 We weren't going to talk about the Labour anti-Semitism row on today's show, but there was an article in the Sunday Times. I do think it is worth talking about. It was a profile by Rosamund Irwin of the ex-Labor MP Luciana Berger. So the article started by recounting some of the awful online abuse Berger has been subjected to. We can go to a section in the piece. So it says, the former MP of Liverpool, Waver Tree, who had joined the party as a student and was in effect hounded out of it by anti-Semitism, received a message online threatening that she would pay for the suspension of the former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Now, while my politics and Luciana Berger is completely different, one thing that's undeniable is that she has been subjected to lots of abuse, lots of awful abuse, some of it from the right, some of it from the left, and you should not be, you know, I'm sure our audience aren't, but no one should be saying that an MP is going to pay for the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn, clearly very threatening language. The next line from the piece is interesting though, because it concerns us. During a live chat session run by the Corbyn sympathising Navarra media, anonymous commentators dubbed her a vile fifth columnist and the face of evil. Now, much like those first comments that I showed you, these again are completely unacceptable. You shouldn't be referring to Jewish people as part of a fifth column, clearly sort of talking about dual loyalties. And it's just, it's not good. It makes people uncomfortable and it does for a reason because it's very adjacent to sort of far right antisemitic conspiracy theory. Not good. Obviously, we do our best to block these kind of comments when they do appear under our videos. We have moderators, many of you volunteers. Thank you so much for the work you do. But I have a few problems with the way this has been reported. So, yes, they showed us a screenshot. Those messages did appear under our video. But we don't have a live chat session. This isn't a live chat session. That's what Rosamund Irwin called it. She's apparently the media and technology correspondent for The Times. And she thinks that Tiski Sauer is a live chat session. She clearly didn't watch it. Otherwise, she would know that this is a programme, a broadcast with a live chat box. And by the way, I love nearly, I love 99% of the chats you put in that live chat box. I don't want you to be tarred by these two comments that have been pointed out here. Further, we had an audience of 7,000 live viewers that night. And these two comments are somehow meant to imply that all of our audience is antisemitic. You might say, oh, that's a bit of a reach. She hasn't said that there. What she's just said is that this is where these comments appeared against Luciana Berger. Berger, apologies. But again, why is it Navarra that it has appeared? Why is it Navarra and not LBC, not Talk Radio? If you have seen any live stream on this channel, on this platform, sorry, on YouTube, there are always going to be hundreds of comments every second. And I'll tell you, if you look at LBC, if you look at Talk Radio, there are a hell of a lot worse than us because I'm very defensive about our Tiski Sauer audience. Most of you, progressive, anti-racist, brilliant people, which is not what you could say under a Nigel Faraz, LBC live stream. But Rosamund Irwin doesn't seem to understand that she doesn't know this. She's blaming us for comments on a live stream. Now, I pointed this out to Rosamund Irwin because I thought it was rather unfair for Navarra to appear in this article. It's clearly the implication she was trying to make. This was her response to me on Twitter. Except those weren't the only two, were they? And I'm sure you know that. We don't allow comments like that on our site. What do you do to stop antisemitic abuse? From this very polite exchange I had with Rosamund Irwin, it was never abusive. I was just saying, I think the way you've represented a show I hosted in your newspaper was not very fair. She's blocked me. So I can't speak directly to her on Twitter. But if you are watching Rosamund, I'm sure you weren't watching that previous show and you just got a screenshot sent to you by someone who hates Navarra Media. But anyway, if you are watching, this is what we do. So as you've said, we don't have comments on our website. I mean, if we did, we'd have to have a different policy there. This is all on YouTube. But even on YouTube, unlike, say, LBC, we don't leave live comments up after the stream. That's because it is too hard to moderate. Basically there are too many of them. And also we do try and moderate our posts, which again is way more than LBC and Talk Radio do, which you've never included in your articles because you have no interest in casting them as associated with racism in the same way that you do crowdfunded organizations on the progressive left. Why is that? You can make your own decision. To show how common it is for unpleasant unsavory comments to appear on any live stream that she hasn't decided to write about. I looked at an LBC stream and it was