Paul Robeson died 50 years ago yesterday, and I’ll always remember the following exchange between my parents (my mum was Scouse and my Dad was African American).
Mum – I see Paul Robeson died today
Dad – He was a communist
Mum – That was no reason to treat him the way they did
Dad – [silence]
It was because of that exchange that I went out and read as much as I could about Paul Robeson. He refused to play roles that cast Black people in a negative light. When I started doing comedy in 1986, I adopted this principle, too, by refusing to perform ‘Black’ or, rather, to expectations of Blackness which are constructed by white people (qv. Frantz Fanon).
Paul Robeson was immensely popular around the world, and this was brought into focus when I was teaching at South Thames College in 2002. In October of that year, I heard that a Blue Plaque was going to be placed on a house in Hampstead where Robeson lived from 1929 to 1930.
Blue Plaque honoring Paul Robeson at The Chestnut, Branch Hill, Hampstead, NW3 7NA
I wanted to record the occasion and armed with a video camera, I recorded the ceremony, which was led by Loyd Grossman, who was then the chair of the Blue Plaque Panel. I tried to get my students interested in Robeson. Sadly, they didn’t care, apart from one student who was Iraqi, who told me how popular he was in his home country. The following morning, he came up to and handed me a CD of Paul Robeson’s songs. I was quite touched.
While many people around the world know about Robeson and his work as a singer, actor and civil rights activist. In the United States, he was airbrushed out of the country’s history. If you mention his name to many African Americans, you’ll get a blank stare. This is a pity. For Robeson was actively engaged in the civil rights struggle before it became a thing, and long before Martin Luther King and Malcolm X became figureheads of the civil rights movement in the 1960s .
The Manic Street Preachers released a single called ‘Let Robeson Sing’, the title of which came from a concert he did over the telephone to the people of Britain after he’d had his passport confiscated and was confined the the United States. The concert took place in St Pancras Town Hall and was sold out within minutes of it being announced.
I could write more, but I’ll let the Manics do the rest. This song always brings tears to my eyes.
Last week, the Home Affairs Select Committee took evidence from Craig Guildford, the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, but they weren’t interested in what he had to say. They’d already made up their minds that the ban imposed on Maccabi Tel Avi’s (MTA) racist football hooligans was ‘antisemitic’. How they arrived at this conclusion is obvious when you consider that five out of eight members of the committee declared that they were members of their respective party’s Friends of Israel groups. Others like the Lib Dems’ Paul Kohler, had accepted donations from Liberal Democrats’ Friends of Israel. One of those MPs on the committee, Jo White, is the spouse of John Mann, the so-called ‘antisemitism tsar’, who’s a notionally independent peer despite having been ennobled by the last Conservative government. Here’s a video clip from Politics Joe.
A leading voice pushing for a whitewash of Maccabi’s racist supporters and in the process, the smearing of the Chief Constable, is Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk, and a former special advisor to Theresa May. Timothy was one of the architects of the Hostile Environment policy, but he isn’t a member of the committee. Nevertheless, he was keen to weaponize the hearing for political reasons.
It should be remembered that Timothy was also closely involved in the ‘Go Home’ vans that were deployed in areas that had a large number of immigrants and people of colour.
The Cat believes that Nick Timothy is the sort of person, who, if a Black or Brown person were the victim of a racially-aggravated assault, would blame the victim for having the ‘wrong skin colour’. In fact, we can see that his concern with antisemitism has nothing to do with Jewish people, but is weaponized to serve a political purpose. Indeed, one could argue that Timothy sees antisemitism as a form of “anti-white racism”. As for actual racism, Timothy doesn’t believe it exists – as the tweets below suggest.
Timothy seems to have a problem, specifically, with people of Somali origin. Chris Philp, who he’s cited here, also has some rather questionable views on race.
Now, Timothy would deny that there’s anything racist in his post but given its tone, it’s hard to see how it could be interpreted any other way.
Here, Timothy suggests that the Equality Act is to blame for the fact that one of his constituents didn’t make the cut with MI6. It’s cheap and it’s pathetic, and there’s no evidence to support it. Personal anecdotes have the same weight in a court of law as hearsay.
Here he is talking about “anti-white sentencing guidelines”.
It’s clear to me that when Timothy talks about Jewish people, he’s equating them with white people and political whiteness. It’s also clear that Timothy doesn’t like people of colour and has adopted the language of the far-right. This is obvious from his use of the deflective term “anti-white racism”. I use the word ‘deflective’ because it’s used as a rebuttal; a means of deflection by white supremacists to deny the existence of actual racism. Curiously, Timothy also claims to be a Christian.
In 2018, Timothy was forced to delete his original Twitter account after he’d been caught lying about Theresa May apparently signing off his ‘Go Home’ vans. The Guardianhas the story.
On Thursday, No 10 did not back Timothy’s claims that May had wanted to block the vans. “You’ve seen the prime minister’s words on various occasions, at the home affairs select committee and other places, we’ve got nothing more to add to that, it remains the position,” a spokesman said.
The MP for Birmingham Perry Bar is Independent MP, Ayoub Khan. Aston Villa is within the constituency. Interestingly, Timothy is from this part of Birmingham and appears to have taken exception to the fact that the area is represented by Khan. Here’s an extract from his Substack.
I have been attending Aston Villa matches for nearly forty years. These days, as the MP for West Suffolk, I don’t always get to use my season ticket, but I go when I can.
Knowing the controversy about the Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv, played on Thursday evening, I got to Villa Park early. Walking past my old school and through the public park on the way to the ground, it all felt quite normal.
But as I turned on to Trinity Road, the noise of the hateful anti-Israeli – and yes, anti-Semitic – crowd reached me. “Death, death to the IDF,” yelled the crowd. Later, “Kill, kill the IDF,” and the genocidal chant, “from the river to the sea.”
First, there’s nothing ‘anti-Semitic’ (sic) about any of these chants. Second, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is a military organization. Third, the chant of “from the river to the sea” isn’t genocidal. The same slogan has been used by the Likud Party. The first time it was used in 1979 was by Menachem Begin, a man who was a former terrorist. I hope Timothy sees this blog because I relish the opportunity to debunk his racist nonsense. It’s likely that, given Timothy’s record, that he sees Jewish people as ‘fellow whites’ and regards antisemitism as a form of ‘anti-white racism’. Indeed, his apparent opposition to antisemitism is relatively recent. In 2018, he repeated the antisemitic George Soros trope, which was reported by Stephen Bush, who was writing for The New Statesman. Bush is also Jewish.
The problem is that the aim of Best for Britain, the Gina Miller-founded group that wants to stop Brexit, is no more secret (or indeed newsworthy) than the fact that you’re reading this on the New Statesman. That Soros is one of those funding the anti-Brexit campaign is not news either, though the Telegraph‘s headline has provoked a disclosure of the exact sum – £400,000 – that Soros is putting towards the campaign. (He is by no means their main donor and the organisation is also pulling in not inconsiderable amounts from small donors.)
The reason that many find the Telegraph‘s treatment so disturbing is that Soros, who is Jewish, has been at the centre of a series of anti-Semitic conspiracies by the increasingly authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Turkey – and the paper has seen fit to uncritically repeat those accusations in its write-up of the story. That Timothy was the author of that “citizens of nowhere” speech only adds to feeling among many that the original speech was a coded way of talking about “rootless cosmopolitans”; aka the Jewish people.
