Earlier this afternoon, I wanted to illustrate that some of the rhetoric expressed by the hard left – especially on the issue of Israel – is indistinguishable from the sentiments of far-right loonies. For this, I decided to establish a game whereby I presented excerpts from a recent article written by Nick Griffin, and asked people on Facebook and Twitter to guess who wrote the excerpts. The results were fascinating: they confirmed my thesis that anti-Zionist rhetoric is spiralling so out of control, the written words of a fascist can be mistaken for the written words of someone “left wing”.
These were the excerpts I presented.
Example 1:
This most influential of all neo-con lobbies proposed using war and regime change to secure American world hegemony for another 100 years by destroying potential rivals including Russia and China and by “remaking the Middle East” by breaking up every nation in the region into warring sectarian fiefdoms so that no-one could threaten US oil supplies or threaten Israel.
This doesn’t look far off from the kind of article that’d be written by CJ Werleman – a journalist prodigiously talented at plagiarism, and sub-par at virtually everything else.
Example 2:
Quilliam’s funding is shrouded in mystery, although £1.2 Million of Home Office money undoubtedly helps to pay its directors’ £85,000 per annum salaries. The fact that arch-neo-con Michael Gove has from the very start been on Quilliam’s Advisory Board should, howver, set alarm bells ringing, and the more one digs, the worse it gets….
(The emphasis on neocons is interesting because neocons and Zionists are seen together as the nexus of western power).
The passage looks strikingly similar to an article Nafeez Ahmed would produce. It has the dark references to money, the conspiratorial tone, and the cliche-addled phraseology. It just needs perhaps more personal invective directed at Maajid Nawaz.
Example 3:
Quite apart from Gove, Quilliam’s Board includes key personnel who have open sympathies and links with the blatantly neo-con Henry Jackson Society, which has several direct links to none other than Frank Gaffney and which is funded by precisely the same clique of neo-con/Zionist Likudnik millionaires as also back Pam Geller, Robert Spencer and all the other hardcore anti-Muslim propagandists who so busily promote both Tommy Robinson and the Mohammad cartoons.
This looks like the kind of passage that’d be written by Tom Mills, David Miller and Narzanin Massoumi (perhaps Hilary Aked as well) – researchers associated with Bath university. When they’re not writing longwinded apologias for Islamist groups like CAGE, they write longwinded articles decrying the nefarious influence of the Zionist lobby in British foreign and domestic policy.
And finally:
the Likud-fascist section of the Zionist movement, which sees hysteria about Islam as the perfect weapon to condition Western public opinion to accept the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Arabs from ‘Greater Israel’ from the Nile to the Euphrates, and to herd Western nations into bombing – or accepting the Israeli bombing of – Iran.
The linkage between Israeli political parties and fascism is very Max Blumenthal/Rania Khalek. Blumemthal is actually endorsed by former head of the klu klax klan, David Duke. But he’s still seen as a progressive, passionately railing against the twin evils of Zionism and US foreign policy – both of which apparently subordinate Muslims into oppression and exploitation.
Criticism of Israeli policies doesn’t entail anti-semitism. But when your criticism is coupled with denying her right to exist, and then infused with conspiracy theories redolent of classical anti-semitism, don’t be surprised when your views converge with far-right white nationalists.
