Anti-Zionism at the Proms: the Big Lie

Did you know that Max Bruch's Violin Concerto is a fiendishly cunning piece of Zionist propaganda? That anyone listening to it live is at severe risk of going home convinced that you can't do better than be beastly to Palestinians?

You'd better believe it, since to doubt this is to doubt that there was any justification whatsoever for the disruption of Thursday night's Prom by Palestine Solidarity Campaign protesters.

There are the usual objections to these people's perceptions and priorities to be made. One may strongly suspect, for example, that the Khartoum Philharmonic Orchestra, if such a thing exists, could have performed at the Albert Hall every summer for the past 30 years without moving them to take action. The state which has occupied Tibet since 1959 sends its circus on tour round Britain without fear of disruption.

But there is more. Let us allow, for the sake of argument, that Israel is indeed the Most Evil State On Earth. What is then to be said about disrupting a violin concerto as a means of protest?

It is asserted that the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is a tool of the Zionist propaganda machine. that (in the PSC's words) it shows "complicity in whitewashing Israel's persistent violations of international law and human rights".

Now please follow me closely at this point. The PSC is right to this extent: having an orchestra good enough to play at the Proms does indeed make Israel look better than it otherwise would. but the reason why this is the case is that the existence of such an orchestra is in fact a good thing, and being a good thing makes the country it belongs to really a better country than it would otherwise be. It is therefore not propaganda.

The man who tells you that a beautiful piece of orchestral music is a lie has not only failed to understand what beauty is. He has failed to understand what truth is. He is a philistine and, being a philistine, a liar too. If he is not conscious of lying, that is because he has drunk so deeply from the well of politics that he no longer recognises the distinction between a lie and a politically unhelpful truth. He has decided that there are so many bad things about Israel that it must not be permitted for there to be any good things about it. The IPO is a bad thing because it is a good thing.

The principle applies without exception - to the Berlin Philharmonic under Hitler, to the Leningrad Philharmonic under Stalin. I need hardly say that propaganda was integral to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. They shared a need to convince their citizens and the outside world of things which were not true. But the orchestras made music which was really and not just propagandistically beautiful and, I repeat, that was a good thing.

Of course I am not suggesting that the arts cannot be instrumentalised and manipulated by oppressive regimes (or indeed by comparatively benign ones). They can be given propagandist content - but come on... Bruch's Violin Concerto? They can also be used to try to establish "innocence by association". But the remedy for that is simply for the audience to decline to be manipulated. It really isn't difficult. In my time I've been to concerts given by Soviet, Iranian and Sudanese musicians. In each case I enjoyed the music, but did I come away with an enhanced regard for the regimes of those countries? What kind of fool do you take me for?

"The kind of fool who would go to the IPO Prom" must evidently be the PSC protesters' reply. So make that not just philistinism and dishonesty but arrogance as well. Ludicrous arrogance, given the demographic characteristics of your average Proms audience, and the audience's reaction on Thursday night suggests that the point was not lost on them. "We must control what music you are allowed hear because otherwise we cannot trust you to think the right thoughts about it": the thought is the one which invariably underlies totalitarinism, and anyone thinking it is unfit to be trusted with a seat on a Parish Council.

So much for the moral status of the protest. There remains the related but separate question of what crime protesters of this sort ought to be charged with. And specifically whether whatever it is should be considered as "racially aggravated". We have been here before, and the outcome was a depressing own goal.

I find Sheriff James Scott's remarks irritatingly bumptious in tone but he has surely judged rightly. I hope the doomed attempt at establishimg "racial aggravation" will not be played out again in a court in London and end up giving the PSC further cause for celebration.

The sustained campaign to portray the state created by Jews as uniquely oppressive and murderous is (since this portrayal is false) is racist in its effect and, whilst it is not necessarily racist in its motivation, almost inevitably leads to a blurring of the line between non-racist and racist motives and reasonings. But the attempt to pin a "racist" label on a single act of protest against the actions of a state is futile.

Imagine that there was a well-organised and vocal campaign to hold the People's Republic of China to account for its occupation of Tibet and oppression of the Tibetan people. Who knows, perhaps one day some members of the PSC will start one. Would we really want to see its supporters in the dock, facing charges of anti-Chinese racism on the grounds that they had unfairly singled the Chinese state out for criticism?