just a randomly selected one. It was the most recent one that day, hosted by Tom Swarbrick. Kind of a centrist analysis. Analyst apologies. He used to work for Theresa May. So it's not like their most far-right show. And these are what I found. So this is just from that morning on YouTube on LBC. And again, I suppose I should give you sort of a content morning. There's going to be quite a lot of racism in these all quite unpleasant stuff. So this is all from LBC yesterday morning. Patriotic Alternative have a longer report on their website. So telling people go search this far-right group about some sort of trumped-up terrorist attack, I think. Then we've got your government is implementing the collergy plan on behalf of the government overlords in occupied Palestine. Now, I don't know what that plan is supposed to be, but it is clearly a very deep rabbit hole, deeply anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Then we've got Swamp armies all in place as Europe locked down coincidence all time to USA election, which they get the go signal. This idea of the go signal is like real. This is this is deep far-right conspiracy. And then you've got someone saying, okay, Jew, it's not even so that's just he's just being out and out. Very explicit there. Now, when I showed this to Rosamond Owen, she said, this is a V odd argument that LBC attracts racist comments. Doesn't make it any better that yours did too. And who would I be interviewing to use the comments you point out? What you're writing doesn't even make any sense. Now, granted she was writing a piece about Luciana Berger. If she was writing one about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, maybe she'd go to those sites. But that's not really what her first reply to me suggested. And again, I'm not an idiot. I know why the Sunday Times are including Navarra media in an article about labor anti-Semitism because they want to tar us with that brush. They want to associate us with racism. That's what they do. The problem here is that she doesn't have a leg to stand on. Before going to this, I want to remind you of what she said. So her first reply to me saying, I think this is a bit unfair. You've included our channel and my show in this way in the Sunday paper, which goes out to hundreds of thousands of people. So she wrote in response to that, except those weren't the only two, were they? And I'm sure you know that we don't allow comments like that on our site. Now, let's go to a video which is on the Sunday Times YouTube site. So it's about Black Lives Matter. If you look at the content, she's sort of critiquing Black Lives Matter. Under that video in the comments, you can see Indigenous British Lives Matter. For 70 years, we have tolerated the destruction of our homeland and attacks on our people. No more tolerances over mass repatriation or war. That's really grim stuff. So allow comments like that on our site. Well, you were judging us for comments which were on our YouTube. And those are comments which are on your YouTube. So you do not have a leg to stand on. Let's get up another one. And again, I'm sorry I'm showing you all of this racism, but this is just to point out the hypocrisy of this Sunday Times journalist. So this is also under that same Sunday Times video. So it's Jeff T writes, the trouble with the Black and ethnic communities is they have a bloody big chip on their shoulders. They realise they are the minority in a white country and always will be. The sooner they conform to the British way of life and culture, the sooner they will be accepted as equals. The only thing they are doing is making a rod for their own backs. I don't even want to read the whole of it. Really horrible, far-right drivel. And that has been on the Sunday Times YouTube site for four months. Now, the comments which she decided to include in her profile to the hundreds of thousands of people who buy the Sunday Times had stayed on our site for, I think, like an hour. And this has been on her YouTube channel, or the Sunday Times YouTube channel, for four months. And we can also look at a few more comments that have appeared, not in the YouTube channel, which even though she's tech and media correspondent, she doesn't seem to understand that there is a distinction between someone's website and someone's YouTube channel. But these are on the website. These are on the website proper. So a few of them. Islamophobia is a fiction to shut down debate. Legitimate criticism of Muslim teaching can't be compared to anti-Semitic demonization and lies. I'm identifying as a young black trans Chihuahua, and the truth can go whistle. I mean, from reading the tweet that Rosamund Irwin sent me, I'd have thought those would have been deleted from the Times website if you had any kind of half-decent moderation. But no. Instead of these comments being deleted by a moderator, they were made into headlines, because this is what the Sunday Times pays their authors to write. Okay? So what you're seeing here is a situation which we have seen again and again and again in this country over the last four years, which is you've got people who work for a deeply structurally