The Telegraph has revealed that a senior staff member of Stop Funding Hate, the group behind the GB News advertising boycott, has shared content on social media that many regard as antisemitic and has links with a group called Ethical Consmer, a leading advocate of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the U.K. The Telegraph ’s Steven Edginton has more.
Amanda Morris, the community organiser for Stop Funding Hate (SFH), has been criticised for several social media posts, including one from 2021 promoting the phrase “#FromTheRiverToTheSea”, a well-known chant used by Hamas to call for the destruction of Israel.
A spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “It is hard to square Amanda Morris’ history of comments, posts and associations with Stop Funding Hate’s philosophy of ‘open, inclusive and participatory campaigning’.”
“Promoting anti-Semitic phrases like ‘From the River to the Sea’, which calls for the destruction of Israel; urging the media to give a platform to spokespeople from Hamas, an anti-Semitic genocidal terrorist group banned by the U.K., are all red flags.”
“How could Jewish people possibly feel included in any of SFH’s campaigning led by such an individual? And how on earth SFH could work with her?”
Stop Funding Hate has led campaigns urging advertisers to sever ties with conservative-leaning media organisations, including GB News, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Last week the coffee company Grind said it had stopped advertising with GB News in response to a tweet from SFH.
The Telegraph can also reveal SFH is heavily reliant on a group called Ethical Consumer for its campaign strategy and materials. Ethical Consumer is a leading advocate of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the U.K., which pushes for the avoidance of Israeli-produced goods and services.
Michael Gove, the Communities Secretary, introduced a Bill last month to clamp down on BDS campaigns which he claimed “lead to appalling antisemitic rhetoric and abuse”.
Amanda Morris wrote a report in May 2021 criticising the media for “referring to Hamas as (an) Islamist militant group” and said “referring to Hamas” as an “Islamist militant group” disregards “that they won a popular vote in 2006”.
Earlier that month conflict had broken out between Israel and Palestine, with the Home Office reporting that 4,000 rockets had been fired indiscriminately into Israel by Hamas killing civilians and children…
Amanda Morris said: “I do not consider that the retweets in question are antisemitic. I have been critical of some of the actions of the state of Israel, but that does not mean that I am antisemitic – on the contrary, I am an opponent of all forms of racism including anti-Jewish racism.”
Worth reading in full.
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Stop Funding Hate = Stop Funding Things We Disagree With.
It’s a clever trick of the Left to characterise their enemies as haters and make an emotional rather than a rational appeal.
It should really be spelled
Stop funding! Hate!
ie, stop funding stuff we hate because that’s what’s really meant.
Indeed – stuff they hate but also stuff they fear, arguments that they fear will hit home with people who hear them, and undermine their hold on power.
I don’t think they’re that rational. I think they’re just organized believers hunting down heretics because heretics have to be hunted down as their very existence contradicts what the believers believe in. The power of the churches has waned since the days of the inquisition or the Salem witch trials. But people themselves haven’t changed, only what they cling to dearly has.
True, though I wonder if the Bishops and Archbishops and Popes etc were quite so fervent in their beliefs or whether it was more about their powerbase being threatened.
So what?
I support BDS and GB News.
Fair enough I suppose. I don’t know enough about BDS to comment really. Interested to know what your view would be if BDS actively campaigned for advertisers to withdraw from GB News?
Michael (slippery) Gove clamping down on BDS should tell you all you need to know..
Possibly. Sadly I don’t have the time to look into it. My general position on the whole Israel business is undecided. I think the “anti-semitism” card is played too often.
No, on this particular issue he’s right.
Is he heck..
Knowing some of the people who support BDS I can’t see them ever campaigning against GB News.
Exactly.. there’s some malicious licence going on in that Telegraph article. Always biased where Israel is concerned..
Maybe the Telegraph is sometimes biased in Israel’s favour. But where exactly is the malicious licence in this particular piece by Edgington?
Sometimes??? every media outlet is ‘always’ biased in Israel’s favour. Its how things are.. you don’t criticise Israel..
Totally disagree. Most media outlets in English are biased against Israel, esp dominant ones like the BBC and Guardian. Almost every day there’s some story or other that is full of half-truths, lies and key factual omissions in an anti-Israel direction.