The "racial aggravation" charge here makes as much of an ass of the law as the proposition that, when a drunken oaf lurches towards a football manager with the alleged intention of assaulting him, the gravity of his offence should hinge on the question whether he called the target of his ire a "Fenian bastard" or merely a "f***ing w***er" (since apparently, in the eyes of Scotland's once highly regarded legal system, the latter lacks the potential to render the offence one "aggravated by religious prejudice").

I would respectfully urge Jews who believe good can come of recourse to such illiberal legislation to think it possible they may be mistaken. It forfeits the moral high ground and is pragmatically counter-productive to boot. It alienates those with a healthy distrust of restrictions on free speech. It closes down all possibility of dialogue with anti-Zionists who are genuinely innocent of racial motivation. As for the hope that some successful prosecutions will shame the hard Left into applying the canons of political correctness consistently, it is a vain one. When did they ever feel the need to be consistent? The clue is in the fisrt word of that phrase "political correctness".

No, let the Prom protesters' guilt be "aggravated" not by racism but by philistinism, barbarism, preening totalitarian arrogance and, last but not least, blasphemy against the God who has made beauty true and truth beautiful.

Goose and gander: a somethingveryspecificist strikes

This should not be a day for point-scoring, but inevitably the point-scoring is in full swing. And I really was pulled up short when I realised what my last post had been.

For today neither the BBC nor anyone else in the left-liberal universe has the slightest difficulty in naming the beliefs held by a man who has slaughtered 90 innocent victims.

Even though there is, as I write, no evidence that any other person - let alone an organisation - sharing those beliefs helped or encouraged him to commit mass murder. Even though his action seems utterly irrational even considered as a means to the ends which are assumed to have motivated it. Even though the outrage would appear at this point to have at least as much in common with the classic spree killing as with the kind of organized religio-political mass murder campaign with which we are familiar.

So there's an absolutely blatant double standard here. Branding everyone in Norway or anywhere else who is worried about Muslim immigration as a potential mass murderer is out of order unless it's OK to do the same to Muslims every time an Islamist bomb goes off. So far from doing that, the BBC fights shy of even applying the label "Islamist" to terrorists, for fear of implicating Islam as such. No such fear of implying guilt by association is restraining it today, though:-

'The BBC's Richard Galpin, near the island which is currently cordoned off by police, says that Norway has had problems with neo-Nazi groups in the past but the assumption was that such groups had been largely eliminated and did not pose a significant threat.'

Once again: this is before we have a shred of evidence that any group was involved.

We ought to be getting some consistency and it ought to be a consistent moderate Somethingveryspecificism rather than any variety of Nothinginparticularism. By all means let's put the far Right under the spotlight, though without imputing bogus guilt by association: it remains true that the EDL hasn't organised any spree killings and Geert Wilders hasn't planted any bombs. But let's also insist that the BBC must boldly go into the journalistic no-go area it has created around the relationship of terrorism to Islamism and Islamism to Islam. Not because we should want to demonise Muslims but because when lives are at stake we need and are entitled to understand what the problem is.

Have I got this right?

'This is not helped by a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, nor by the steady pressure to increase what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system.'

- Ed Miliband

'those at the top and the bottom who were not showing responsibility and were shirking their duty to each other [...] some of those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work - but didn't.

'Labour - a party founded by hard-working people for hard-working people - was seen by some, however unfairly, as the party of those ripping off our society.'

- The Archbshop of Canterbury

No, wait...

Pravda!

'2 killed as Koreas exchange live fire'

- headline in the Morning Star. It's reassuring to see that some things never change.

Suspended by the chasubles

So the Right Reverend David Spart, Bishop of Neasden, has been suspended. Quite right, too, and I trust the incandescent +London has selected a suitably sensitive part of the anatomy to suspend this prize twerp by.

I had a long republican phase and am still by no means an ardent monarchist, though my respect for the Queen is considerable. I hope, however, that even as a Trot I would not have been quite mean-spirited enough to derive satisfaction from predicting the demise of somebody else's marriage before it had started.

What's not to dislike about Bishop Spart's remarks? I don't know which is worse, the smug schadenfreude or the no less smug assumption that he can be an outspoken red republican whilst simultaneously holding high office in an institution headed by the Queen.

Says Spart:-

“I think we need a party in Calais for all good republicans who can't stand the nauseating tosh that surrounds this event.

“I managed to avoid the last disaster in slow motion between Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll, and hope to avoid this one too.”

