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    Re: Sick bags at the ready.... Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on April 10, 2024, 12:24 am, in reply to "Sick bags at the ready...."

    Yup, that was the main reaction. At least the part about her being pleasantly surprised about Starmer purging pro-Palestinians from the Labour party was honest, and revealing of her sick priorities. The part about Berger requiring a police escort inside the labour conference on the other hand is a malicious lie, one she made at the time and was instantly debunked by a number of eyewitnesses. In fact Berger was given a police escort for when she ventured outside of the conference, which she herself described as a 'secure zone'. In other words playing the victim as a publicity stunt to attack Corbyn - which is what she built her whole political career on.

    JVL report:

    'Perhaps the most notorious and widely publicised example of alleged leftwing antisemitism directed against Berger from within the party was the report last September that she required police protection at Labour Party conference because of the supposed threat to her safety from party members.

    Summarising this slur against delegates and visitors attending the conference, Berger’s fellow anti-Corbyn rightwinger Margaret Hodge wrote: “The pictures of Jewish MP Luciana Berger walking through the conference area surrounded by police protection officers delivers a chilling image, demonstrating how antisemitism has pervaded the modern Labour Party. We should reflect on what those pictures tell us about the intimidation and racism that exists today in our party.”

    That myth has since become the stock-in-trade of anti-Corbyn propagandists everywhere. In a ranting attack on the Labour leader in the House of Commons in January during the debate on Labour’s motion of no confidence in the government, Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove demanded: “Why is it that a Labour Member of Parliament needs armed protection at her own party conference?” In Toby Young’s fevered imagination this story has grown into the fantasy that Berger “had to hire bodyguards to protect her when she attended the Labour Party conference last year to protect her from possible attacks by antisemites”.

    I’m not a huge fan of Skwawkbox, but Steve Walker published a decent piece on this at the time. He reported that he saw Berger leaving the conference zone at lunchtime on the Tuesday: “She approached the exit without any company other than a colleague, but two uniformed officers in high-vis jackets did then fall into place in front of and behind her. As she left. In other words, Ms Berger has required no protection in the Conference, but appears to have been allocated a couple of officers to walk out with her and presumably accompany her to her transport.”

    In response to inaccurate claims by her leftwing critics that she had received no police protection at all during the conference, Berger herself stated that although the police were not armed (a detail that has escaped Michael Gove) they “were with me all of the time, for the entirety of conference, when I walked to the many events outside of the secure zone” (emphasis added). In other words, Berger herself conceded that, contrary to claims by Hodge and others, she required no police escort inside the conference area itself.

    If it had been Labour Party members who posed a threat to Berger (as the now entrenched myth asserts) then obviously the conference area, where she was surrounded by party members, would have been the place where she would have been most at risk. Yet, as numerous witnesses confirmed (see also the contemporary coverage by Zelo Street), Berger walked around the conference zone unaccompanied by police and without facing any harassment at all from party members, still less any threat of violence. Instead, her police escort was provided when she left the conference zone and went out in public.

    Given the history of far-right threats against Berger, as outlined above, it is obvious why the police would have decided she needed an escort while walking through the streets outside the conference area. Their actions in fact reinforced the point that it is fascists rather than socialists who represent a danger to her safety. But Berger failed to provide that clarification, and has allowed Labour Party members who were at the conference to be repeatedly smeared as potentially violent antisemites. Evidently it serves her political purposes that people should believe a lie.'     - https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/luciana-berger-subjected-to-hatespeak-and-death-threats-from-the-left/

    jeers to the pair of them,
    I

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