Further down the article, we see this:
But the bigger question for Timothy is this: why does he keep blundering into racially-charged rhetoric, and why he is so incapable of listening and displaying contrition? His response to the “citizens of the world” row was to declare that everyone who objected to it was simply making trouble for trouble’s sake. On Twitter he is busily retweeting everyone who is defending him, including Eric Pickles, who argues that Timothy couldn’t possibly be engaging in anti-Semitic behaviour because he is a “friend of Israel”.
Good question, but it should be recalled that Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, Yair, are quite happy to be antisemitic when it suits them. This story from The Guardian in 2017 informs us of the following:
Yair Netanyahu had already gained a controversial reputation for crudely trolling his parents’ enemies before his latest intervention, which has spawned days of hostile media coverage.
On Saturday the 26-year-old posted a cartoon on his Facebook account depicting the American-Hungarian investor George Soros dangling the world in front of a reptilian creature, as well as a figure highly reminiscent of the antisemitic “happy merchant” image.
The cartoon, which has been circulated by antisemitic websites, was posted a day after Israel’s attorney general announced that he was minded to prosecute Sara Netanyahu, Yair’s mother and the prime minister’s wife, for misappropriation of state funds. Benjamin Netanyahu is also under pressure as a result of several overlapping corruption investigations, which have gained pace in recent weeks.
But if Timothy is the MP for West Suffolk, why is he taking such a close interest in Ayoub Khan’s constituency? The Cat believes it has nothing to do with either Aston Villa or football, and is an attempt to smear Khan as an “Islamist”. Timothy clearly isn’t happy that a Brown man, who also happens to be a Muslim, is the MP for a part of Birmingham that he comes from. Here’s a post on X from Timothy in which he complains about the flags being displayed at a meeting in Khan’s constituency.
The fact that Timothy ignores the racist and violent history of MTA’s ultras is indicative of his deep-seated racism. How he must hate being in a party led by a Black woman! Albeit, a Black woman who seems to be trying her best to become White.
In October 2025, Tel Aviv police called off a derby match between MTA and Hapoel Tel Aviv. This fact appears to have been ignored by the Home Affairs Select Committee and Timothy. You can read more here and here. Similarly, when Legia Warsaw ultras were banned from travelling to England, not a word was said by the committee or Timothy. Was UEFA, the governing body for European football, being anti-Polish? No. Here’s an example of the kinds of chants one hears from MTA’s ultras.
The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmoud announced that West Midlands Police had “overstated” the threat posed by MTA’s racist ultras. If Mahmoud was seeking to placate the racists, she failed spectacularly. This morning, they’re still complaining that MTA’s violent thugs were banned and continuing to claim (without evidence) that the ban was inherently ‘antisemitic’.
Yesterday, we also heard on the news that the Chief Constable, Craig Guildford had “fabricated” evidence and there are now calls for him to be dismissed or to resign. A note of caution: this revelation should be taken with a massive pinch of salt. MTA’s violence, like that of Legia Warsaw or Lazio is well-documented. However, when Nick Timothy appeared on BBC News’s Verified slot yesterday afternoon, he mentioned “armed Islamist militants” were planning to attack “innocent” racist football ultras. Yet, if that was the case, then why weren’t there any arrests of these “armed Islamist militants”? Because they didn’t exist. That’s why. Even worse, Matthew Amroliwala let it pass without any challenge.
Timothy’s source for the claim that there were “armed Islamist militants” planning to carry out “acts of violence” is The S*n. Indeed, it is the only “news” source to have made this claim.
The Cat has demonstrated that those who have demanded Guildford’s resignation have many questions to answer, especially regarding the documented evidence of MTA ultra’s violence at matches across Europe and why they ignored them. It’s obvious that the same committee would never have ignored the violence of homegrown football hooligans or those from other countries, so why does it seek to whitewash MTA’s racist ultras?
Let’s go back to last year when MTA ultras went on the rampage in Amsterdam. Richard Sanders of Double Down News discusses how footage of the events has been manipulated by news organizations against the wishes of Annette de Graaf, the woman who shot the original footage.
Racism and the weaponization of antisemitism does much harm to communities, but you can’t tell the likes of Nick Timothy that, because he doesn’t want to listen. He’s convinced, despite the evidence to the contrary, that MTA’s football ultras aren’t racist and violent and didn’t deserve to be banned from travelling. Given the evidence, Timothy is clearly engaging in gaslighting.
Mohammad Mosaddegh, the last elected leader of Iran
You may have seen images of protests in Iran and thought, “At last, the people are rising up against a brutal tyranny”. That’s exactly what our government, the United States and Israel wants you to think. They want you to believe that ‘democracy’ will automatically follow if the protests are successful in removing the current regime. Now, many people want to see democracy in Iran, but that’s not what the West has in mind for the country. What they won’t tell you is how they’ve lined up the son of the last Shah (who was also imposed by on the Iranian people in 1953), Reza Pahlavi and his equally corrupt family, to rule Iran.
To understand what’s currently taking place in Iran, we need to go back to 1953 and the MI6 and CIA-supported coup that overthrew the last democratically elected leader of the country. With this in mind, we also need to go back to 1978-1979 and the Iranian Revolution.
In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh became the Prime Minister of Iran. Immediately following his election, Mosaddegh announced that he was going to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (formerly the British. 51% of AIOC was owned by the British state. The idea of Iran owning the company didn’t sit well with the British or the Americans, nor did the idea that the Iranian government was taking an increasing left turn, and feared the country was moving closer to the Soviet Union. Unable to countenance this, the US and UK initiated Operation Ajax to overthrow Mosaddegh. As for the Shah, he’d initially resisted CIA and MI6 interference, but eventually acceded to their demands.
In 1953, Mosaddegh was overthrown and the Shah was reinstalled as sole ruler of Iran. He wasted little time in stamping his authority on the country. In 1957, he created the Sâzmân-e Ettelâ’ât va Amniyyat-e Kešvar (SAVAK) with the help of Mossad and the CIA.
In addition to its internal operations, SAVAK also operated outside Iran’s borders and assassinated exiled dissidents, but its main tasks were strict censorship of the media, the interrogation and torture of prisoners, and the surveillance of political opponents. It was hated and feared in equal measure.
We should also recall that when Iranian people took to the streets in 1979, they weren’t calling for an oppressive Islamic Republic; they wanted something like the democracy they tasted over 20 years earlier. Instead, the democratic forces of the movement were side-lined or purged during the period from 1979 to 1983. This included some of the parties on the Left. The man who became the spiritual head of the revolution, the formerly exiled AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, gradually grabbed power for himself and his party. Although, he’d been content to work with leftist forces, like Tudeh and the MEK, he moved against them, purging them from the political machinery of the state. You can read more about the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath here and here.
Back to the present, the current protests in Iran are being selectively reported and misreported in the Western media. The PR machinery of the US, UK and Israel is working overtime to convince gullible Westerners that Reza Pahlavi is the rightful ruler of Iran. To achieve this, our media organizations have conveniently elided the events of 1953 and 1979, partly because of the complexity of these events and Iran’s 20th century history, and partly to promote, what they see as the legitimacy of Reza Pahlavi. They also ignore the political composition of the protesters. This report from Freedom News tells us that:
At present, strikes and protests are unfolding simultaneously, and the situation is escalating rapidly. What began as a peaceful shutdown of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar by shopkeepers turned violent after security forces intervened. From there, protests quickly spread to cities across the country.
