A thread on boycotts, accountability, sock puppets and hotzaat shem ra:

On Monday, @JewishLabour, myself and a range of our senior activists joined the boycott of Twitter for 48 hours.

We did so on our terms and issued a statement setting out our collective position. 1/13

@JewishLabour is a membership organisation. We’re led by an NEC. We aren’t purely a communal organisation, and no single person has the ability to dictate our collective position. We are accountable to and for each other. Sometimes that means disagreements and compromises 2/13

Our members have faced years of abuse both online and off. By people brave and dumb enough to do it in their own names, but also scores of sock puppets hiding in the shadows behind the defence of anonymity. 3/13

Our activists have stood up to this insipid culture of bullying, harassment and intimidation with aplomb. They don’t hide their names or who they are, instead facing down hate and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous behaviour sent their way 4/13

They have been on the front lines within the Labour Party for years. But not only mashing away at their keyboards at midnight. In meetings. Making allies. Maintaining relationships. Delivering training. Attending conferences. Organising elections. Running campaigns. 5/13

Many of those who’ve taken the lead have also had to remain fortified and sane, despite the high stakes situations in which they’ve been part of making big decisions that have shaped political history in the last few years 6/13

Some of them decided not to vacate social media during the boycott. That was their decision. I support their right to do so. Some did so privately expressing deep concern that some advocating the boycott have a less than consistent attitude to opposing all forms of Jew hate. 7/13

Dissent and debate are as old and Jewish as Hillel and Shammai. Argument must be for the sake of heaven. Machloket l'shem shamayim. There are too many warnings and prohibitions in Jewish scripture against anger. 8/13

In the interests of shalom bayit (a peaceful home), I’ve disappointed myself enough in not calling out really bad behaviour by some who hide in anonymity, and whose only accountability seems to be either only to themselves or to the volume of retweets they fail to achieve. 9/13

But a word of warning: If you think on yourself as a tzadik (a righteous person), don’t slide into my DM’s 46 mins after the start of the boycott you support to call our activists and members “toxic, narcissistic fools”, with an instruction that we should “f**k off” 10/13

I, and every @JewishLabour activist haven’t spent the last few years of our lives fighting a fight we never asked for, and being publicly accountable for everything we have said & done to be treated in such an appalling way. There is #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate. Even Twitter DMs 11/13

In the coming weeks and months, we will see the conclusion to the EHRC investigation, further legal and political consequences for the Labour Party and its former leaders.

One day the full story of the last five years will be written and told. 12/13

It is forbidden to speak hotzaat shem ra (spreading a bad name / slander). To rebuke that behaviour is an obligation. This is that.

#Ends