Consider the following: A soccer star living in an Arab dictatorship doesn’t much care for black people. He therefore refuses a transfer to a Premier League club in England because it has two blacks on its staff. He publishes his reasons on his website but the affair is barely reported in the press and the football authorities are so far silent.

Now consider this: Demonstrators and activists in a Scandinavian country in Europe object to an international tennis match because the visiting players are black. The sports authorities in collusion with the government cave in to pressure and force the match to be played behind closed doors.

Finally, consider the following: At the 2008 Olympics a swimmer from an Islamist theocracy makes it clear that he will not compete against a black man. In order to avoid penalties he then says he has withdrawn from the competition due to illness. The International Olympic Committee accepts his explanation without demur.

Substitute “Israeli-Jew” for “black man”, and the above is a precise representation of recent events in international sport.

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This Monday, Britain’s Channel 4 TV aired a landmark documentary alleging that Jewish lobby groups have sunk their claws so deep into the British establishment that politicians have no choice but to toe their line, and that the media has been cowed into submission. It is easy to laugh, but we should not. The documentary has provoked a new wave of virulent anti-Semitism and threatens to silence Israel’s few supporters in Britain once and for all. I have an op-ed on the subject in tomorrow’s edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe which is now published on the paper’s website.

Click here to read it, and then please come back to my site to leave your own comments outlining what you think:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574543671980025770.html

The airing last night of a rambling and analytically threadbare documentary alleging a secretive Zionist conspiracy against the British political establishment has immediately had the predictable effect of bringing anti-Semites and assorted Israel-haters right out of the woodwork.

The documentary shown on Channel 4 — the same channel which on Christmas Day last year gave Iran’s Holocaust-denying president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a seven minute, uninterrupted propaganda slot — was preceded by a primer in the Guardian which I wrote about yesterday. It effectively argued that since there is no sane or rational case to be made for Israel, the rare occasions when British politicians offer words of praise for the Jewish state can only be explained by the presence of a vast and wealthy Zionist lobby which is paying them or pressuring them to toe their line.

The Channel 4 website is now awash with adulation for the documentary and its makers — Peter Oborne and James Jones. Since Channel 4 is leaving all of this up on its site for public consumption, it is clear that they see nothing wrong with what is being said. Here is a small selection of the comments, some of which were published before the programme went out:

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(This article has been updated with links to the full pamphlet explaining the show which airs Monday night. The distortions therein are quite breathtaking. The update also gives a link to Melanie Phillips’ take on the matter. For both, see the links at the end of the article)

You know the old line about the racist who prefaces a torrent of racially charged abuse with the words: “I’m not a racist, but…”? Something similar about conspiracy theories could be said about the makers of a landmark documentary due to be aired this evening on Britain’s Channel 4 Television alleging that a secretive group of Zionists (just “Zionists”, not Jews you understand) has got hold of Britain’s main political parties and is manipulating them to spew pro-Israeli propaganda.

Writing about their documentary in the Guardian (where else?), Peter Oborne, a columnist for the Daily Mail, and television journalist James Jones are, of course, anxious that they should not actually be labelled as conspiracy theorists and seek to pre-empt such charges thus: “It is important to say what we did not find,” they tell us nervously. “There is no conspiracy, and nothing resembling a conspiracy.”

Except that their entire piece makes it quite clear that a conspiracy is precisely what is being alleged.

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It is being reported out of the Russian city of Perm this weekend that three homeless men have been arrested for knifing a man to death, munching through as much of his body as they could stomach and selling the remainder to a public kiosk serving pies and kebabs.

Given the kind of campaign being waged in the Guardian to discredit the 20th anniversary of the end of communism, it would be no real surprise if the story turned up in the paper’s comment section as the peg for yet another op-ed mourning the passing of the old regimes.

For it has been a truly eye-popping couple of weeks for those who can bear the mental torture of trawling through that paper’s opinion pages.

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