At the heart of this unrest lies unbearable economic pressure and rampant inflation that has made everyday life impossible for large segments of society. The first strikes emerged among mobile phone sellers, driven by the chaos of fluctuating exchange rates and the soaring cost of imported goods.
The reporter also advises us that:
At the same time, the son of Iran’s former king is once again attempting to capitalize on the situation. Whenever protests erupt in Iran, he rushes to claim them as his own. While it is true that he has some supporters inside the country, the vast majority of his base resides abroad. Beyond royalists, decades of repression by the Islamic Republic have effectively destroyed the possibility of other organized opposition forces emerging inside the country.
The report continues:
Organization is largely horizontal and decentralised: through social media networks, local calls by bazaar merchants, and the organic spread of street-level rage—without a central leader or guiding party. This is precisely its strength: genuine self-organisation by ordinary people against domination.
However, this is where the danger lies. Exiled opposition groups—particularly royalists aligned with Reza Pahlavi—have entered the scene and are attempting to hijack this popular uprising. Through calls issued from abroad, they inject slogans like “Long Live the Shah” in an effort to steer protests toward the restoration of another hereditary dictatorship—one that previously crushed people through SAVAK and bloody repression, and now seeks to reclaim power through diplomatic smiles and empty promises.
So, despite the wishes of, what seems to be, the vast majority of Iranian people, the West will try to impose Reza Pahlavi on the country.
Here’s a video clip of Reza Pahlavi urging Iranians to rise up.
I think we can assume that this entreaty is an attempt to ride on the coattails of popular protests and, with a little bit of help from his friends, insert himself into the wider movement for change.
Reza Pahlavi has spent decades cultivating an image as a democratic statesman-in-waiting. In interviews, he speaks of a future decided by a popular referendum, backed by detailed proposals like a 100-day transition plan. To Israel’s delight, his alignment extends beyond symbolism to the core of Israeli strategic thinking.
During his 2023 visit to Tel Aviv, he articulated the very logic driving Israel’s current attacks against Iran, dismissing nuclear negotiations as a “waste of time” and insisting that the “quickest way to eliminate all threats” was to invest in an alternative to the regime itself.
Moreover, he envisions a future rooted in what he calls the “Cyrus Accords,” a revival of the ‘ancient friendship’ between the Persian and Jewish peoples, a vision reinforced by powerful personal gestures, such as his daughter’s recent marriage to a Jewish-American businessman.
So, how popular is Reza Pahlavi among Iranians? Not very.
While opinion pieces in Israeli mediaframe the choice for Iran as one between chaos and a restored monarchy, Pahlavi commands little tangible support inside a country where many see his movement as “opportunistic” and “disconnected from the Iranian people.”
For Israel to imagine a different outcome in Iran is to ignore the region’s bitterest truths. From the sectarian carnage of post-Saddam Iraq to the militia-ruled wastelands that now scar Libya, Yemen, the last two decades have taught the brutal lesson that foreign-imposed regime change does not produce compliant allies, but rather vacuums filled by extremists, proxy wars, and humanitarian catastrophes.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has been explicit. He is campaigning to restore choice and is uniquely positioned to do so because his name carries recognition across generations, while his platform deliberately rejects partisanship. He has been the only figure to consistently call for coalition and inclusivity, not factional rule. He has said clearly that whether Iran’s future is a constitutional monarchy or a republic is not his decision. It is for the people, in a free referendum.
He seeks to be the coalition builder for all Iranians. That is why the Emergency Booklet is dangerous to the regime. It does not belong to one faction. It belongs to every citizen who wants an Iran free of clerics and tyranny.
In an interview with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which was reported by The Jerusalem Post, Pahlavi said:
“You have a very strong prime minister in Israel who is clearly on our side. I think that [US President Donald] Trump, unlike his predecessor, is definitely on a different path vis-à-vis what’s happening in Iran today. And you have Marco Rubio at the State Department. I believe he’s perhaps the first secretary of state ever since the Iranian revolution who truly gets it,” Pahlavi said, praising the political echelons in both Jerusalem and Washington.
For the West, this is the time to act. The regime is at its weakest point. Reza Pahlavi has the trust of the people, name recognition at home and abroad, support of various Iranian political groups from monarchist to republican, from Left to Right, from liberal to conservative, and a plan and a team to execute it.
So, while the US, UK and Israel promote the idea of change in Iran and seek to rehabilitate the reputation of the Pahlavi clan, the Iranian people don’t want them. But then, as we’ve seen in Iraq and now, Venezuela, whatever the people of those countries wan in terms of governance, is of little consequence. What really matters is what the US wants.
Finally, here’s a video clip from BBC News that was posted this morning. Towards the middle of the clip, there’s a banner that claims that protesters are “chant[ing] support for the monarchy”. I find it hard to believe that there’s a significant number of protesters who want Reza Pahlavi to carry on where his father left off.
It was only a matter of time before I stumbled across a more egregious and violent post on a comments thread, and here it is. This is the account of someone calling himself ‘Will Will’ Comments like these should always be taken seriously.
To be sure, this isn’t a joke. Here’s what happened when I reported this post. Predictably, Facebook said it didn’t “go against their Community Guidelines”.
Usually, you’re given an option to request a review.
Not this time. Instead, I was told that I could block the account or delete the message. I’ve chosen to do neither. As of today, 5 January 2026, the account was still up on Facebook.
I took the additional step of reporting this account to law enforcement, but I’ve heard nothing.
If someone drives a van into a crowd of protesters at the next Palestine Solidarity march, then you’ll know who did it. You’ll also know that Facebook played their part by not removing the post.
Once upon a time, Goldsmiths College, a federated institution of the University of London, had a reputation as a radical seat of learning. Sadly, those days are mostly behind the college. In the last fifteen years, possibly longer, the shine has come off as Warden after Warden has implemented unpopular “transformations” that have led to redundancies and the closure of some minority courses. Prof Frances Corner, the most recent Warden of Goldsmiths, who also adopted the title of Vice-Chancellor, left the college a whole academic year before her leaving date. No one seems to know why, although I have a suspicion that it’s related to the college’s very costly independent KC-led antisemitism inquiry, which, according to a Freedom of Information request submitted by Michael Rosen, has cost more than £485,000. More about that later and how I found myself being used as a possible scapegoat by Prof Corner and the senior management team.
Let’s return to Prof Corner. She became Warden of Goldsmiths in 2019, succeeding Prof Patrick Loughrey, who had been in the role since 2010. Corner took charge in August of that year and made herself unpopular within a month of assuming control. From March, there had been a student occupation of the Stuart Hall Building (Oh, the irony!) and Deptford Town Hall, where senior management’s offices are located. The purpose of this occupation was to protest institutional racism and to demand that the college decolonize the curriculum. During this time, I was an associate lecturer working in the Department of Theatre and Performance. One of my students, who was Black and of mixed heritage, complained to me that there were racist lecturers and that he had personally experienced racism. Indeed, one lecturer claimed that the effort to decolonize the curriculum was inherently antisemitic. The occupation ended in July 2019 after senior management, led by Prof Corner, apparently committed themselves to addressing complaints of institutional racism. Their statement read:
Partly in response to the student campaign, Goldsmiths is committing an additional £500,000 over the next year alone to support this work. The College’s management team has published a Statement of commitments made to GARA (PDF) on how the College will accelerate and build on its work in this area, including:
Developing mandatory training for all student-facing staff on race awareness, to be rolled out during the next academic year;
Additional staffing to support Dr Nicola Rollock’s work on addressing the degree attainment gap and her wider audit of the experience of BME students and staff;
A number of new staff roles across areas including student wellbeing and counselling, project support, and chaplaincy services;
A review of current procedures for tackling racism and other forms of discrimination and harassment, and the operation of our Hate Crime Reporting Centre;
Discussing further proposals for better representation of BME students at department level, and ensuring such representatives are adequately supported;
Committing an additional £20k of funding for Black History events and an additional £20k of funding for events organised through the chaplaincy for faith groups;
Identifying a larger multi-faith prayer space on campus;
Reinstating two scholarships for residents of Palestine who intend to return to help fellow Palestinians after their studies.