Well, I avoided it too. I spent an agreeable day with my comrades in Boulogne (note to Bishop Spart: nicer than Calais). As I recall, the local Communists laid on some kind of reception, but apart from them and the lefties from across La Manche practically nobody was out and about. Royalty addicts are nowhere thicker on the ground than in Europe's republics.

That was of course nearly thirty years ago. One would hope that having done a certain amount of growing up in the meantime would be an indispensdable qualification for a bishop - even the Bishop of Neasden.

The lie that keeps creeping into the mainstream: now Israel is accused of genocide in the Big Issue

'During the trial Osmond cited cited the words of Rachel Corrie - the US activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah in 2003 - as inspiration, specifically her diary entry: "I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, this has to stop. I think it's it's a good idea for all of us to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."' (the emphasis is mine; for the trial in question see this and - deserving a companion post in its own right - this)

Let's keep this simple. First point: Corrie's words are simply untrue - still as untrue now as when she wrote them. Untrue by any definition of the word "genocide" that does not reduce it to a Zimbabwean dollar of political discourse, that does not leave us needing a new word to describe the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Second point: it is no small matter to make a false allegation of genocide specifically against a state founded as a home for a people who have suffered the real thing. "Offensive" is a grossly overused word which I do not resort to lightly, but if ever there was a case to which it was appropriate, this is it.

Third point: the quote is from an article in The Big Issue (July 26 - August 1 2010, p. 25).

There is nothing in the article that questions the truth of Corrie's allegation. On the contrary, the passage quoted is immediately followed by allegations of war crimes committed against civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza. And let us be absolutely clear about this: I am not denying that any war crimes were committed in Gaza, but even if it were true that the Israelis had deliberately attacked a hospital and UN compounds, "genocide" is not a synonym for "war crimes".

The article is also notable for containing not the slightest hint that anyone other than Israel and its allies bears any responsibility either for the fighting in Gaza or for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. The only points at which it provides anything remotely resembling balance are where it concedes that there is actually no proof that the arms firm EDO MBM supplies Israel at all, let alone supplying kit for use in war crimes. I suspect we have the magazine's lawyers to thank for this.

None of this is surprising given that one of the co-authors is Richard Purssell. He is a long-standing member of the International Solidarity Movement, the group to which Rachel Corrie belonged. In fact, he was with her when she died. I know this because I have googled him, not because The Big Issue told me. Evidently the reader was not meant to think that the article was partisan. The other co-author is a journalism lecturer and evidently knows a trick or two.

Let there be no misunderstanding: whilst I think that diary entry paints Rachel Corrie in a very unattractive light, and I see no reason to doubt that the primary cause of her death was her own foolhardiness, her death was untimely, unmerited and tragic. However, it doesn't make her use of the "g" word any whit more justifiable. Or rather, it shouldn't do - but it's always fascinating to see how religious patterns of thought persist among the theoretically most secular-minded of people. Corrie, we are to understand, speaks from beyond the grave with the moral authority of the martyr (as the early Church knew, the best martyrs are young and female).

A good gauge of how justifiable the charge of genocide is the fact that even the ISM don't - at least officially - make that accusation. They prefer the still highly contestable but comparatively speaking reasonable charge that Israel has created an apartheid system.

So have they written to the Big Issue dissociating themselves from Corrie's claim? Are they moving to expel Richard Purssell? If they have, it will give me great pleasure to withdraw what follows. But I'm not expecting anything of the sort before the inauguration of porcine aviation.


If you hold an extreme and irrational belief which you would like to insert into the mainstream of political discourse, what is the best way of going about it? Guerrila tactics are likely to serve you better than conventional ones. Don't issue a manifesto and get imbroiled in arguments in which the weakness of your case will be exposed. No, let Rachel the martyr state your case for you, for nobody can start an argument with a martyr. Dress up your propaganda as an objective news feature, and get it published in a magazine sold by homeless people. For who will want to hear that the Big Issue is not on the side of the angels?

The lie is worthy of Der Stürmer (for, huff and puff as you may, it is a lie specifically about Jews). But was Der Stürmer ever half as a slick?

As for the Big Issue, I would hope they could be induced to feel ashamed of themselves. My fear, though, is that we have already passed beyond that point.

ContactPoint: goodbye and good riddance

For me it was what they call a defining moment: the Blair government's response to the nightmarish death of little Victoria Climbie.

