"I don't think we need to apologise for anything. This was a piece which examined somebody's views very carefully.
"I think there are people out there who need to apologise to us because there have been vicious accusations in the last couple of days, from (former Labour leader) Neil Kinnock among others, that somehow this was an anti-semitic attack."
So said the Daily Mail's City Editor Alex Blummer to Radio 4's Today programme.
However, the "Man who hated Britain" headline was taken from comments made in his youth as he arrived in this country having fled the Nazis in Belgium. However, as Ralph Miliband's biographer, Michael Newman, wrote in The Guardian even these teenage diary entries were taken out of context.
So the Daily Mail are claiming that people are claiming they are anti-semitic. Now a lot of that attention comes from what the Daily Mail was writing during the war, around about the same time as a 16 year-old Ralph Miliband was writing his early thoughts about his adopted homeland in his diary. There was praise for the Black Shirts, anger against the number of aliens who had entered the country and the owner visiting with the Furher.
Yeah the Daily Mail are thinking that people owe them apology for looking at their writings some 70 years ago and associating those thoughts with the actions of today. Somehow they still can't see that the way their presented the story about Ralph Miliband saying not once but twice on separate days that he hated Britain, a nation that as soon as he was old enough he joined the Royal Navy to fight against the atrocities that he had experienced from the Nazis, fighting for freedom to have his own thoughts as well as those of everyone else.
LLoyd George said a few things before WW2 about it not being a good idea to go to war for Poland.
ReplyDeleteClearly that means the LibDems, 70 years later, are a Nazi party.
Or at least so your logic suggests.