The MCB propaganda campaign on Islamophobia, funded by Ken Livingstone’s electorate, sees negative stories about Muslim countries as Islamophobic. As Nick Cohen notes:

as we skim read we learned that it was giving Islam “negative associations” to report that the Iranian regime was holding a conference of Holocaust deniers. Muslim democrats in Iran opposed it. Livingstone and his “leading academics” could not. Meanwhile, Journalists – including me – conveyed “negative associations” when we wrote that Jack Straw was standing up for the rights of women when he criticised the full veil. Muslim feminists oppose the veil. Mr Livingstone and his “leading academics and experts” cannot.

The obvious logical extension to this is that news stories portraying Israel in a negative light are anti-semitic. So this, this, and this are anti-semitic. I have to admit this is a surprising position for the MCB to hold.

See Ian Kershaw do it here.

Yes. It is a continuing mistake to a) think that the Johnny Foreigners don’t really mean what they say and b) to think that they are all reasonable chaps after all (unless they are Jewish).  It is wishful thinking and a convenient rationale for doing nothing always.  Conor Foley and Sunny Hundal are classics of the genre of course.

Kershaw is a fine historian too.

A Google Alert in my mailbox reveals that fascist blogger and occasional Grauniad contributor Neil Clark has responded to recent critics. See the comments following that post and not the main text itself, from which all references to the odious creature have been expunged. I will not link directly to Clark’s website, in the same way I wouldn’t link to the BNP site.

The apologist for Serbian war criminals and election candidate for the nationalist-socialist “British People’s Alliance” refers to me as a “nerdy warmongering cyberbully”, and those who agree with my criticism of Clark over at Liberal Conspiracy as my “blackshirted chums”. How ironic. Clark has never been known for the eloquence of his prose, and as for the “nerdy” tag, I assume this is due to me being a science journalist by trade. How original.

Neil Clark: not nice, and very, very dim.

Been waiting for this: a Berlin based artist produces an alternative to the infamous Kufiya, the Palestinian scarf. His version, available in blue and black, shows hammer and sickle, various drugs, butt-plugs, condoms, viagras, and Stars of David.

Kufiya Feigale @ antipali.com