Mick Hartley

Rod Liddle in the Spectator

‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party.

Mr Griffin has, in the past, referred to the ‘Holohoax’ which he believes was fabricated by wartime propaganda and has been an ‘extremely profitable lie’. My friend had never heard of Nick Griffin. But how interesting that this is where the left is now getting some of its bullets from. Its anti-Jew bullets. Hitherto, directly quoting from Nazis, or neo-Nazis, was kind of verboten for them, except of course among the Palestinians themselves, who at least have the decency to make it absolutely clear that they wish the entire Jewish race to be wiped from the Earth and whose pre-eminent political movement, Hamas, has that goal written at the heart of its founding constitution.

Not any more. The Overton window on Jew-hating has shifted so far that even the most extremist comments from people who have pictures of Adolf pinned up in their basements are now considered… well, I suppose kosher isn’t the word – halal, maybe.

Very good. There could hardly be a clearer demonstration of the degree to which sections of the left have now completely lost the plot – because of an obsession with Palestine, and brains addled with “settler colonialism” and “from the river to the sea”, and other vacuous slogans which have taken the place of critical thought.

I had previously been of the generous – and naive – opinion that the white left hates Jews because it hates Israel. That through the inevitable contact with the people who call themselves Palestinian and their Muslim supporters, there was a gradual erosion of the boundaries between loathing Israel and, as so many Muslims do, loathing the people who live there. You end up nodding along when they say the Jews control the media and armaments and capital, and eventually you end up painting virulently anti-Semitic daubs in an art gallery in Margate and thinking how clever and right on you are and down with the Pallys.

But this was wrong, I think. It is the other way about. They hate Israel because they hate Jews. We all need somebody to hate and for the left, Jewish people have come to represent a plethora of things they already hated: capitalism, the West, military competence, industrial competence, education and a hostility to the religion which they come close to worshipping themselves, Islam. In a sense Israel is simply an embodiment of those already-present loathings.

It is true the Overton window had already moved quite sharply over the past ten years or so in tandem with the rapid growth of our Muslim population and its growing political weight. That is in there somewhere – but perhaps only to the extent that this growing section of our community gives licence to the real feelings the white left already had. A white left which can show you racism in a handful of dust – except where the Jews are concerned. Then, it simply doesn’t exist.

So when four ambulances are set on fire, it is easy to spot the anti-Semitic white lefties. They are the ones asking why the Jews have their own ambulances, or the ones suggesting it was a false flag attack by Mossad, or that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Gaza. These idiots are not only enemies of the Jews – they are enemies of the rest of us too.