Dr Pete Newbon is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department at Northumbria University.

The weekend 15/16 May saw horrific antisemitism on the streets including a man in a car in a Jewish area of London shouting through a megaphone ‘F**k the Jews, rape their daughters’.

Dr Newbon is Jewish and an active campaigner against antisemitism. In particular he is one of several current and former Labour members who campaign assiduously against antisemitism in the Labour Party and who were instrumental in Labour’s heavy defeat in the December 2019 election. Dr Newbon resigned from the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader in September 2015, in protest against his antisemitism.

The antisemitism over the weekend 15/16 May was fuelled by the lies of far Left Labour MPs regarding the Middle East Conflict, including Corbyn.

In response, on 18 May Dr Newbon tweeted an image of Jeremy Corbyn reading from a book to primary school children. The book was ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen. The text on the left hand page of the original image was replaced with the title of the antisemitic forgery ‘The protocols of the Elders of Zion’. 

The caption of the altered image (‘Oh no … A J- ….. er, I mean a ZIONIST! A nasty, horrible Zionist! We can’t go over him, we can’t go under him, we’ll have to make an effigy’) is a play on the well-known lines from the book ('We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it').

The image is simply a satire on Corbyn’s antisemitism. It is well within the bounds of decency regarding satire and is obviously not ‘antisemitic’. 

However the photo caused a ‘pile-on’ from Corbyn’s supporters  on Twitter including calls for Northumbria University to discipline Dr Newbon. The ‘pile-on’ included Michael Rosen who wrote that the altered image was ‘loathsome and antisemitic’.

Michael Rosen is not qualified to assess antisemitism.

He doesn’t accept that Israel should have the right to exist.

Further, Rosen thinks that Israel’s right to exist ‘has at its heart at the very least some racist overtones towards the dispossessed’.

One of the examples in the IHRA definition of antisemitism relates to this view of Michael Rosen that Israel is in its essence a racist endeavour and therefore has no right to exist. IHRA offers this as an example of how the Jewish right to self determination is often denied. IHRA guides us, therefore, to make a judgment according to context, about whether Rosen’s antizionism is antisemitic. Pete Newbon’s University has adopted IHRA. The 'context' hurdle is clearly passed.

Rosen thinks that ‘The main justification for this demand’ [ie the axiom that Israel has a right to exist] ‘seems to be the holocaust’.  This show how little Rosen knows about Israel. Zionist movements began in the nineteenth century in response to antisemitism. The belief that Israel was created in response to the Holocaust is simply ignorant. Zionism was the self-determination movement for Jews in response to thousands of years of antisemitism.

Dr Newbon’s accusers (including Rosen) are simply malevolent Corbyn supporters seeking revenge over those they blame for Corbyn’s defeat in the December 2019 election.

They are 'gaslighting' a Jew who fights antisemitism.

We trust that you will ignore them.