Mick Hartley

Giles Fraser at UnHerd:

When I grew up, being anti-fascist used to be all about confronting angry, skinhead racists — thugs who would beat up black and brown people on the streets and throw disgusting insults around. Even when they tried to assume a sort of respectability to win elections — an unconvincing camouflage of cheap shirt and tie — you could still smell the fascism on them. But they haven’t won an election in this country for years. We are not fooled. The BNP collapsed in 2010. Good riddance.

Such is the power of the cartoon fascist though, that he invites complacency; he allows “good people” to look in the mirror and believe they aren’t antisemitic. They chortle away at that Mitchell and Webb sketch of two SS officers asking “Are we the baddies?” thinking it refers to someone else.

These days, the fight against fascism has become a lot more complicated, more nuanced. And, because of this, more dangerous again. The war against Hamas has given people an alibi to say the most racist of things, and yet to retain all innocence in their own minds. And the more morally certain people are that they are right, the easier it is for them to miss their own complicity. During the month following the Hamas attack, the Community Security Trust reported the highest number of antisemitic incidents since they were formed in 1984 — a 531% increase from the same month last year. And I bet my bottom dollar that most of these incidents are not being conducted by, or even inspired by, Stella-fuelled cartoon fascists….

The antisemitism of the hard Right and the hard Left is easily spotted and readily damned. But it is the genteel, middle-class, soft-Left, hand-wringing antisemitism — the kind that wouldn’t dream of saying anything crass or extreme — that has been legitimised, has become high-status opinion even, on the streets of London. Do not think that your feel-good liberalism or soft leftism is any sort of prophylactic against your antisemitism. It isn’t.