Colleagues and student groups from across Goldsmiths will be engaged with this work, including members of the student protest group Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action (GARA). This group occupied Deptford Town Hall on New Cross Road for four months from mid-March 2019.
This direct action was brought to a close on Friday 26 July 2019 after the College and the campaigners established a mutually-agreed Statement of commitments made to GARA (PDF).
Following the agreement, on 29 July 2019 Acting Warden Professor Elisabeth Hill wrote an open letter to all students and staff emphasising the collective effort required to address the issues raised by the campaigners.
Professor Hill wrote: “While the occupation has been brought to a close, GARA has stated clearly that its campaign will continue and I again stress the need for each and every one of us to reflect on how we can contribute to the collaborative work to tackle racial justice.”
Goldsmiths management also issued the following statement in which it said it was committed to anti-racism training for all staff. The text reads as follows:
Every level of staff will undergo the training. This training will commence in the academic year 2019/20 going forward as reflective of the initial meeting of the Anti-Racism Training Steering Group
This training is to be rolled out across future academic years and for incoming staff members
SMT and the Communications team will be prioritised as early adopters
There will be discussion about how best to roll out the programme across the College in the way that is most effective and in discussion with the Anti-Racism Training Steering Group
There will continue to be an additional 2 GARA representatives and 2 representatives from each of the liberation groups (Black, Disabled, LGBT+, Trans, Women) in the Stakeholder Group(s)
And:
Several Senior Management Team members and key Communications team staff attended and completed a two-day, externally-run training course during the 2019/20 academic year.
The College launched two open-tender processes with the aim of appointing an experienced facilitator or team of facilitators with expertise in anti-racism to deliver mandatory anti-racism training to all staff. The anti-racism training working group was unable to identify a suitable supplier from these rounds and the decision was made not to award the contract at this time.
Training has been delivered to members of Goldsmiths Leadership Group, which comprises of senior academics in leadership positions and senior professional services staff. The training, which was three days of training spread across Spring term 2024, is intended to empower senior colleagues to lead change at the College.
Further staff training is planned for academic year 2024-25.
The statement claims that “further staff training is planned for [this academic year]”. Thus far, nothing has happened. I have seen no evidence of anti-racism training at Goldsmiths. A year or so after the GARA inquiry was closed, Goldsmiths art lecturer, Evan Ifekoya, first withdrew his labour from the college and resigned a short time later, citing institutional racism as a causal factor.
In their letter, Ifekoya said that a missive had been circulating among staff that encouraged staff members to voice their support that the university extend fixed-term contracts for employees, as five out of six Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) workers in the art department’s B.A. program are on such contracts. (Goldsmiths has planned not to renew any fixed-term contracts.) According to Ifekoya, “some [colleagues] responded by arguing that all staff matter, as if the mere mention of BAME workers takes attention away from white people.”
It is already well known that in the Higher Education sector, most of the casualized staff on short or fixed term contracts are people from racialized minority groups or women. ArtsNews reported:
Over the past year, Goldsmiths has been the subject of scrutiny in the British media for the way it has dealt with race. Last summer, for 137 days, a group known as the Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action occupied one of the university’s main buildings, alleging that the school had acted against its BAME students and promoted “institutional racism.” Goldsmiths pledged to do more to fight racism among its student body and staff, and several months later, the university released the findings of a survey about the matter.
The report revealed that 26 percent of students surveyed had experienced racism, either from staff members or from their colleagues. Nearly half of all respondents said the school’s curriculum did not privilege the experience of BAME students, and just 5 percent of respondents said they believed the school’s senior management was diverse. (After the report was issued, some students claimed the report was “watered down.”)
While racism continues to thrive at Goldsmiths, antisemitism is being prioritized over other forms of discrimination. This is problematic, not least because it prompts the accusation that Jewish students and staff enjoy special privileges, and that discrimination against other minorities won’t be treated as seriously. This is a dangerous road for Goldsmiths to travel on, but it is also damages the fight against the very antisemitism the college says it wants to address. Furthermore, it harms the fight against racism more generally and will lead to an upsurge in racially-motivated attacks and we’ve seen this already. This is something that neither the CST, CAA nor Gnasher Jew wants to admit. The CAA, especially, isn’t interested in working with anti-racism groups because it seeks to instrumentalize antisemitism in order to shut down criticism of Israel. I will be writing a blog about this in due course.
So, where does this come from? Before I continue, I need to go back in time to 2023.
In May 2023, Goldsmiths, under pressure from the Community Security Trust (CST) and CAA, and probably, Gnasher Jew, launched what it called an ” independent KC-led antisemitism inquiry”. At this point, it’s worth pointing out that the earlier GARA racism inquiry was neither KC-led nor was it particularly independent. The antisemitism inquiry was ostensibly launched after Goldsmiths Student Union president, Sara Bafo, accused David Hirsh, a senior lecturer in sociology, who himself has close ties to the CAA, of being a white supremacist. In 2022, Hirsh had posted a tweet in which he smeared the students’ demand for decolonization of the curriculum. Here’s the tweet:
Hirsh also posted this rather patronizing tweet about Black Lives Matter.
Curiously, he also claims that anti-racism should be intersectional and yet, he and the CAA don’t work with anti-racism groups. Indeed, one wonders why Hirsh, who is an apparent expert in antisemitism and also, it is claimed (largely by CAA and The Jewish Chronicle) racism, would smear efforts to decolonize the curriculum or education more generally, as “antisemitic”. It should not be forgotten that today’s racism has its origins in colonialism and empire, and was supported by a body of pseudoscience that insisted that people of African origin have “lower IQs” and are only suited to manual labour and lives of subservience to the European hegemony. Does he deny that or is there something else behind his words? Well, let’s put it this way: whenever racism against racialized minorities rears its head, Hirsh is nowhere to be seen. One may easily get the impression that Hirsh doesn’t like Black and Brown people and, therefore, sees us as problematic. The only time he mentions Black people is when he can weaponize them to make some point about how awful Black people are for complaining about racism.
Goldsmiths antisemitism inquiry dragged on for two years and in that time, Mohinderpal Sethi, the KC put in charge of the inquiry found a series of examples of antisemitis, but my name did not appear as an example. Sethi also made some good statements in defence of free speech, and attacked the flawed IHRA working definition of antisemitism. In the summer of 2025, the inquiry was wound up and after spending close to half a million pounds, it also concluded that there should be more Kosher options in the college’s food outlets, but there should also be mandatory, but separate, antisemitism training for all staff. Remember, that, for all senior management’s talk about anti-racism training, nothing actually happened. No anti-racism training has taken place, and no organization or group has been approached to run such courses. Yet, rather than include antisemitism as part of anti-racism training, the college has decided to treat antisemitism separately. Why has it done this? Moreover, why weren’t the group of 14 Jewish academics at Goldsmiths not consulted about these plans nor asked to provide statements to the inquiry while it was running?
