Casual abuse

Anyone who has spent any time reading the Comment is free site at the Guardian will be unsurprised that the main reaction to the arrest of Lord Levy has been one of Jewish conspiracies and Zionist plots. Every article referring, even tangentially, to Israel at the site leads inexorably to two hundred comments about ow the evil Jews rule the world.

David Hirsh attempts to confront this unpleasant attitude here, listing a number of points he's making. One of them made me double take:

(3) The comments box is a Guardian space, not a BNP space or a Jihadi Islamist space or a Daily Telegraph space.

So those three entities are synonymous? Or equivalent? It is apparent to anyone with even half a brain that currently the more the political viewpoint moves to the left, the greater the risk of anti-semitism. There are no Hizb-ut-Tahir columnists writing for the Telegraph, which of course employed Barbara Amiel and until recently was in a stable of papers with the Jerusalem Post. Hirsh is being offensive both in his intent and in his stupidity. Incidentally, the first three comments to an other Comment... piece on how Britain had military plans for war with Israel in the 1950s all lament the fact that such a war never took place, and call for it to happen now. Anti-semitism? Not at the Guardian surely.