The state had all the power it needed to save this beautiful child's life, and access to all the knowledge it needed to identify her as being at risk. It failed her through the blinkered incompetence of its servants.

How, then, did the New Labour state react when confronted with its inability to make proper use of the power it had? Simple: by awarding itself more power. If it could not protect a child where there were multiple indicators of risk, the "lesson to be learned" was that it must invent a new Stasi to monitor and collect data on the millions of children whose parents, far from torturing them to death, were doing a far better job with them than the state could dream of doing. And all this data was to be centrally held, with security as good as the competence and integrity of the people using it - people like, well, like the ones who let Victoria Climbie die under their noses.

Thus was ContactPoint born. And now, after an outlay of £235m and, at length, a change of government, the whole thing's being switched off.

Which seems as good a note as any for me to come out on. If the admirable James MacMillan can do it, why should I skulk in the closet? Like MacMillan, on 16 May I voted Tory.

And on the day the plug was pulled on ContactPoint, non, je ne regrette rien. The state has been too long in the hands of those who believe it is the cure for every ill and can never have too much power.

The lice and the fleas fight over the cadaver of Amnesty International

Martin Bright gives us an extract from Gita Sahgal's latest salvo against her former employers Amnesty International. He's impressed and one can understand why. Of course it is unconscionable that AI has been organizing gigs for an extreme Islamist, and in this matter Ms Sahgal has acted as a model whistleblower.

My own admiration for her is tempered by the fact that her job description at AI was "Head of the Gender Unit", meaning it was very much on her watch that Amnesty declared abortion to be a universal human right, with the corollary that unborn children have no human rights at all.

So this is, after all, no more than a turf war between two factions of leftist ideologues using Amnesty to promote their agendas. For both sides the most fundamental human right of all is negotiable. It was Dr Johnson who said that there is no settling the precedence between a louse and a flea; putting it another way, only if it can be arranged for both sides to lose does Amnesty stand a chance of recovering its original and noble vocation.

The Blood Libel updated

One of the more disturbing recent instances of anti-Semitism of the Left is a Swedish newspaper article accusing Israeli soldiers of 'harvesting' organs from Palestinians. This is not from an obscure neo-Nazi rag: it's Sweden's top-circulation paper, Social Democratic in its politics and 50.1% owned by the country's trade union confederation. Details are at Engage, and if you want to read the article the Google translator doesn't mangle it excessively. Harry's Place also has some worthwhile thoughts.


You'll be convinced if you're disposed to take seriously every piece of paranoid hearsay circulating in the Occupied Territories and to believe the worst about Jews - oops, I mean Zionists, of course. If, that is, you're a not untypical member of the Guardian-reading, Fairtrade coffee-drinking classes for whom Sweden is the closest thing to Nirvana.


Challenged to provide hard evidence, the writer has backed off. But the paper's editor seems to feel no urge to publish a retraction. On the contrary. Following high-level protests from Israel, he's chosen instead to play the freedom of speech card. And since he is not an anti-Semite, there is no need even to discuss the charge that he has published something anti-Semitic. It's not anti-Semitic, you see, to feel that Israel doesn't and shouldn't have a good name to lose. So all those Fairtrade coffee-drinkers are in the clear.


That may sound terribly bitter. But based on my own experience of Fairtrade coffee-drinkers (of whom, by the way, I am one) at prayer, I don't think it's overstating the case. I'm forcibly reminded of what I wrote here about the resurrection of another mediaeval prejudice. The following, directed against an activist of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, could just as well be applied to Donald Boström and the editor of Aftonbladet:

'I've mapped out a No Man's Land bounded on the one side by a world in which real dead chickens are fished out of a real village well, and extremism and hatred provoke real people on both sides of a bitter conflict into committing real evil deeds, but bounded on the other side by the ravings of pure racist paranoia. In this wilderness our Accompanier and many others like him seem to have no fence to stop them from drifting towards the wrong side, and they show all too little awareness of the need to build one.'

Mumbai: the blame game

Have I mentioned Caroline Lucas MEP, or was that one of the ones that I didn't quite finish? As I have extensive Christmas shopping commitments today, I'll allow Howard Jacobson to do it for me. Let's face it, nobody, least of all me, does it like Howard.

