Anger at Jones’s comments on Turn Left channel as his failures over antisemitism scam resurface
Left-wing Jews have expressed outrage at commentator Owen Jones’s renewed attack on Black Jewish left-winger Jackie Walker. Jones, appearing on the Turn Left YouTube channel, did not name Walker but referred unambiguously to her during the programme, using her as an example pf the ‘small number of people who engage in either antisemitism or antisemitic tropes’ and supposedly ’cause hurt to Jewish people’ by her analysis several years ago of the involvement of Jewish people in the slave trade:
Jones described ‘the idea that there was a role of Jewish people in the slave trade’ as if such a thing was unthinkable or invented, going so far as to call it a ‘false narrative’. But of course there were Jewish people who were involved in the slave trade, just as there were white British and European people and people of other ethnicities involved in the slave trade.
Of her analysis, Walker said:
Jews, like all peoples, are subject to material conditions. Persecution of European Jews led to an exodus from Europe to the Caribbean. All Caribbean islands were slave economies. There is irrefutable historical evidence that over certain periods, and in some areas of the Caribbean, Jews were significant in the development and maintenance of the Slave, Sugar and Plantation trade. Like over 90% of Jamaicans I have heritage from slave owners and the enslaved.
She also wrote:
Yes, I wrote “many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”. These words, taken out of context in the way the media did, of course do not reflect my position. I was writing to someone who knew the context of my comments. Had he felt the need to pick me up on what I had written I would have rephrased – perhaps to “Jews (my ancestors too) were among those who financed the sugar and slave trade and at the particular time/in the particular area I’m talking about they played an important part.” The Facebook post taken by itself doesn’t, and can’t possibly reflect the complexity of Jewish history, of the history of Africa, the history of people of the African diaspora and the hundreds of years of the slave trade. The truth is while many peoples were involved in this pernicious trade it was the rulers of Christian Spain and Portugal that ordered the massacre and expulsion of thousands of Jews from the Iberian Peninsular who forced Jewish communities to seek refuge in the New World and the Caribbean. It was European and American Christian empires that overwhelmingly profited from the kidnap, enslavement and death of millions of Africans and I’m happy to make explicit and correct here any different impression my Facebook post gave. The shame is, at a time when antisemitism has been weaponised and used against certain sections of the Labour Party, nobody asked me before rushing to pin the racist and antisemitic label on me.”
Jackie Walker, one of the highest-profile victims of the antisemitism witch-hunt – and far from the only Black person – was shamefully treated by Labour and a number of high-profile figures, who scapegoated her either to try to avoid further smears or to reinforce the false ‘Labour antisemitism’ narrative – so much so that even the politically-driven Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation into the party’s handling of antisemitism complaints was highly critical of treated and then expelled her, though not for antisemitism.
In 2016, when Walker was first suspended, she wrote a response to the smears and the party’s actions. Years later, she received a Freedom of Information Act reply from the party about the discussions around the decision to suspend and then expel her. In correspondence, one party staffer involved in the investigation told another that the complaint against her was the weakest case of supposed antisemitism they had seen.
Owen Jones’s record on the antisemitism smear campaign, as in his support for Jeremy Corbyn at various points, is far from unblemished – nor is it his first attack on Walker. Electronic Intifada‘s Asa Winstanley wrote in a 2022 article titled “How Owen Jones learned to stop worrying and love Zionism”, that Jones:
sabotaged the popular movement that brought the veteran Palestine solidarity campaigner to the brink of power by claiming the Labour Party had an anti-Semitism problem, insisted Corbyn apologize for anti-Semitism that he had not even been guilty of and happily played the role of the Israel lobby’s useful idiot.
Jones relentlessly called for Corbyn’s most high-profile supporters to be thrown out of the party based on confected anti-Semitism allegations – including Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.
Among Jones’s critics over his latest reinforcement of the smears against Jackie Walker is Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) co-chair Jenny Manson, who described herself as ‘furious’ about Jones’s comments. She told Skwawkbox that she considers the ‘particular animus’ toward a Black Jewish woman to be a sign of Britain’s ‘deeply racist society’:
In our so called liberal society, Black people are shut up when they talk about their own experience of oppression. Take Starmer’s treatment of Diane Abbott and take Owen on Jackie. To me this is cruel, contemptuous and arguably racist.
I would guess that most of Jackie’s critics will rightly support Faiza Shaheen. So what does that say about the particular animus towards Jackie. Is it, as I once heard the lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie say, that West Indian Black people are at the bottom of the pecking order? And the women at the very bottom?
We are a deeply racist society.
Owen Jones was contacted for comment and was provided with Jenny Manson’s comment in full, but had not responded by the deadline for publication.
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