Socialist | Trade Unionist | Has the high ground | 🇵🇸
Joined November 2012
- Tweets58.4K
- Following4.7K
- Followers7.2K
- Likes53.5K
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Reject the Board of Deputies
The Board of Deputies' declaration that The Green Party of England & Wales is a "racist" party would be laughable if it wasn't so disgusting.
Zionists love to characterise the BoD as some kind of pluralistic exemplar. This of course is mischievous. I mean, sure, its "deputies" will disagree on peripheral issues. But as a fundamentally Zionist entity, whenever Israel/Zionism faces serious opposition, they fall in line.
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Allow me to translate:
Ashok beat the BBC firing squad, and now the Zionist lobby are trying to make sure he's disinvited from appearing on television ever again.
400K. What an absolutely obscene capitulation to a Zionist mischief maker.
The BBC has agreed to pay £400,000 to an award-winning Jewish documentary-maker who alleged she was subjected to antisemitism and pushed out of the corporation after October 7.
Lucie Kon, 57, spent 22 years at the BBC and worked on programmes including Panorama, Today, BBC Breakfast and Storyville. Films she commissioned or helped produce won an Oscar, Emmy and Bafta.
Kon says her treatment changed dramatically after the Hamas attacks. She alleges colleagues described Zionists like her as “evil”, argued that Israel should be called terrorist if Hamas was, and told her to consider what had driven Hamas to carry out the massacre.
When she proposed a documentary about October 7, Kon says she was told she was “too partial” to oversee it because she was Jewish.
She subsequently filed a formal grievance, but a BBC investigation rejected her complaint. Kon says she was then kept away from work for months. During a restructuring, her position was made redundant and she failed to secure the similar role replacing it.
She launched unfair-dismissal proceedings.
The BBC has now agreed substantial compensation, reported as £400,000, without admitting liability or accepting that Kon suffered antisemitism.
Kon says Jewish employees still at the corporation continue to face hostility and feel unable to identify openly as Jewish or Zionist.
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
The report explicitly acknowledges that hatred toward Jews is NOT on the rise, and that only anti-Israel sentiments are increasing. And yet they STILL published a review claiming “antisemitism” is a major problem in British schools, because "antisemitism" means "opposing Israel".
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
This is embarrassing
Mike Tapp MP used to be a Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Israel @_LFI, has been on Parliamentary delegations to Israel and does not have a clue about the racist Israeli apartheid policies
We deserve so much better than this in Parliament
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
A report based on the experience of just 29 sixth formers is now going to be used to crack down on freedom of speech over a genocide in every school in the country. What the hell is going on?
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Mike Tapp, endless defender of Israel and accuser of antisemitism, “didn’t know” that Jewish citizens of any country can settle in Israel while Palestinians displaced from their ancestral land, since the Nakba, are forbidden from returning.
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
The report had nothing to do with protecting schools and everything to do with protecting Zionism.
The Board of Deputies has relentlessly ran cover for the genocide in Gaza and Zionist settler colonialism.
This hysterical misinformation won’t work anymore.
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
🚨 UPDATE: The hypocrisy gets even worse.
"Sir" David Bell, the very man behind the government's antisemitism in schools report, was accused of Islamophobia back in 2005 for singling out Muslim faith schools.
As the then head of Ofsted, he warned that religious segregation could threaten social cohesion and questioned whether Muslim schools were adequately preparing children to respect other cultures.
Fast-forward 21 years...
We're now discussing a Jewish school's published commitment to preparing pupils to become "positive advocates for Israel", while Bell's new report goes far beyond political impartiality, proposing measures to silence legitimate criticism of Israel, presenting genocide as a matter of competing political perspectives, and sanitising the actions of the Israeli state under the guise of tackling antisemitism.
If Muslim schools teaching a particular worldview raised concerns about social cohesion, why shouldn't schools explicitly preparing children to advocate for the State of Israel face the same scrutiny?
Especially when Israel are carrying out a genocide in Gaza!!
This isn't about Jewish or Muslim children. It's about the political indoctrination of ANY child, and the equally dangerous prospect of using education as a vehicle for state propaganda, suppressing legitimate criticism and sanitising atrocities.
It has absolutely NO place in our children's education, no matter which religion, ideology or state it seeks to serve.
If this is seriously where we're at, we may as well stop calling it the Department of Education, and call it what it is: the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
#GazaGenocide #FreePalestine
@NEUnion @educationgovuk @andyburnham
theguardian.com/education/20…
I'm not going to name the school, but the @BBC's coverage of the antisemitism in schools report featured interviews with children from a Jewish school.
Here's the rub, though.
The school's own published curriculum explicitly teaches Zionism, celebrates the establishment of Israel and describes preparing pupils to become "positive advocates for Israel" at university.
It even references bringing in organisations such as StandWithUs to prepare pupils for that advocacy.
Now, let me be absolutely clear. There is nothing wrong with teaching Jewish history, culture or identity. And antisemitism must be challenged wherever it exists.
But when children are actively encouraged to advocate for a particular state, rather than critically examine its history, policies and actions, surely we have to question whether this is education or ideological conditioning?
And here's the staggering hypocrisy.
