The good news: Channel Four TV next Monday, 9 July, at 8pm, will screen a programme about the growing threat of anti-semitism in Britain. The bad news: it will be presented by the grotesque right-wing newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn.
When genocide was raging in Rwanda in 1994, Littlejohn wrote: "Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them." Nick Griffin of the BNP calls Littlejohn his favourite columnist.
Susan Sontag famously remarked in 1982: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism [she meant, Stalinism]? The answer, I think, should give us pause."
She was right, of course. But the fact that information about the horrors of Stalinism was mostly carried by the publications of the right - by the publications of the Trotskyist left, too, of course, but they were much less well-resourced - wove that information into a right-wing, Cold War story had its consequences. Decent-minded people, rightly repelled by the wrap-around story, were pushed towards ignoring, discounting, or minimising the information.
The left needs to speak out against anti-semitism - including anti-semitism within the left, in its "absolute anti-Zionist", "smash-Israel", "Zionist=racist=Nazi", "boycott Zionists", "we are all Hezbollah" forms - in order to stop the right seizing this issue, too.
Martin Thomas
