sanders & Peter Oborne pointed out, the findings of the EHRC report itself on Labour's disciplinary process tacitly contradict the Panorama documentary. It’s logically impossible to endorse both. 4/

https://t.co/rIFZFHxGhf


Instead of pointing out this discrepancy, Shabi simply moves on, seemingly with no reflection, to uncritically endorse the EHRC, ignoring the evidence of its crude partiality.
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