We're being told that schools must exercise political impartiality when discussing Palestine, while a school can openly describe preparing children to advocate for Israel.
Political impartiality cannot be a principle applied selectively, depending on which side of a conflict children are encouraged to support.
And the BBC has a responsibility to scrutinise that distinction, not simply present children's views without examining the educational environment in which those views have developed.
Children deserve an education that teaches them how to think, not what to think.
@NEUnion @educationgovuk
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
The reality of the "independent" review telling every school in England to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism: its author, Sir David Bell, was being paid by a government agency while he wrote it, and a pro-Israel charity has listed him on its council for ten years.
The government told the public he was "independent of Government" and had "no conflict of interest". Neither is true.
What we found:
- Bell was paid £20,000 a year as vice-chair of Skills England, a government agency, in a seat the Department for Education gave him. He held it until August, through most of the review.
- The Academic Study Group on Israel and the Middle East has listed him on its council since at least 2016. Its website says its one firm policy is opposing boycotts of Israel. It gives talks on Israel in schools, which is exactly what his review was asked to judge.
- In 2005, as chief inspector of schools, he singled out Muslim schools as a challenge to "our coherence as a nation". The chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools called it Islamophobia, and his own inspectors said he had presented a personal view as inspection evidence.
Then we followed the money:
- The department's £1.3 million antisemitism training contract had one bidder, according to the tender record. It went to Palace Yard, a company set up in 2022 by the former Labour MP Natascha Engel.
- That contract says all its training must use the IHRA definition "as a foundation". It was signed eight months before Bell was appointed. His review then recommended IHRA.
- Two of the people who advised Bell, from Partnerships for Jewish Schools and the Antisemitism Policy Trust, now sit on the group putting his recommendations into practice.
- The Union of Jewish Students, also on that group, holds a contract worth almost £1 million to train universities. Its own policies include "UJS to advocate for Israel within UK Policy and International Law".
- UK Lawyers for Israel* (UKLFI) and the Campaign Against Antisemitism* (CAA) both say the review adopted their recommendations.
*For context, UKLFI once justified the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli occupation as "good for obesity". Both these groups have staunchly defended Israel throughout its perpetration of a genocide in Gaza, and regularly conflate Jewish people with the apartheid state.
This matters because the review decides how every school treats what pupils and teachers say about Israel, and the IHRA definition it recommends treats some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. A review with that power should come from someone with no pay from government and no tie to a pro-Israel charity. Bell had both. The government put one in a footnote and left the other out.
We mapped every link, each with its source, explaining just how far this review is from "independent": newscord.org/editorials/davi…
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
The "five Israelis" were on-duty IDF soldiers, by the way. Seems like an important detail to include.
Five Israelis wounded and two suspected Palestinian attackers killed in West Bank shooting bbc.in/3Ud0szZ
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Basic education piece:
Not all Jewish people are Zionists.
Lots of Zionists aren't Jews.
The Board of Deputies largely self identity as Zionists.
The Media often report the Board of Deputies as the opinion of Jewish people.
Yet many Jewish people say #NotInOurName
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
🚨 A UK defence editor had information that UK Special Forces operating in Central America were involved in the US kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in Jan 2026
Article was never published after UK military's 'D-Notice' censorship body told the editor to spike it
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Greens: Zionism is racism
*three weeks of deranged media attacks*
British public: +2
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Only 5,000 kids were surveyed, only 92 were Jewish, only 70 of 92 responded, and 29 said they had faced antisemitism at school. Only 2% said antisemitism was a big problem at their school and we're reclassifying it as a more serious form of racism based on that? Is this a joke?
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
I'm not going to name the school, but the @BBC's coverage of the antisemitism in schools report featured interviews with children from a Jewish school.
Here's the rub, though.
The school's own published curriculum explicitly teaches Zionism, celebrates the establishment of Israel and describes preparing pupils to become "positive advocates for Israel" at university.
It even references bringing in organisations such as StandWithUs to prepare pupils for that advocacy.
Now, let me be absolutely clear. There is nothing wrong with teaching Jewish history, culture or identity. And antisemitism must be challenged wherever it exists.
But when children are actively encouraged to advocate for a particular state, rather than critically examine its history, policies and actions, surely we have to question whether this is education or ideological conditioning?
And here's the staggering hypocrisy.
We're being told that schools must exercise political impartiality when discussing Palestine, while a school can openly describe preparing children to advocate for Israel.
Political impartiality cannot be a principle applied selectively, depending on which side of a conflict children are encouraged to support.
And the BBC has a responsibility to scrutinise that distinction, not simply present children's views without examining the educational environment in which those views have developed.
Children deserve an education that teaches them how to think, not what to think.
@NEUnion @educationgovuk
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
Greens +2
Anti-Zionism is not only the baseline moral position. It is also strategic
Look what happened to Ed Sheeran when he did what the Israel lobby told him
The world has changed. Don’t go by mainstream media. Hold the line
"Antisemitism in schools is at record levels!"
"We shall therefore investigate".
"Behold our landmark report confirming that antisemitism in schools is at record levels!"
Fucking ridiculous.
Hipster Union Rep retweeted
It appears that opposing Zionism is popular…
Come help us do it.
join.greenparty.org.uk
