Weekend supplement.

That’s why Jeremy Corbyn is such a strong leader!

 Oh Len, on the Marr show, saying such weird things. 

I know!  Someone must have dared him to try and get away with playing ‘opposites’ all the way through the Marr show. 

Like the time when Penny Mordant took on the challenge of seamlessly introducing some outlandish word into her speech.

Wait till tomorrow, when he’ll admit he was playing ‘opposites’ and the joke was on the Beeb.

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During a bout of insomnia, I turned on the radio - as you do - it’s a very effective soporific for we inso-maniacs. What I heard was something called A History of Hate 

Not wanting to appear like an apologist for the Serbs, or even worse, like an inverted version of a Nazi enthusiast who insists that “the Jews brought it on themselves” -  heaven forfend  - but I had the distinct impression that this programme was coming at me through a prism of rose-coloured, Islam-washing specs.  The moral of the story was that hatred of Muslims led to the Srebrenica massacre.

I don’t know as much about the Bosnian war as I ought, and I have no business moralising about it. Perhaps it was indeed a straightforward matter of ’good versus evil’ but the programme presented it as virtue in the form of tolerance, diversity and religious freedom versus evil in the shape of Hitler-style, racial purity.  If it was a lecture, the message was a warning not to mess with far-right/alt/right anti-Islam bigotry.  

Admittedly I may have got it all wrong, but in my half-awake state it seemed to me that a good deal of the actual ‘hate’ came from the programme itself, and it was aimed at ‘the far right’, a term that I took to mean ‘critic of Islam’. What’s more, I felt that as a critic of Islam, the hate was being directed at me and the message they were sending was: "you’re a hater and ‘look what hate leads to’ "The Srebrenica massacre. 

This sleep-time paranoia wasn’t ameliorated when the next item included someone eulogising about hijabs and gaily coloured headscarves.

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See Rod Liddle? What is he like?

I’m not sure what the reproduction rules’n’regs are on stealing huge chunks of content from paywalled articles but I’ve only stolen the section about the Labour party. If you’ve got the  Sunday Times or have online access to it you’ll have read it by now, but if not it’s hidden over t’fold. 

But Rod, I haven’t forgotten - it’s not so long ago that you were still rooting for Labour (long, long, long after things went bad.)

Rod Liddle, Sunday Times 30th June 2019

I have been feeling a little bit of sympathy for the Labour MP Chris Williamson. I am aware that one should not feel sympathy for anti-semites, but compassion springs out of me, at all times, like a fountain of brilliant light and so I cannot quite help it. 

Yes, Williamson has retweeted or approved anti-semitic remarks on social media. Yes, he looks, facially — to me at least — like a man called Reinhardt who has just been discovered hiding out in Argentina and might, if you shouted “Heil Hitler”, have great difficulty controlling the actions of his right arm, even after all these years. My suspicion, though, is that the current furore in which Williamson is embroiled is not about anti-semitism at all. 

It is not motivated by a revulsion for the fact that the Labour Party nowadays finds Jew-hating an agreeable and potentially vote-winning sideline and is riddled with it, from top to bottom. It is instead a conscience-salving exercise on the part of those within Labour who know all that full well, but are disinclined to get the hell out of the stinking party because they quite like their jobs. 

In a slapstick parody of due process, Williamson was suspended for saying that Labour had done too much apologising over this whole anti-semitism business; then readmitted by a gerrymandered disciplinary board on which sat that human oil slick, Keith Vaz MP; and then de-readmitted when Keithy, in a very Vaz-like manner, decided the whole thing had been a bit dodgy and should be held again. 

Vaz’s about-turn came after more than 120 Labour MPs and functionaries had signed a statement deploring the readmittance and calling for Jeremy Corbyn to show “leadership” by kicking the bloke out. This is, on the face of it, one of the most bizarre and confected campaigns one could ever come across. 

That Labour has done too much apologising about anti-semitism is an article of faith for the Labour leadership, a vast array of Labour MPs and councillors and probably most, if not all, of the Momentum hordes who helped bring Magic Grandpa to power. It is, effectively, what the Labour Party thinks. “It’s a Tory smear,” they will tell you and maybe whisper, the whiff of bratwurst on their breaths, that big business and the Jews are also behind it. 

That Williamson is anti-semitic I have no doubt. But compared with Jeremy Corbyn he is an exemplar of anti-racist progressivism. The Labour leader has called the genocidal and anti-semitic terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends”. 

He has been photographed giving the salute of the virulently anti-semitic Muslim Brotherhood. He has laid a wreath on the grave of a Palestinian terrorist who murdered innocent Jewish athletes. He has approved of a grotesquely anti-semitic mural, suggested that British Jews don’t understand irony (for which he is being sued) and written a foreword to a deeply anti-semitic book, which he described as “brilliant”. 

There have been no real explanations for any of this stuff other than that Grandpa didn’t know what the hell he was doing: the tried and trusted “Hey, sheesh, I’m a moron, me!” defence, his only recourse. If it had been on only one occasion, that defence might well have washed, given what we know about Corbyn’s pygmy intellect. But time and time again? 

A few weeks ago an appalling woman called Lisa Forbes was elected Labour MP for Peterborough on the back of a sizeable Muslim vote. She had expressed her great approval of anti-semitic comments on a social media site. Theresa May had a “Zionist slave masters agenda”, apparently, while someone else wondered why Palestinians didn’t stab more Jews. Forbes did not just like this horrible thread. She wrote: “I have enjoyed reading this thread so much.” And there she is, in parliament, unsuspended and described by Grandpa as an “anti-racist”. 

So, you Labour MPs, why have a go at Williamson? He is the least of your worries. Your party members habitually espouse anti-semitism. This is partly because, in their benighted adolescent leftism, they sign up to the important tenets of it: Jews behind capitalism, Jews behind the evil press, Jews running everything. And it is partly because — as they have discovered, to their great satisfaction — in some parts of the country it is a pretty powerful vote-winner. 

And it was for suggesting precisely this, incidentally, that I was suspended from the party three years ago. A glad and happy day, that was. Like the Labour MPs who signed that statement, I was deluded for too long and should have got out of my own volition.