Requests by our ad hoc group to meet with Professor Dinham to discuss the shape of the action plan governance structure have been repeatedly rebuffed and we have been told that the plan is ‘owned’ by Goldsmiths Council and therefore not up for debate. Instead, we have been offered informal meetings which we do not consider to be part of any meaningful consultation. Our reluctance to engage in future meetings and workshops is therefore based on what we believe to be fundamental flaws in the action plan and its implementation.
To date, no one has explained why the university is making a special case for antisemitism as a single example of racism. This argument wasn’t made at the time of setting up the Inquiry nor the action plan and now, as the plan moves forwards into ‘conversations’ and enactment, the argument has still not been made. The college has now spent well over £500,000 at a time of severe financial hardship on an inquiry and action plan without a clear and detailed timetable or buy-in from affected staff and students.
We have argued that the College should fold antisemitism into a university-wide programme of anti-racism training but this has been repeatedly rejected. If the argument had been put as to why antisemitism is a special case, then we would at least have something on the table to discuss (and to have a ‘conversation’ about), but there is nothing.
So, the question remains: why do Goldsmiths senior managers insist on treating antisemitism separately to other forms of racism and discrimination? It seems to me that they’ve internalized the hierarchy of racisms and are, at the same time, internalized a racial hierarchy that was first established during the days of empire. It’s also worth noting that the senior management team, while it has one person of South Asian origin in the role of Chief Finance and Infrastructure Officer, is comprised mostly of white people. Andrew Dinham, mentioned in Prof Rosen’s post, is the Executive Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Culture and Belonging. I find these titles somewhat confusing. What culture? What belonging? What is clear to me is that there’s a large body of people at Goldsmiths, staff and students alike, who don’t feel that they belong. I am one of them.
It’s obvious to me that it is the intention of senior management to close down criticism of Israel’s brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank, while, at the same time, privileging antisemitism over other forms of racism. It is also clear that while many of those at the forefront of anti-antisemitism action want antisemitism to be treated as a form of racism, they want it to be treated separately from other forms of racism. Why? Israel is a settler-colonial state and those of us who want to see the curriculum decolonized are seen as a threat to the existence of the Zionist entity. In other words, they know Israel is a settler-colonial state and are fighting hard to present it as otherwise. They delude themselves while lying to us.
I shall now return to Prof Corner, who left Goldsmiths under a cloud. Her dictatorial style combined with her callous treatment of academic staff contributed to her departure. She’s left the college with a massive payout. But the main contributing factor in her demise was the way she spent a large sum of money on an antisemitism inquiry that failed to achieve what management wanted it to achieve. Namely, they wanted to hold their hands up and say to the CAA and CST, “Yes! Goldsmiths is a hotbed of antisemitism! You were right all along!” However, in order to demonstrate that they were seriously committed to rooting out antisemitism, they needed to find an example. They thought that they had one in me.
In late July 2023, the college contacted me with regards to a “very serious matter”. When I asked what that matter was, I was told that I needed to attend a meeting. I replied that I was on my way to the airport and requested that they send me an email. As I approached the airport, the email landed in my inbox, and when I opened it, I was astonished to find that I had been vexatiously accused of “spreading” antisemitism. The charge related to a reply to a tweet that I sent to David Hirsh. Hirsh, for his part, blocked me and then unblocked me to tell me that “[he] should have sued [me]”.
Threatening people with lawsuits is the act of a bully, but using, or rather, hiding, behind GnasherJew and the CAA to channel a complaint is another level of bullying. Any judge worth their salt would throw out vexatious lawsuits (also known as lawfare). For his part, Hirsh seems to have deleted the brief exchange between us and yet, as you can see, Gnasher Jew hasn’t taken down their actionable tweet and neither has the CAA.
So, what happened to Goldsmiths’ and the CAA’s case against me? After dragging me through an ill-advised eight month disciplinary process, the college decided there was no case to answer. Originally, Prof Corner insisted on chairing the disciplinary hearing. Goldsmiths UCU reminded her that she’d written an inscription to Prof Hirsh’s most recent work and had to recuse herself because of a conflict of interest. It was an embarrassing climbdown. At the disciplinary hearing, I left them with this parting shot: Goldsmiths doesn’t have a social media policy. The chair’s face was a picture, and they didn’t get their scapegoat.
There’s a narrative on the right that posits that there’s a “Christian genocide” taking place in northern Nigeria. This story has been whipped up and amplified by the likes of Donald Trump and his legion of followers, both in the United States and abroad. In 2024, Trump claimed that Nigeria is “a country of concern”. His words are interesting for the fact that, at home, he doesn’t care too much about Black people – even if they’re foolish enough to vote for him.
According to this narrative, Nigerian Christians are being massacred in large numbers. What this narrative conveniently ignores is the fact that Muslims are also being attacked and murdered. There’s also an insinuation on the part of Trump and his flunkies that the “genocide” is being directed from the Nigerian government. This article from Jonathan Este in The Conversation, puts things into perspective. Here’s an extract:
Successive military and civilian regimes have since struggled to curtail the string of religious violence, which is often linked to issues such as ethnicity, resource management, competition for resources and colonial boundaries. (British colonialists placed different ethnic groups with sometimes different values in one country.)
Figure 1: Visualisation of terrorist and insurgent attacks and fatalities in Nigeria (2014–2024) based on ACLED dataset. Author
Figure 1 shows that while the number of attacks carried out by terrorist and insurgent groups have been roughly similar in the last four years, the number of fatalities has declined.
This chart does not explain the categories of people attacked. To understand whether there is a disproportionate attack on Christians, I compared the number of attacks on churches and mosques in Nigeria in the last 10 years.
Figure 2: Visualisation of the yearly attacks on churches and mosques in Nigeria (2014–2024) based on ACLED dataset. Author
The data shows that non-state actors have attacked both churches and mosques in Nigeria. While there have been more attacks on churches in the last six years, the data reveals that there were more attacks on mosques in 2015 and 2017.
Generally, Nigeria’s population is considered to be roughly evenly split between the two religions, with only around 0.6% adhering to traditional African religions or other beliefs.
Although it is difficult to extract the number of fatalities in these cases, the number of attacks on places of worship is an indication that both Christians and Muslims are under attack by terrorist and insurgent groups in Nigeria.
What is evident from this narrative is that Christianity is being politicized and weaponized in order to construct a warped reality that favours the views of America’s Christian Nationalists, who are steeped in Crusader myths and notions of dispensationalism. This view is fervently anti-Muslim, while, at the same time being resolutely philosemitic. This fetishization of Jews and has long been one of the pillars of Christian Zionist eschatology, and relies upon the return of Jews to “Israel” in order to fulfil a Biblical “prophecy”. Philosemitism and its close relation, Christian Zionism, are therefore, fundamentally and yet, paradoxically, antisemitic.
We can take it as read that Trump’s interest in Nigeria has nothing to do with protecting Nigerian Christians, and is more about gaining access to the country’s natural resources, one of which is oil, which is mostly found in the south, and gold, uranium and bauxite, all of which ate in abundance in the north. Trump is also playing to his Christian Zionist/Christian Nationalist base, which is overwhelmingly composed of white Americans, who know very little of the world outside their borders. Many of these Christian Nationalists have only heard stories about Nigeria and are unlikely to be able to pick out the country on a map.