We're still very much in the same territory as Grumpy's post on Astrid Proll (not that Dr Lucas has ever been a terrorist herself, I hasten to add). A Green Party ought to be a very good thing indeed. This one won't be getting my vote as long as we carry on hearing this kind of thing from its leader.

The romance of the murderer

'I hate the fact that we are all under pressure to repent. I have long dissociated myself from the RAF, as early as when when I was in England. However, we are stigmatised for our lives. For many people it is just black or white - there is nothing in between. Those who died in Stammheim were people who committed inhuman acts not because they were criminals, evil or monstrous, but because they could not endure the unfairness and oppression of this world.'

You kill because you are fascists, we kill because we care. The definitive voice of romantic leftism: Astrid Proll, 61, still doesn't get it.

The RAF aka Baader-Meinhof made this unfair and oppressive world a little more unfair and oppressive. That's all. There's still time for Ms Proll to read Albert Camus' The Rebel.

Fighting Holocaust denial with Holocaust denial

Bizarre as it sounds, I fear that's something we're going to see more of. Because I don't believe the significant omission in this flyer from a branch of the SWP results simply from the random blundering of a bunch of ignoramuses. It fits just a little too neatly into recent trends.

While Holocaust denial is too useful a stick for beating the BNP with to be discarded entirely, the comrades would evidently prefer not to go so far in their Holocaust affirmation as to identify the group which contributed the overwhelming majority of its victims. For Jewish victimhood is out of fashion; the comrades have read their Finkelstein - or at least heard his claims at third hand - and know that Jews use their victimhood to manipulate, exploit and oppress. And in any case there are alliances to be forged with those for whom the thought of Jewish victimhood is anathema.

Talking of which, it's clear that we won't be seeing any of the comrades waving 'we are all Georgians' placards. With the bigots in Lebanon and Iran applauding the bullying of that tiny nation by the heirs to the Tsars it wouldn't do for the comrades to find themselves on the opposing side. So they're washing their hands of the whole business and hiding behind a 'clash of imperialisms' neutrality which, like most neutralities, really means tacitly siding with the winners (I can't bring myself to link to Socialist W**ker, so google it if you feel the need).

Infantile leftism is a rite of passage which many will embark on this autumn, just as a very naive Cyrus did when he went along to Freshers Fair and got signed up by a Labour Club which turned out to be a Militant front. But was it ever such a dismal, hopeless business as it is now?

Good in parts

Some highs and lows from the curate's egg that is Harry's Place. This is the kind of thing I read it for: an erstwhile leftist group from El Salvador provides a textbook instance of the meeting of the political extremes:-

'La Voz editors Salvador Duarte and Marta Consuelo Hernández included lengthy quotes from a notorious and long-discredited anti-Semitic tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to buttress their arguments. They proclaimed the legitimacy of Hitler’s National Socialism. They echoed Nazi lies that the Russian Revolution was financed by Jews for Jews and denounced Leon Trotsky, a leader of that revolution and founder of our political current, for his Jewish heritage.'

The kind of thing I can do without is HP's attempts to prove its leftist credentials by smearing for Barack. Naturally Sarah Palin is an irresistible target, and naturally it's Brett who leads the charge against her faith. Her Pentecostalist pastor talks about spiritual warfare, and that makes him 'the flip-side to Islamism' . So that'll be 'flip-side' as in the side that doesn't go around murdering randomly selected civilians but apart from that small detail is just the same. Typical Brett.

Gene manages to do even better, though:-

'It appears that Palin did not officially support Buchanan’s 2000 campaign for president, although as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she did wear a Buchanan button when Buchanan visited the town. She wrote in a letter to the editor of an Anchorage newspaper: “As mayor, I will welcome all the candidates in Wasilla.” (I can’t help wondering if this would have applied to David Duke if he had run for president and visited the town. After all Buchanan’s and Duke’s views on a number of issues– immigration, race, “Jewish power” and Israel– are not a million miles apart.)'

Palin the Osama lookalike meets Palin the David Duke groupie, thanks to the magic of the 'what she's actually done isn't quite awful enough, so let's invent something worse and suggest she could have done it' technique.

OK, there won't be many people on either side playing fair in this campaign. But you could always try setting a precedent, guys...

PS on Palin: this is substantially a fair cop. But then so too is this.

You can't criticize...

Lots of important stuff at Harry's Place and Engage on goings-on in the academics' 'trade union' UCU. Also here.

