Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland      (journalist, editor, gatekeeper?)
Jonathan Freedland "helping to confect an anti-semitism crisis in the Labour Party"
Born	25 February 1967
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Wadham College, Oxford
Religion	Jew
Spouse	Sarah Peters
Interests	• Israeli–Palestinian conflict • anti-semitism

Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and a monthly piece for the Jewish Chronicle. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, and presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View. Freedland's family background is Jewish.

Reporting

Seamus Milne, fellow Guardian editor, observed that "A senior editor of a national British publication who has written frequently for The Guardian's opinion section, told me that he was aware that all coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue was "tightly controlled" by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's executive editor for opinion."

Middle East

Jonathan Freedland has been termed the paper's 'gatekeeper' on the Middle East conflict. According to Jonathan Cook, Freedland is "helping to confect an anti-semitism crisis in the Labour Party".

"Democracy"

In May 2019 he argued that Politics may be broken. But it’s only politics that can save us.

Destroying Corbyn

In August 2020, Jonathan Cook wrote:

If anyone gave the weaponisation of antisemitism against Corbyn an air of bipartisan respectability it was Freedland and his newspaper, The Guardian. They made sure Corbyn was hounded by the antisemitism claims while he was Labour leader, overshadowing everything else he did. That confected narrative neutralised his lifelong activism as an anti-racist, it polluted his claims to be a principled politician fighting for the underdog.

Freedland and The Guardian not only helped to breathe life into the antisemitism allegations but they made them sound credible to large sections of the Labour membership too.

The rightwing media presented the Corbyn project as a traitorous, hard-left move, in cahoots with Putin’s Russia, to undermine Britain. Meanwhile, Freedland and The Guardian destroyed Corbyn from his liberal-left flank by portraying him and his supporters as a mob of leftwing Nazis-in-waiting.

Corbynism, in Freedland’s telling, became a “sect”, a cult of dangerous leftists divorced from political realities. And then, with astonishing chutzpah, Freedland blamed Corbyn’s failure at the ballot box – a failure Freedland and The Guardian had helped to engineer – as a betrayal of the poor and the vulnerable.

Helping Johnson

Remember, Corbyn lost by less than 3,000 votes in a handful of Labour marginals in 2017. Despite all this, Freedland and The Guardian now pretend that they played no role in destroying Corbyn, they behave as if their hands are clean.

But Freedland’s actions, like those of his newspaper, had one inevitable outcome. They ushered in the only alternative to Corbyn: a government of the hard right led by Boris Johnson.

Freedland’s choice to assist Johnson by undermining Corbyn – and, worse, to do so on the basis of a disinformation campaign – makes him culpable, as it does The Guardian, in everything that flowed from his decision. But Freedland, like The Guardian, still pontificates on the horrors of the Johnson government, as if they share no blame for helping Johnson win power.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Labour’s witch-hunt against Ken Livingstone	article	31 March 2017	Jonathan Cook	Labour's kangaroo court trying to justify suspending Ken Livingstone for stating the fact that Hitler supported Zionism
Document:The American Jewish scholar behind Labour's "antisemitism" scandal breaks his silence	Interview	3 May 2016	Norman Finkelstein Jamie Stern-Weiner	Norman G. Finkelstein is clear: "It’s time to put a stop to this periodic charade, because it ends up besmirching the victims of the Nazi holocaust, diverting from the real suffering of the Palestinian people, and poisoning relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities. You just had an antisemitism hysteria last year, and it was a farce. And now again? Another inquiry? Another investigation? No."
Document:The EHRC’s report into Labour antisemitism is the real ‘political interference’	blog post	7 November 2020	Jonathan Cook	It is instructive to compare the certainty with which the EHRC treats Councillor Pam Bromley’s ambiguous remarks as irrefutable proof of antisemitism in Labour with its complete disregard for unmistakably antisemitic comments from Boris Johnson, the man actually running the country. That lack of concern is shared, of course, by the establishment media and Jewish leadership organisations.
Document:UK Labour Party is right to drop racist IHRA guidelines of anti-Semitism	Article	6 August 2018		The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Anti-Semitism definition guidelines the Labour Party are correctly omitting, are designed by Israeli propagandists to aid their many mass lobby attempts to stop international solidarity with the Palestinians and to deny Palestinians the right to express the nature of Israel’s 70 years of violence and racism towards them.

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