Libel Settlement Clarification
This statement also appears on our Crowd Justice fundraising site.
JVL, Richard Kuper and Naomi Wimborne-idrissi were sued for defamation by John Ware and reached an out-of-court settlement. As part of that settlement we published an apology on our website.
Part of the agreement was that neither side should disclose any details of the terms of the settlement. We believe that Ware has pushed this understanding to its limits with his words on the matter published in the Jewish Chronicle and The Article.
To be clear, the apology issued in open court was not for what we had written or said about The Panorama Programme. The agreed settlement did not require us to retract or qualify in any way our criticisms of the programme itself.
We still need further funds to complete the settlement. If you are able to donate please do and please share this clarification as widely as possible.
Thank you.
I saw Ella Rose and others appear on this programme without their being identified — recognised programme as a stitch -up by Ware
Thank you, it’s really good to know this as I was perplexed and worried by the apology. What a pity you’re not allowed to tell us any more about the settlement. This confirms my experience and has led me to believe that socialists may do well to keep out of the courts.
If Ware has breached the terms of the agreement, surely he should be the one forking up – from his il-got gains? A look at headlines from his other chosen medium “The Article” shows it is rabidly right-wing, just like the JC. Its claim ‘to examine all sides’ is patent rubbish. Ware barks the word ‘statutory’ to validate his reliance on the ‘findings’ of this ultra-establishment and unelected body. Since when did socialists – or indeed journalists, which Ware claims to be – rely on the effusions of the bourgeois state? Forde does leave gaps – he does not go far enough in pointing out the extreme right-wing and Zionist character of much of the LP bureaucracy. Ware completely ignores Forde’s naive belief in the possibility of nonfactional – that is, non-political – party administration.
How sickening that this vile man can win against two such upright honest, truth-seeking humanists. A sad day for truth and Justice.
I suggest everyone read the apology as published on the JVL website. The criticism of the Panorama programme stands in its entirety. It was a deliberately distorted, biased, and mostly untrue right wing attack on Corbyn and his Labour Party. No one has sued Al Jazeera for its revelations. Ware clearly has right wing, zionist leanings and the Panorama programne had a political agenda.
Further point “I read in the Guardian”(!) a week ago a good piece by a former worker at the Central Office for Information – (now DISinformation): after the reigns of Thatcher, Ingham, Blair and Campbell. This ‘pentito’ casts light on the total chutzpah of John Ware in assuming that the ‘statutory status’ of the ECHR report on JVL gives it some force or even credibility. On the contrary, as the real journalist I.F.Stone (remember I.F.Stone’s Weekly, anyone?) demonstrated, distrust of state institutions and their allegations if the first duty of any seeker after truth. Stone’s major source was The Congressional Record – and his main target for critical analysis…
Despite the dodginess of his claims to vindication Ware’s piece in ‘Article’ is worth reading as the only serious attempt I know to defend his ‘Panorama’ programme and to address, at least in part, the Forde report and Al Jazeera’s programmes instead of simply ignoring them. Ware also, probably inadvertently, raises a genuinely interesting question about the meaning of an ‘independent’ complaints system; a question which the useless EHRC report failed even to identify.
Clearly any complaints system should be independent in establishing facts and applying the rules but Ware seems to think that it should also be independent in deciding what the rules are; e.g. what ‘antisemitism’ means. Somebody has to make this decision and the NEC ducked it by adopting the IHRA definition; a deliberate fudge designed to imply strongly, without actually saying, that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Whatever its political function it is obviously useless as a basis for decisions in individual cases. Under Corbyn the complaints investigators seem to have tried to fill the gap by involving his office in discussions designed to establish some ground rules. This looks like a sensible and practical solution but Ware regards it as wholly illegitimate; presumably because it diluted the power of headquarters staff belonging to his favoured faction.
We have now returned to a system in which there are no known rules at all. We have to look at decisions made by anonymous bureaucrats in individual cases, usually without any stated rationale, and try to deduce from them what the underlying principles are. By this means we can see, for example, that Jews who criticise Israel are not now acceptable in the Labour Party but that other people who do the same sometimes can be. The leadership can welcome the results without openly endorsing the principle.