Fact-Checking Michael Danby

Here's a paragraph from an 'opinion' piece in yesterday's Australian by Labor ZIO, Michael Danby:

"Before that there was a front-page row over the Oxford University Labour Club, when its former chairman, who is Jewish, resigned live on the BBC, citing harassment by Corbynistas singing 'Rockets over Tel Aviv' and calling and disparaging their fellow Jewish undergraduates as 'Zios'." (Anti-Jewish bigotry set to bring down Corbyn and British Labour, 6/5/16)

Almost nothing in it, however, can withstand scrutiny.

As it happens, the gentleman concerned, Alex Chalmers, produced a resignation statement (telegraph.co.uk, 16/2/16), from which we can see that:

a) Chalmers was not a "former chairman" of the OULC, but a co-chair.

b) Chalmers may or may not be Jewish. More to the point, Danby omits to mention that he had worked for BICOM (British Israel Communication & Research Centre) - from which we may safely conclude he's a ZIO.

c) Chalmers "resigned live on the BBC"? Really? What an odd place to resign! Trouble is, I can find no evidence for this claim.

d) Chalmers did not resign because of "harassment by Corbynistas singing 'Rockets over Tel Aviv." Here is his reason for resigning:

"It is with greatest regret that I have decided to resign... This comes in the light of OULC's decision at this evening's general meeting to endorse Israel Apartheid Week."

e) Chalmers made no mention of "Corbynistas" (or Corbyn, for that matter) in his resignation statement.

f) Chalmers made no mention of "Rockets over Tel Aviv" (or any other song) in his resignation statement. In fact, there is no song called 'Rockets over Tel Aviv'.

g) Chalmers did not mention "harassment." His resignation statement merely accuses "members of the Executive" of "throwing around the term 'Zio' (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon," and then leaps to the conclusion that "a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews."

Quite why he chose to draw that particular conclusion from the use of the term tells us more about him than it does about the OULC. After all, that "large proportion of OULC," alleged to be using the term, could conceivably be referring to, well... ZIONISTS.

Which raises the questions:

Is calling Zionists Zionists (or ZIOS) now anti-Semitic? If so, Herzl, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, to name but the leading lights of the ZIO-pantheon, are, ipso facto, anti-Semites.

Is Chalmers seriously suggesting that "members of the [OULC] Executive" get their cues from KKK websites?

Finally, if ZIOS is a disparaging term, what are we to make of 'Corbynistas'?

Enough already! Please don't ask me to fact-check Danby's other 28 ZIOgraphs.