racist organization who literally hire people to write headlines saying Islamophobia doesn't exist. Rod Liddle is hired by the Sunday Times in a spectator, his other outlet. He has said that there isn't enough Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. They are using the flimsiest evidence, the flimsiest evidence, two comments in a live feed where you've got hundreds of comments a minute to suggest that a left-wing channel, anti-racist channel, watched by... And again, I think this is a really important point because what people try and do is they try and use two comments to tar a whole brush. And I'm just not saying we can't take responsibility for our audience. I'm saying our audience is brilliant, right? There are thousands of you and you're really brilliant people. There are a couple of people who write dumb shit. We block them from the site if they do that, especially if it's racist. We're 100% make sure they can't comment again. But the idea that this should tar our whole audience, I hate it, and especially from someone who basically works in a racism factory. You know, in the building where the Times is, you've also got talk radio, you've also got The Sun. You've got other outlets which spout the most racist drivel from their best paid journalists. This is not just about comments. This is about structurally what that organization does. Probably, and this is probably the most significant and appalling sort of instance of inciting racial hatred from the Times, is something that appeared not in the comments section, not in the op-ed section, but on the front page. So you've got Christian Child forced into Muslim foster care. Now, this sparked a huge row. Everyone was like, oh, political correctness has gone so mad that you're forcing Christian children into Muslim foster care. It's sort of playing into all the worst tropes that come from sort of far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which is young white children being forced into brown... It's really grim. A complaint was made about this, which was upheld because that front page, and again, this wasn't a comment section. This wasn't in the op-ed section. It was wrong. Ipsos upheld a complaint because the fact of the matter was, the child was at least as Muslim as she was Christian. She was baptized, but she had regularly attended church in the care of her practicing Muslim grandparents. The family, again, was a divided family in terms that they weren't on Muslim... I mean, the whole story completely fell apart. It was on the front page of the Times, and now a Times journalist is saying, these comments would not appear in our paper and trying to smear an anti-racist left-wing organization, which is, by the way, funded on a shoestring. The Times want moderators. They can pay for them. Trying to, in this really self-righteous way on Twitter, suggest that we're associated with racism. I can't stand it. I mean, Michael, I think you've put it better than I ever could have. This is clearly a bad faith attack. We put a lot of effort into moderating our comments. It's a sad and unfortunate truth that some will slip through the net, and when they do, we'll do our best to make sure those commenters can't comment again. I really appreciate and adore the comments in community that we've got for Tiske Sauer. I think it's one of the most impassioned and intelligent audiences. You could hope to have as a media organization, and so I think it's absolutely outrageous that thousands of viewers are being tarnished with this brush. But the thing that I would like to say, actually, is not to you and it's not to our audience. It's to Rosamund Owen herself, because, Rosamund, you've blocked Aaron Bostani. You've blocked Michael Walker, but as far as I can tell, you haven't blocked me yet. And I've got no reason to think that you don't take racism very seriously. And as we've laid out in this show, there are raced comments below the line on the Times and Sunday Times YouTube channel. They've stayed up there for months. Some comments as ugly as advocating for mass repatriation or a race war. And we've also highlighted a pattern of coverage, which is either explicitly racist and denigrating of black people of Muslims and ethnic minorities or also just misleading, dishonest journalism. So I can only assume from the way in which you tweeted my colleague Michael Walker that you are either shockingly ignorant of the organization of which you work for or this is a bad faith attack and you are holding the viral media to standards that no other media organization could be held to or perhaps you hold to a hierarchy of racism where you don't consider racism against black people and against Muslims to be as serious as antisemitism. Now I really hope it's not the latter. So here's my question for you. Given we found a lot more than two comments on a single live stream highlighting a pattern of racist comments on the Sunday Times YouTube channel and also a pattern of racist commentary in the publication proper, what are you doing to stop racism within your organization? Now patiently wait for your answer. Her answer is going to be nothing. What I'm doing is I'm