Owen Jones’s non-apology for liking anti-Semitic bile

No effort or expense was spared in its production. As an editor’s note at the top of the story notes, Jones spoke to no fewer than 13 people to produce his account, and apparently spent “$24,000 in initial legal bills in vetting the story”. 

A defamation read for a full book typically costs less than £5,000, but as the editor’s note states, Jones’s targets have good lawyers: the relatively unknown (and junior) BBC editor Raffi Berg – mentioned 39 times in the article – engaged “famous defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, who is also former Director of UK Lawyers for Israel”, after all.

And yet no-one is discussing the piece, because instead social media is, for once, genuinely shocked and stunned by the comments below the post which have been publicly liked by Owen Jones.

“Great reporting,” one begins, before continuing in full. “Sadly, the legacy media in the US, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe have become the propaganda arms of white supremacist settler colonial domination. The Zionist project has sought to make Jews the new master race.”

Another comment endorsed by Jones complained about “Zionist voices in the governing party [that] continue to pull Starmer’s strings”.

As Wilde might have said, to like one antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to your article looks like misfortune. To like two looks like carelessness.

Owen Jones does, of course, have a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. He knew that likes on Substack are public – of course he didn’t think he was just privately liking antisemitic posts – but he just hadn’t read them properly, simply seeing the praise and mashing the like button.

A cynic, or even an uncharitable skeptic, might doubt this explanation. They might even wonder exactly how far Jones said he read into the first message. Did he stop after two words? Is he often in the habit of reading things that briefly? Or did he read the second sentence and think that was just fine, and worthy of a like, before stopping just short of the overt “master race” sentence? 

But it’s the season of goodwill to all men, and that must of course extend to Owen Jones, so let’s take his explanation at face value, because it still raises a question or two.

The first is that – unaccountably – Jones seemed to forget to include an apology alongside his explanation. This seems like quite the mistake: imagine if Jones had accidentally liked a tweet endorsing an explicitly racist conspiracy theory about anyone other than Jews. Might he think that an apology should come right at the top of an explanation then?

Still, surely that was an oversight. Perhaps Jones is also about to acknowledge that multiple of the most visible comments – the ones he saw early enough to personally like – on his article attracted this kind of comment, it might be a reflection of the content he is producing and the audience he is attracting? Most of us, having never publicly liked antisemitic conspiracy theories by accident, don’t know whether that introspection would hit us, but it feels likely.

Finally, Jones might wish to reflect that he has just written 9,000 words on sloppiness and bias within the BBC and then failed to read a three-sentence, 37-word long antisemitic comment before accidentally publicly endorsing it. Mistakes might be easier to make than Jones was assuming, after all.

Still, the row is unlikely to make Guardian editor Kath Viner’s Christmas any merrier. The organisation is already on the brink of civil war over the sale of the Observer, and departing food critic Jay Rayner joined multiple other former newspaper staffers in bemoaning Viner and the Guardian’s blind spot when it comes to antisemitism.

Now, yet again, its star columnist is in the middle of another row about a personal blind spot for antisemitism so blatant that he couldn’t spot a racist slur in a four-line long comment.

Inevitably, the Guardian’s remaining Jewish staff and readers will look to how Viner reacts. Perhaps there’s even another 9,000 word article in that?