Trump is no friend to Christians, Nigeria or the rest of the planet.
I’ve just told someone that speech is a physical act that has physical effects and consequences. They laughed. Typically, people who see speech as something that’s isolated from the body aren’t able to grasp the fact that in order for speech to take place, one needs to think of something to say, and then produce it using the organs of the body associated with speech: the lungs, the larynx, the diaphragm, the tongue, the teeth, the lips and the hard and soft palates. It is then transmitted via a medium (the air) and then received using the organs of hearing: the eardrum, stapes, malleus and incus and then interpreted in the brain.
Speech that is deemed by the listener as abrasive, coarse and hateful will have a physical effect. Likewise, the speech that is deemed by listeners as pleasant will also have an effect on the body.
There is always intent behind speech and to say that words simply pop out of someone’s mouth without first being formed in the brain is as absurd as it is ignorant. Free speech warriors, for all their talk about free speech, are quite happy to spread hatred under the guise of free speech. Hence, the deployment of the “hurty words” claim, which is, paradoxically, an admission that they understand the physical nature of speech. For them, the speech uttered by demagogues and hatemongers neither incites violence nor spreads hatred. Yet, if someone were to speak in such a way as to incite violence against them, they would be quick to report the speaker to the authorities.
Now seems like an appropriate time to remind you of the well-worn maxim: think before you speak.
Have you ever seen post on Facebook that you thought was blatantly racist or misogynistic and reported it to Meta only to be told that it didn’t “violate Facebook’s community standards”? Well, you’re not alone. This year, I must have reported many posts for violations of the community standards, which are, frankly, not worth a bucket of warm piss.
Earlier this year, The Interceptran a story about the way Meta has changed the rules to allow content that is racist, misogynistic and which glorifies violence against minorities.
Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.
Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:
“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
“Gays are freaks.”
“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”
Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan described the effort in a statement as a means to fix “complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce.”
While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.
The document provides those working on Meta user content with an overview of the hate speech policy changes, walking them through how to apply the new rules. The most significant changes are accompanied by a selection of “relevant examples” — hypothetical posts marked either “Allow” or “Remove.”
When asked about the new policy changes, Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss referred The Intercept to remarks from Kaplan’s blog post announcing the shift: “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
When you try to report a post for an apparent violation, you are presented with a limited menu of options.
Once you click on an option that seems appropriate, which in this case is “Violent, Hateful and Disturbing Content”, you are then led to this filter.
“Promoting hate” seems like a reasonable choice, but you will notice that it’s not terribly specific. Say you click on “Promoting hate”, you will be led to this filter.
Once you’ve done that, you’re led to this final filter.
If, say, you choose any of these options, you are then told that your report will be “reviewed”. There’s a problem with this: the reviews are conducted by AI, which, as you will know, is operated by the same people who think eugenics is a legitimate scientific field, and racism and sexism are just “opinions”.
Should you decide to appeal the decision, you are informed that this will be conducted by something called “the Oversight Board”. The composition of this board isn’t widely known, but it includes former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, as well as John Samples of the Cato Institute, which is described as a “libertarian” think-tank. Whenever any group or person identifies as “libertarian”, you can read this as right-wing libertarian. These self-styled libertarians are often comfortable with racism and sexism to the extent that they will defend these things. That said, it isn’t known if any of the board’s members are actively involved in reviewing cases. One suspects that they aren’t.
Racists, sexists, and other bigots will try to couch their sentiments in neutral-sounding language to avoid suspension. Unfortunately, neither Facebook nor its Oversight Board, judge posts that use such language as being in contravention of its much-vaunted Community Standards. Here’s what it says on their page for hateful conduct.
Do not post:
Tier 1
Content targeting a person or group of people (except groups described as having carried out violent or sexual crimes or representing less than half of a group) on the basis of their aforementioned protected characteristic(s) or immigration status in written or visual form with:
Dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including:
Insects (including, but not limited to, cockroaches, locusts)
Animals in general or specific types of animals that are culturally perceived as inferior (including, but not limited to, Black people and apes or ape-like creatures; Jewish people and rats; Muslim people and pigs; Mexican people and worms)
Bacteria, viruses or microbes
Subhumanity (including, but not limited to: savages, devils, monsters)
Allegations of serious immorality and criminality:
Sexual predators and paedophiles (including, but not limited to: Muslim people having sex with goats or pigs)
Violent criminals (including but not limited to: terrorists, murderers)
Calls and hopes for the following harms (serious or specific threats and calls for violence are addressed under our Violence and Incitement policy):
Contracting a disease
Experiencing a natural disaster
Self-injury or suicide
Death without a perpetrator or method
Accidents and other physical harms caused either by no perpetrator or by a deity
Harmful stereotypes historically linked to intimidation or violence, such as Blackface; Holocaust denial; claims that Jewish people control financial, political or media institutions; references to Dalits as menial laborers; and comparing Black people to farm equipment.
Mocking the concept, events or victims of hate crimes even if no real person is depicted in an image.
Mocking people for having or experiencing a disease.
Content that describes or negatively targets people with slurs. Slurs are defined as words that inherently create an atmosphere of exclusion and intimidation against people on the basis of a protected characteristic, often because these words are tied to historical discrimination, oppression and violence.
Tier 2
Content targeting a person or group of people on the basis of their protected characteristic(s) (in written or visual form) with:
Calls or support for exclusion or segregation or statements of intent to exclude or segregate, defined as:
General exclusion, which means calling for general exclusion or segregation, such as “No X allowed!”
Political exclusion, which means denying the right to political participation or arguing for incarceration or denial of political rights.
Economic exclusion, which means denying access to economic entitlements and limiting participation in the labour market. We do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.
Social exclusion, which means things like denying access to spaces (physical and online) and social services, except for sex or gender-based exclusion from spaces commonly limited by sex or gender, such as bathrooms, sports and sports leagues, health and support groups, and specific schools.
Insults, including those about:
Character, including but not limited to allegations of cowardice, dishonesty, basic criminality and sexual promiscuity or other sexual immorality.
Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.
Other areas, including, but not limited to, allegations of worthlessness, uselessness, ugliness, dirtiness.
Expressions that suggest the target causes sickness, including, but not limited to, “make me vomit”.
Targeted cursing, except certain gender-based cursing in a romantic break-up context, defined as:
Targeted use of “fuck” or variations of “fuck” with intent to insult, such as “Fuck the [Protected Characteristic]!”
Terms or phrases calling for engagement in sexual activity, or contact with genitalia, anus, faeces or urine, including, but not limited to, suck my dick, kiss my ass, eat shit.
All well and good, but in practice it’s useless. Far-right and bot accounts continue to freely spew hatred on the platform under the apparent guise of free speech.
Yesterday, I reported a comment for demanding gunboats be sent into the English Channel. Given the way the comment was worded, it’s unlikely that the account that posted it will receive a sanction and will simply continue to advocate violence towards refugees and asylum seekers.
So, how about these comments that were hurled at Labour MP, Dawn Butler? Many of them come from X (formerly known as Twitter), but others were posted on Butler’s Facebook comment threads.
It’s possible that many of these accounts are bots, and some are probably sockpuppet accounts. It isn’t known if Butler has reported any of these accounts, but The Cat suspects that Facebook, for all its claims to promoting a safe environment for users, has taken no action.