busy distracting from the racism of my own organization by throwing stones at anti-racist progressive organizations who aren't funded by as NFO big billionaires who haven't spent decades stoking hatred against Muslims and trans people and put on their front pages scare stories which aren't actually true about why kids being forced into brown families. In a way it feeds back to the Labour issue because whilst as we've always said there were some real antisemites in the Labour Party and more than there were some real antisemites there were some sort of ways of speaking that made Jews rightly uncomfortable and there could have been a bit more leadership from the top on it but the purpose of making it out as if the Labour Party was the home of racism in this country was to absolutely distract from the powerful institutions in this country who don't just have a few members who tweet things on Twitter but who are literally owned and controlled by people who are willing to put lies on their front pages to incite hatred against powerless people who have even recently arrived in this country because they are coming from a war zone who they're saying this is disgusting why can't they live in France these people are criminals giving huge platforms to Nigel Farage who's going around beaches harassing people coming over in dinghies metaphorical sense of his cam I don't want to make any particular allegations about what he's done on the ground but the fact that the purpose of these organisations and the way they make money is to stoke racial hatred and then to say that actually no racism in Britain the biggest problem is what people have written on Facebook and Twitter who are part of the anti-racist left wing party and then you get people on Twitter who sort of say oh no but it's a bigger deal when it's from the left because you're supposed to be anti-racist so we're going to hold you to impossibly high standards because you're left wing there's a single racist comment on your YouTube channel that undermines your whole argument that undermines the whole point of your being and I say to them look we do hold ourselves to a higher standard but if you are trying to make us commit to this sort of weird ass double standard that you don't apply to anyone else and you know is impossible to meet we're not going to do that because we would fail that and then you'd hold it against us right so let's be realistic about this and let's call out people who are only attacking us in bad faith I mean I think part of the way in which anti-Semitism has been used to discredit the entirety of the left is to be the intention is to rob us of the ability to talk about racism at all now like you said it is true that there are anti-Semites within the lay party there are anti-Semites on the left and more than that there was also this broader lack of sensitivity and kindness and a failure in leadership from the top of the Labour Party didn't deal with it as quickly as it should have and I think that we can all agree on that we might differ on what's on the specific policy responses should have been but that's definitely true the most fervent attackers of the left from the right wing papers and the right wing media in general do not take racism seriously no don't take anti-Semitism seriously so you've got the same people who are pushing this kind of George Soros conspiracy theory from the front page of the telegraph for instance that was Nick Timothy Rupert Murdoch who has talked about the Jewish-owned press that these are somehow people who get a free pass because they're not associated with the left and they're not associated with the anti-imperious left in particular and I don't think this is something that we talk about enough it's part of the reason why there is this selective outrage with regards to anti-Semitism and perhaps a heightened sensitivity when it comes from the left or is perceived to come from the left is in part so that you can no longer talk about the way in which Islamophobia has shaped decades of state policy both domestically and overseas and to rid the left of its moral authority when it comes to structural and institutional discrimination and that is a huge part of this story now the challenge for the left and I'm going to talk about the challenge facing the left because we do have a responsibility to make something better, to do something better is to try and revive those bonds of anti-racist solidarity which have historically existed between Jewish communities and other communities of colour within a shared anti-racist movement and I think it's going to be really difficult and I think it's been made more challenging in particular because of this heightened, very partisan conflict with regards to anti-Semitism but that's the challenge that's facing us because the rising tide of white nationalism endangers all of us endangers Jewish people, endangers Muslims endangers Black people presents a threat to trans people to people who aren't straight and so you really do have to have a kind of shared movement and shared language to deal with that and that is precisely what this particular form of weaponisation is designed to impede