Sorry.. I’ve got to laugh. You’re obviously having a little joke with us.. BBC/Guardian.. haha
I see. I guess what I find interesting is how best to approach groups like “Stop Funding Hate” or some other organisation that lobbies people to promote their message. Most of us here I imagine disapprove of “Stop Funding Hate” but how should they be “dealt with”? Should their activities be illegal, or is it a free market? I guess most of agree that the state should not engage in censorship, nor should it bully, require or encourage others to do so. But what about private entities? The advertisers are free to refuse them, but often don’t. Freedom of speech in any meaningful sense is hard to achieve if the avenues for speech and information are shut down.
I despise Stop Funding Hate.
Any advertiser who buckles under their pressure I boycott.
I have just emailed Grind to tell them I will not be purchasing again from them indefinitely. I support good cofee not political activism or cowardice
Me too..
Sorry but, whatever the activists involved think they’re doing, the BDS campaign is in essence stupid, hateful, and antisemitic. It seeks to destroy the world’s only Jewish-majority state alone of all countries in the world on the basis of a completely false narrative echoing nasty old ideas about Jewish power, conspiracy and malice towards the non-Jew.
False in your eyes but not mine.
No false in fact on key matters, not just in my opinion. E.g. the 4 maps posted below are demonstrably ignorant and deceitful in the same way that all the crap we were told about covid by the govt and NHS was demonstrably false.
Israel is an apartheid state created at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.
Yes Covid was a scam and it is ridiculous to equate them both.
Well, in my experience engaging with BDSers over the past 20yrs, it’s clear the BDS movement is a post-truth cult – rather like the post-truth covid cult. Accurate facts and fair judgment seem important to neither.
And no, Israel is nothing like South Africa before 1994. So the apartheid slur is just that – a fact-free smear like ‘anti-vaxxer’. The only apartheid I see is the attempt to isolate, demonise and destroy the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
This article explains why Israel is an apartheid state.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2018-03-18/why-israel-is-an-apartheid-state/
You need to get your head out that place that the sun doesn’t shine.
What a pathetic post.. nobody with any real sense of decency would defend Israel and its behaviour. Its been utterly disgusting, and they get away with it because of the ‘antisemitic’ card that they always pull out when criticised..
Leaving aside your insult, what exactly is pathetic about it?
And I would defend Israel in general precisely because I have a sense of decency. While it’s far from perfect, Israel’s overall record is no worse than other western countries and far better than all the other states in the ME – incl Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank which are responsible for 99% of Palestinian suffering. The fact that the BDS crowd never criticises the latter shows that the movement is all about Israel-hatred, not genuine concern for Palestinians.
And your comment on the antisemitic card is hard to take seriously when you poisonously refer in another comment on this thread to Jews as “those who hold the real power over us”. Presumably if that wasn’t what you meant, you’d have clarified by now.
Sorry.. you’ve lost me now. You’re talking absolute rubbish, and I’m getting a sense of who you represent. Bye..
“Stop Funding Hate” which uses bully boy tactics to get its own way.
“Just Stop Oil” which uses bully boy tactics to get its own way.
“Black Lives Matter” which uses bully boy tactics to get its own way.
There appears to be a common thread amongst all these groups campaigning for ‘the common good.’
Perhaps though if the companies that are approached to assist with ‘the common good’ had the common sense to tell these woke, totalitarian outfits to do one a degree of sanity and ‘niceness’ might return to society. Just a thought. However, being honest I would prefer a rather more brutal and honest approach to dealing with these anti human scum.
A good start would be to leave as an example the eco nutters who glue themselves to roads with a bloody big chunk of said road remaining attached to the limbs they have stuck to it.
I would pay to see that.
Put some bollards around them and open the road. Perhaps their friends will get them out. Perhaps not.
What a useless government. These movements are founded, grow, get big PR and influence public policy and private decision making. Yet all the time no Minister (or their army of assistants) noticed anything.
you could be forgiven for believing they were not interested or they approved.
time and again. Get rid of them all.
Or to put it another way, when are grassroots actually Astroturf.
They never stop do they.. I’m talking about those who hold the ‘real’ power over you.. those you’re not allowed to criticise..
Jeez.. they’re even labelling R F Kennedy Jr antisemitic now..
As for Palestine.. what Palestine ???