Reporting posts that contain hate speech is a near pointless exercise when you consider that the mechanism for reporting such posts is actually designed to frustrate the reporting of racism and misogyny. The only effective way to deal with the hatred posted by the far-right is to boycott Facebook entirely. Even challenging the racists and sexists on the platform can lead to restrictions on your account – as I recently discovered when I challenged a racist post from three Zionists on one of The Stage’s threads.
Despite their boasts, Facebook and other social media platforms like X, take no action against hate speech and, in many cases, actually allow hate speech to flourish.
… was always one of the handy phrases trotted out by British racists in the 1960s and 1970s. You can file it alongside such phrases as “it’s just a joke”, “it’s comedy” and “he’s 81, cut him some slack”. In the last 10 years or so on social media, the racist joke has made an unwelcome return. Defenders of the jokes, as well as defenders of racism, will claim that it’s an expression of their “free speech” and that their racist views are merely “opinions”.
Whenever someone asks me if there’s a difference between US racism and British racism, I usually reply with the latter is usually couched in humour, while the former is more direct. When I first entered the world of work in the mid-1970s, many work colleagues were quite happy to label me variously as a nig nog or a coon. When I responded with disapproval or tried to challenge these, supposedly, humorous takes, I was told I needed to “laugh at myself” and was often asked “can’t you take a joke?” Of course, these men, because it was always men, never laughed at themselves but saw me and other non-whites as fair game.
In Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians, Eddie Waters has some advice for his comedy students.
Comedy, which is a humorous discourse, doesn’t function in an ideological or discourse-free vacuum. Thus, it is affected by discourse. One of those discourses is racism, and the other is sexism/misogyny. As Waters says: “It’s not the jokes. It’s what lies behind them. It’s the attitude”. Comedians, likewise, don’t operate in a discourse-free environment. They have their own beliefs; ideologies, if you will, and these guide or inform actions.
In the 1980s, we worked hard to expel racism and sexism from the entertainment field. Tellers of racist jokes – who were often but not always open mic spots – were usually met with silence, boos or heckles; sometimes, depending on the venue, it could result in a glass being thrown at the comedian. I remember a gig that I did in Stockport many years ago. The gig went well and I came off to laughter and applause. This was 1996 or 1997. The act who followed me told a string of anti-Irish jokes and audience responded accordingly with silence and disbelief.
So, what prompted this blog? Last week a story appeared in the Liverpool Echo about Vince Earl, who was performing at the annual Doddy Day Happiness Show at the city’s Royal Court Theatre on 26 October. Earl, a comedian and actor, who’s best known for playing Ron Dixon (Ron Dicko) in Brookside, stunned audience members by making racist remarks. By the way, Ken Dodd wasn’t known for telling racist jokes. He was more of a hostage-taker.
Former Brookside star Vince Earl apologised after he was accused of making racist remarks on stage at the Royal Court. The Liverpool venue has said it will no longer be working with the 81-year-old and pledged all artists appearing on its stage going forward will need to agree to an anti-racism statement.
The event, now in its sixth year, was held at the Liverpool theatre in celebration of late comedian Ken Dodd‘s legacy with an afternoon of music and comedy. However, the event was mired in controversy. The ECHO was told some members of the audience got up and left during Mr Earl’s set as they were offended by the material included.
And
After being approached by the ECHO, the theatre was unable to confirm if people did exit during the show. But Mr Earl has since apologised for the material included in his set describing it as a “lapse of judgement”. The apology comes as the Royal Court’s CEO issued a statement to the ECHO saying she was “horrified” by the comments.
Gillian Miller said: “We are horrified, as a theatre, that this happened on our stage. We have apologised to all attendees for the offensive comments that were made. We have told the performer he will not appear on our stage again.
Like most newspapers, the Echo has a page on Facebook, and it prompted the usual complaints about “political correctness gone mad” and “free speech”. Here’s a selection of comments:
These two claimed that Earl didn’t know any better because he’s 81. Notice how “Mike Cromby” says “Earl is not racist he’s a professional entertainer, and very funny”. More often than not, those defending racist comments aren’t members of the group that’s being attacked.
The top two contributors in the screen shot below believe that people shouldn’t be “offended”. This is a common refrain from the white supremacists and ethno-nationalists who clutter social media with the reactionary takes on life, and who are emboldened by platform owners like Elon Musk. Fair play to the two posters who put them straight.
Here are two more, which plough the same furrow as the T Jay Callaley and Paul Stewart.
“Cherelle Smith” opts for the passive-aggressive “you can’t say anything these days” trope. It reminds me of this piece from comedian, Stewart Lee.
The resurgence in racist “humour” can be traced to the backlash against Black Lives Matter (BLM), but may possibly go back to Gamergate, which occurred a year or two before the murder of George Floyd. White supremacists, hardline colonialists/imperialists and their fellow travellers, responded to BLM by misappropriating the word “woke”, emptying it of its original meaning and weaponizing it. Scratch the surface of the misappropriated and weaponized version of “woke” and you’ll find a disgust of Black people beneath. Its purpose is intended to mock and belittle Black and Brown folk. Indeed, many of the same people who use the misappropriated form have also bought into eugenicist claims that Black people have “lower IQs”. The same people also declared how they were opposed to sports teams taking the knee, on the grounds that it wasn’t “acceptable to them”. They also told us that sportspeople needed to find “another way” to show solidarity (a word that’s totally absent from their lexicons). Yet, they’re quick to label those of us who call out racist jokes as “snowflakes”? Come on.
Let’s return to the word, “woke”, and its use as a political weapon by reactionaries. The only people who use the word in this way do so, because they have something to gain from it. Furthermore, it’s clear to me that they see tolerance of others, kindness and empathy as weaknesses. This position overlaps with the far-right’s disgust for anyone or any body that works to bring people together and to stamp out hatred. Thus, racist jokes are defended as expressions of apparently decent people with great senses of humour, who are also “defenders” of free speech.
Take Konstantin Kisin, for example, who’s one of the hosts of Triggernometry (geddit?). When Kisin was booked to appear at an event at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), he was asked to sign a behavioural agreement. That such things are necessary informs us exactly how hitherto hidden discourses have been revived and given space and encouragement on social media. In many, if not all, cases, the tellers of these kinds of jokes have been white men. The BBC reported the following in 2018.
A comedian has turned down a gig at a university after being asked to sign a “behavioural agreement” first.
Konstantin Kisin was warned about a “no tolerance policy” on topics including racism, sexism and transphobia.
He was asked to perform at a gig at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, organised by university society Unicef on Campus.
The group has since apologised and the Students’ Union says it “believes fully in freedom of speech”.
Konstantin told Radio 1 Newsbeat the experience reflects a growing trend of free speech becoming stifled on university campuses across the UK.
He shared the “behavioural agreement form” online, saying the title “nearly made me puke”.
“I just think it reflects an attitude among a group of people, people at university particularly, where it seems that they have become places of indoctrination rather than learning,” he said.
Free speech for Kisin and those who share his views means freely expressing hateful and intolerant views (couched in ‘humour’), and the right to shout the word “nigger” in the face of Black people, because, according to them, “Black people use it”. Notice also how Kisin repeats the familiar right-wing and far-right misconception of universities, which he describes as “places of indoctrination”. The reality is that when people like Kisin talk about free speech on campus, they want the right to push their reactionary views while denying the right to reply to those people who challenge their claims and views. A challenge to reactionary views is always seen by reactionaries as a sign that their “free speech” has been “suppressed” or that they’ve been “cancelled”.
