Mick Hartley

Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator:

I see even national treasures aren’t safe from the petulant, punitive tantrums of the irritant left. Witness the travails of Maureen Lipman. Two actors you’ve never heard of have flounced out of a stage production with Dame Maureen, citing her views as the cause of their ideological pant-wetting. And what are her criminal beliefs? She supports the existence of a Jewish state.

Dame Maureen will be appearing in Right Before I Go at the Soho Theatre in London in a few days’ time. It’s a play that draws on real suicide notes left by public figures and everyday people. Its aim is to illuminate suicide’s horrors. No sooner had Lipman’s involvement been announced than the keffiyeh clowns of the thespian left were spluttering into their seven-quid matcha teas.

The first to sashay away in a flourish of cheap outrage was Gerard McCarthy. He was in Hollyoaks once apparently. He said he could not in good faith appear alongside Ms Lipman given the views she has “repeatedly expressed regarding Israel and Palestine”. Oh Lord, grant me the confidence of a bit-part actor getting on his high horse over a dame who’s been entertaining the nation for six decades.

The next to exit in a juvenile huff was Iz Hesketh. No, me neither. With Lipman on board, I feel this production no longer “aligns with my own personal values and beliefs”, said Hesketh. Nothing will “ever change” if “we don’t stand by our morals when it matters”, Hesketh continued, as if this were a modern-day march on Selma rather than the tinny bleating of D-list luvvies so vain they won’t even breathe the same air as those they disagree with.

It’s the narcissism of the Lipman spurners that is most alarming. Imagine if we all scarpered from situations that did not perfectly align with our “personal values and beliefs”. Workplaces would collapse. Social life would come to a standstill….

Underneath the self-righteous blather, it’s fairly clear that this is basic grade A antisemitism under the familiar cover of anti-Zionism. They don’t want to appear in the same play as a Jew – or at least a Jew, like Maureen Lipman, who’s proud to be Jewish. This is where we are – the world of the new “progressives”.

You want to see racism? Actual racism? Then look at the broader campaign against Dame Maureen. When she was performing in the brilliant play Allegra in Aberdeen earlier this year, a “Palestine solidarity” group put out a leaflet depicting her with devil’s horns. The Jew as demon? How medieval. Outside almost every theatre she’s performed in this past year, there’s been a whiffy rabble of keffiyeh-smothered Israelophobes barking about “genocide”.

Let’s speak plainly. An 80-year-old Jewish woman is being demonised and harassed simply for believing in Jewish self-determination in the Jews’ ancestral homeland of Israel. It’s obscene. Where are her fellow actors? Where’s Equity? Where’s the Labour party, which Lipman supported for decades before the Corbynites took over? Their silence over this lo-fi persecution of a Jewish dame is as shameful as the persecution itself.