So are you saying you think it’s really ‘the Jews’ (or maybe ‘Israel’) that have the real power over us all? If so, that’s just vile antisemitic shite.
As for the lying maps you’ve posted, they each actually represent unrelated things and are intended to deceive. Here’s more detail for anyone interested:
http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-maps-of-disappearing-palestine.html
In 1922, according to the census we carried out, the population of Palestine was, to the nearest 10%, 80% Muslim, 10% Christian and 10% Jewish.
The state of Israel is an explicitly racist one founded through murder, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, all still going on.
The real ancestral homeland of the Ashkenazi Jews behind the creation of Israel is the area that used to be the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and we know that their ancestry is on average 60% European – they started out as Jewish immigrants to what is now Italy who married local women because Jewish women weren’t available – so they’re actually far less racially Semitic than are the Palestinians. And, it seems to me, technically not Jewish.
Your first sentence doesn’t make sense – how could you have been in British Palestine in 1922? If it’s a quote you should put it in “” and give a source. But in any case, no one denies Jews were a minority in British Palestine overall. They were also a majority some parts of it.
Your comment about Israel being racist, murderous, terrorist, and engaging in ethnic-cleansing is the usual extreme but very generalised set of accusations. But there’s no evidence to show these things truly sum up Israel accurately. E.g. the Arab population of Israel has grown from 150,000 in 1948 to around 1,250,000 today – so Israel must be the most incompetent ethnic cleanser ever!
As for your final para, it’s pseudo-historical gobbledygook. There’s always been a Jewish community in Israel/Palestine/Holy Land with connections to Jewish communities elsewhere. And for some time now, the majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants from Arabs lands who were ethnically cleansed in the 1940s, 50s, 60s.
Leftist hate group is overrun with anti-Semites. No surprise there!
Hypocrite.
Always room for another.
Rules for thee but not for me.
I’ve meanwhile invented the verb paedofiling for members of political group A try to paint member(s) of political group B as paedophiles. Something similar is also needed for try to paint member(s) of group B as antisemites. Both are smear tactics readily employed by so-called culture warriors from all sides and they really just highlight that the same kind of diagreeable and stupid people exist in numbers in both camps (and hence, that the answer to Whose side are you on? ought to be None of yours!).
Considering this, what’s the point of this article? Demonstrate that the only qualitative difference between the Telegraph and Stop funding hate! is that their PR is targetted at different demographics?
I disagree, and the Telegraph is correct to point out the antisemitism here. Just because accusations of antisemitism are sometimes made in bad faith (e.g. the Sunak govt’s use of the accusation to silence Andrew Bridgen recently), that doesn’t mean there aren’t clear-cut cases of real antisemitism as well – in this case SFH’s apparent support for Hamas and the BDS movement.
I was planning to write a longer reply but that’s useless — your statement doesn’t really mean anyhing except But I want to call them antisemites!!1
Reply: See above, culture warrior.
No, my statement means there’s at least a prima facia case that there’s a problem with anti-Jewish prejudice in this particular instance because of the facts of the matter – e.g. apparent sympathy or support for Hamas which is an overly antisemitic organization like the Nazis or KKK.
Here’s the Hamas charter for anyone interested:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
Have you given thought to the fact that linking SFH to BDS and GB News is contrived and out to discredit.
How do you know it’s a fact? And wouldn’t it help rather than harm GB News for SFH to be linked to vile movements like BDS?
Pity we can’t give these people sandpits and plastic spades and leave them to play where they can’t bother the rest of us.
What a hateful group they are.
Agreed. They’re the very thing they accuse others of being.
You aren’t exactly addressing Plato or Einstein. The fact that our country is a playground for this kind of thing just tells you the state of affairs. It is like you have to start talking baby language just to be able to function. Tragi-comic perhaps the way that adult babies are. Its a trance and once they are in it it is very difficult to bring them home.Just divert your mind away from adult babies.
Amanda Morris ! Plastic Rag Head ! Fumb Ducker !!
Really, the likes of SFH need taking to court. If GB News was breaking the broadcasting code egregiously, they’d lose their licence. SFH is therefore demonstrably running hate campaigns of defamation against legitimate businesses – they were attacking GB News before it even launched. Who funds them? And if it goes to court, will they be forced to pay up?