Telling, isn't it, that the 'you can't criticize Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism' brigade turn out to to be the ones who react to criticism by trying to gag the critics?

I've not infrequently had wistful thoughts about an academic career, but I'm very glad I'm not one of those faced with the decision whether to stay and fight in this increasingly vile snakepit or turn their backs on it. Good luck to all the fighters for left-wing decency, whether they're carrying on the struggle inside or outside.

Baroness Tonge and Hamas: from understanding to praise

The list of speakers at IslamExpo last month reads like this blog's Most Wanted list. Comrades Steele and Milne of al-Grauniad were there, arm in arm with Gorgeous George, as was their colleague Maddy of the Sorrows. Tariq Ramadan, Rowan Williams' favourite Muslim intellectual, was there, and, talking of the Archbishop, Sarah Joseph was there. Ilan Pappé was there, assuredly with the blessing of his fans in the Deutsche Volksunion.

Sorry if I'm doing them an injustice, but I can't picture any of these characters as innocents abroad who, expecting to encounter 'Europe’s largest celebration of Islamic culture, tradition, innovation and art', were horrified to discover they had stumbled into a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood rally. If I discover that any of them used it as a platform to denounce Hamas as an anti-Semitic terrorist organization, he/she will get a fulsome apology from me. But I'm not expecting to have to take the trouble.

I certainly won't in the case of the speaker who said this:-

“I would like to say a thank you to the three speakers before me…I hope you (audience) realise how much guts it takes to speak like they have…they are very brave and deserve a tribute from all of us.”

The immediately preceeding speaker was Azzam Tamimi, Hamas's Special Envoy and as such, unsurprisingly, an open supporter of suicide bombers. The tribute came from former Christian Aid trustee Baroness Tonge. Stephen Pollard, from whose blog the quote comes, comments:-

'Let there be no doubt now about what Baroness Tonge believes. She no longer even bothers hiding behind the ambiguity of ‘understanding’ why people become suicide bombers. As her remarks at IslamExpo show, she now thinks that those who explicitly praise and honour suicide bombers “are very brave and deserve a tribute from all of us.”'

David T of Harry's Place says simply 'He's right, isn't he?' He is indeed.

More about the Baroness to come.

The meeting of the extremes

I've just seen a poster advertising the Socialist Workers Party's annual jamboree. Guess who one of the star turns is. Yes, him again, the German neo-Nazis' blue-eyed boy. It's trite but so true: if you travel far enough towards one political extreme you'll eventually meet up with the opposite one. And it underscores my point about the strange company some people keep in the name of Christianity.

The fun starts tomorrow, if you're interested. If you're very lucky you'll find that, as in past years, musical relief from the heavy theoretical stuff is being provided by the SWP's pet Holocaust denier.

Nobody told them

'If Hamas is not an antisemitic organization how does Seumas Milne explain the fact that on Thursday night Palestinian fighters thought it was a smart political move to walk into a Jewish Yeshiva in Jerusalem and kill eight Jews who were studying their religion?

'Perhaps nobody had told these Jew-killers that Hamas has commissioned a re-drafting of the Covenant?'

- asks David Hirsh.

It doesn't seem to be doing a great job of briefing its own spokesmen, either. But doubtless Comrade Seumas can explain everything.

The Muslim dead

'This is not the only manner in which [Ronan] Bennett gives himself away. He refers to the "Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan" and conscripts them for what he imagines is his side. How dare he? Has he even begun to tot up the number of Muslims murdered by the Taliban? Or the total slaughtered in Iraq since al-Qaida began its campaign to level the Shi'a mosques? Does he think that the forces of the Northern Alliance, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who fight on "our" side against barbarism, are somehow inauthentic Muslims because they prefer Bush and Blair to Mullah Omar or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Something in his tone makes me suspect that this may well be his problem, just as I might have preferred him to mention that it was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left "the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation".'

- C. Hitchens in cracking form in the Guardian. Read it all.

The Left that Doesn't Learn

Mitchell Cohen's article in Dissent magazine, 'Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn' has been noticed by a lot of the blogs I read, and deservedly so. It contains some leftist assumptions which I no longer share, but I guess that makes it all the more of a must-read for folk who do share them. Mick Hartley has the concluding money quote.

Join the dots

Neo-Nazis hobnobbing with Islamists who in turn have links with the far left: david t of Harry's Place joins the dots and comes up with a very unattractive picture.