This week’s anti-Israeli polemic by the widely celebrated British commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is so bizarre that I am not even sure that that headline is quite correct. But as I endlessly repeat, if you subscribe to an agenda which is not only counter-factual but outright irrational as well there can be no surprise if, having said things which are simply nutty, you leave yourself open to misinterpretation. What was that line from Orwell about insincerity as the great enemy of clear writing?

So try this from her piece on Yom Kippur (coincidence?), on Monday, ending an impassioned article about how America must stop grovelling to “fanatic and aggressive” Israel, how there are positive signs in global nuclear disarmament, but how even Iranian oppositionists would rush to their nation’s defence if the evil Israelis attacked.

After some truly weird remarks about Iran’s leaders trying to prove they had “really big willies” by test firing missiles, and the hippie-day rejoinder: “Listen people, we need to talk about Israel. And soon. Like now,” she concluded with the following:

“The Israeli human rights activist Gideon Spiro bravely asks that his country be subject to the same rules as Iran and all others in the Middle East: “Rein in Israel, compel it to accept a regime of nuclear disarmament and oblige it to open all nuclear, biological and chemical facilities and missile sites to international inspection.” The US has leverage because it maintains and funds Israel. If Obama shies away from this, there can be no moral justification to go for Iran or North Korea or any other rogue state. And the leader whose election and dreams gave hope to millions thereby hastens the end of the world.”

Meaning?

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What happens when multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties clash with a full and rounded rendition of the Nazi past? If recent events in Berlin (of all places) are anything to go by the answer may be as follows: important truths will be denied so that those multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties may be preserved.

In the most important commentary on the subject for quite some time, Daniel Schwammenthal of the Wall Street Journal Europe relates a story about such events which everyone should read and internalise. It is not only shocking in itself, it holds up an image of one of Europe’s possible futures.

Schwammenthal’s piece pegs off an attempt by a German journalist, Karl Rössel, to stage an exhibition at a state funded multi-cultural centre in an Arab and Turkish dominated area of Berlin. The exhibition was entitled “The Third World in the Second World War” and included a small section on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini — the Palestinian leader and national hero who was an admirer of Hitler, a prolific propagandist for the Nazi cause and an active recruiter for the SS in wartime Yugoslavia where he participated in genocide.

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Today’s revelations that Iran has secretly built a second uranium enrichment plant have raised the stakes considerably in the West’s efforts to prevent the Islamist regime from going nuclear. President Obama said of the news that it was a “direct challenge” to Iran’s non-proliferation obligations.

But let us put all this in clearer perspective. We now have definitive proof that Iran has been engaged in a policy of outright deception both with Western powers and with the United Nations. Their dishonesty can only mean one thing: Iran, as its sharpest critics have always said, is running a nuclear weapons programme. There would be no need for deception if its ambitions were purely civilian.

Calls are now coming in from Europe and the United States for tougher measures. Obama and other western leaders are now giving Iran until December to comply or face a new round of sanctions. This is all very well. But it does not go far enough. Either Obama is serious about stopping Iran from going nuclear or he is not.

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A new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented widespread and growing anti-Semitism across mainstream society in Spain. The report, Polluting the Public Square: Anti-Semitic Discourse in Spain, (see link below), reveals a combination of traditional Judeophobic beliefs in the general population alongside extreme anti-Zionist modes of expression in the media.

Polling by the ADL this year showed 74 percent of Spaniards agreeing with the proposition that Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 56 percent saying they have too much power in the business world, 64 percent saying Diaspora Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country and 42 percent saying Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.

Barely had the report been released when it was announced by Spain’s Housing Ministry that it had imposed a boycott on Israel’s Ariel University forbidding it from taking part in a biannual architectural and environmental competition to design solar powered housing. The boycott was imposed due to Ariel’s location on the West Bank and was justified with reference to European Union guidelines.

Spain, it should be remembered, still occupies parts of Morocco where, despite long standing protests from the Moroccan government, the Spanish occupied cities of Ceuta and Melilla remain under Madrid’s sovereignty. However, as I have said many times, an appeal to reason and logic may miss the point when engaging with anti-Zionist bigotry.

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The obscene rantings of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad last week in which he described the Holocaust as “a false pretext to create Israel” have drawn fire from across the world. Russia joined a list of countries, including Britain and the United States, over the weekend in issuing a strongly worded statement of outrage.

This is all well and good. Indeed, it is the least we should expect. But Holocaust denial merely forms part of a wider pattern of related anti-Semitic discourse in which the crimes of the Nazis are either denied or, more commonly, are inverted so as to function as a rhetorical weapon of deligitimisation against Israel. And it is not just a problem in Iran and the wider Muslim world.

It is also a problem in Europe where smearing the Jewish state by alleging or inferring that its behaviour is analogous to Nazi Germany has taken root inside mainstream political and cultural discourse. Instances of this sort of behaviour in the European mainstream have been written about in previous entries on this website and I have included an entire section on it in my recently published book — A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel.

But since it is not obvious that denying the Holocaust in order to denigrate Israel is morally worse than alleging that Israel is analogous to the Nazi regime which perpetrated the Holocaust an important question arises:

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