Kisin has also given a keynote speech at an event organized by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a think-tank set up by Jordan Peterson with funding from Paul Marshall and Legatum. Kisin laughs off any suggestion that he’s right-wing, but given his associations, it’s hard to see how he can deny it.
For all his denials, Kisin’s words, which are produced in his mind, betray him. Kenan Malik in The Guardian earlier this year insists:
Kisin is no racist, and certainly no [Bernard] Manning or [Enoch] Powell. He describes himself as “classically liberal” (though John Stuart Mill may wish to have a word about that). The exchange exposes, though, a contemporary paradox. Britain is more liberal and inclusive in its understanding of national identity than ever before. Yet, old racist tropes keep being rehashed by those on the right who would describe themselves as hostile to racism. Kisin despises the racial politics of Manning and Powell. But it is difficult to see how his view of “brown Hindus” being debarred from Englishness differs from Powell’s assertion that a “West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman”.
The horse/stable narrative underpins Kisin’s discourse and it’s hard to see how it doesn’t when he says that Rishi Sunak can’t think of himself as English because he’s a “brown Hindu”. Jokes about race invariably include an element of dehumanization and are always told from a position of superiority. This is especially the case of those “jokes” that are told at the expense of Muslims and, in particular, Muslim women.
Anshuman Mondal of the University of East Anglia wrote in The Conversation:
It doesn’t matter if racism is articulated in ways that are funny or unfunny. It’s still racist to dehumanise people, whether the joke is good or bad. Boris Johnson’s “joke” clearly dehumanises: in it, women who wear niqabs (not burqas – Boris knows so little about this he can’t tell the difference) are no longer human, they are walking post boxes. That is the reason why Johnson’s joke is racist – not because it’s not funny (or even if it is).
Tellers of racist jokes and their defenders want you to believe that free speech in Britain is under threat because they’re being challenged on their brands of humour. The truth is that free speech isn’t absolute nor has it been enshrined in UK statute. Furthermore, the United States isn’t a beacon of free speech either, despite what UK-based Trump supporters tell you.
Do you remember the photo above? I do. I remember it very well. This edition of Newsnight was hosted by Emily Maitlis, who was known to be hostile towards Jeremy Corbyn. It was aired in March 2018 at the height of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Even an A Level Media student with rudimentary semiotic skills could easily decode the image behind Maitlis. You can see how Corbyn’s trademark cap appears to have been photoshopped to make it resemble a Russian Ushanka hat, like the one below.
The background is not only tinted red, but it also includes an image of The Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral with its trademark onion bulb domes. Red is the colour associated with left-wing politics and, especially, Soviet Communism. The not-so-subtle insinuation here was that Corbyn is a Russian agent and, therefore, a Putin stooge. But the use of this kind of signification is anachronistic, because the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991.
When I pointed this out on what was then called Twitter, another poster claimed that it was the “curvature” of the studio background that gave the impression that the hat had been smudged or altered in some way. I told him that he was talking nonsense and pointed out that the hat wasn’t the entirety of the image and that the use of colour together with the images of the Kremlin implied that Corbyn was a “Soviet” agent. He replied by telling me that he worked in broadcasting and tried to browbeat me by telling me that I was “creating meaning”, which is something that we all do. This exchange continued for another couple of tweets and then he blocked me. By the way, my job involves semiotics, because I teach Media Studies and Cultural Studies.
The BBC broke accuracy and impartiality rules in a News at Six report about Jeremy Corbyn’s view on shoot-to-kill, the BBC’s governing body has said.
The item, by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, was shown three days after the Paris attacks in November 2015.
A viewer complained that the report misrepresented the Labour leader’s position on the use of lethal force in the event of such an attack in the UK.
BBC News director James Harding said he disagreed with the BBC Trust’s ruling.
In the News at Six report, Kuenssberg said she had asked Mr Corbyn “if he were the resident here at Number 10 whether or not he would be happy for British officers to pull the trigger in the event of a Paris-style attack”.
He was seen to reply: “I am not happy with a shoot to kill policy in general. I think that is quite dangerous and I think can often be counter-productive.”
The actual question Kuenssberg had asked during the interview was: “If you were prime minister, would you be happy to order people – police or military – to shoot to kill on Britain’s streets?”
No heads rolled, and Kuenssberg later replaced Andrew Marr in the BBC’s Sunday morning political slot. Yet, when someone like Trump shouts that he’s been the victim of the BBC’s bias, they respond by dismissing their Director-General, Tim Davie, and their CEO of News, Deborah Turness. However, it is true that Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol building. That is not in question. Just take a look at this clip from NBC.
CNN has a more detailed analysis of Trump’s speech here.
Another recent example of the BBC’s bias is with regards to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Whenever it reports on the conflict, it’s careful to frame its reports in such a way to avoid attacks from the Israeli government and pro-Israel advocacy groups in the UK. Hence, the the prefacing of Gaza’s civil defence and health ministries with the formulation, “the Hamas-controlled”.
The BBC’s current crisis is manna from heaven for the Conservatives and Reform. Both parties aren’t content with the Corporation’s right-leaning news coverage, and complain that this or that programme is “woke”. The idea that the BBC has a “left-wing bias” is a right-wing confection that’s based on little more than their desire to control the narrative and the discourse. Furthermore, the Tory Party has been gunning for the BBC for decades. When it was in government 2010 – 2024 , it repeatedly slashed the corporation’s funding. This is from the Media Reform Coalition and was published in 2023.
The government’s recent statements on the BBC licence fee mark only the latest in a long series of political attacks on independent public media. Over the weekend the Prime Minister cheered the BBC’s drastic cuts to Newsnight, one of the Corporation’s few remaining programmes producing investigative journalism. The Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer then indicated the government may block an increase in the TV licence fee, claiming an inflation-linked rise of £15 would be too high for many households.
The reason behind this sudden focus on BBC funding couldn’t be clearer: to distract from the government’s failed economic policies, and to shift blame for the growing cost-of-living crisis onto the BBC. Right-wing media outlets have wasted no time in boosting the government’s anti-BBC campaign, with GB News, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph all reheating their usual commercially-motivated bluster against the licence fee.
Yet these attacks on the BBC serve a deeper, more insidious purpose. With renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter due in 2027, the government is laying the foundations for an all-out assault on the future of the BBC as a universal, publicly-funded public service broadcaster.
Bias is unavoidable and news orgs that claim to be impartial are telling lies. As humans, we have inherent biases. It’s up to us to be aware and to make others aware that we’re operating from a position of personal experiences, tastes and political dispositions.
Hunter S Thompson, a journalist himself, said of objective journalism:
“So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
The BBC has always shown bias in favour of the establishment and it tends to treat Tory politicians with kid gloves. Its coverage of the 1926 General Strike, and its edited footage of the Battle of Orgreave being notable historical examples of its right-wing and establishment slant. If you have the chance to watch recorded coverage of the General Election of February 1974 (it’s on the BBC iPlayer), the Cat urges you to do so. The studio hosts can’t hide their loathing of the Harold Wilson-led Labour Party and try to play down the possibility of them forming a government.
Mic Wright has an incisive take on the whole sorry saga here.
Guy Debord's Cat 