The things they say

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously... American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.

Gilad Atzmon, jazz musician and defender of the 'rationality' of burning down synagogues, 'On Antisemitism', 20 December 2003

The only person who presents a real, honest and genuinely left wing alternative is Galloway and Respect. They’re the only party that is properly explicit about this criminal war.

Gilad Atzmon, on a political party he can identify with, Socialist Worker, 5 May 2005

UPDATE: I'm always pleased to have a politically eclectic readership, and welcome a new correspondent who is disgusted at the smearing of Respect that my entire site represents. I hadn't thought it necessary to spell out the point, and am conscious that doing so will will dilute any rhetorical impact, but I'm always happy to lay it on with a trowel where this organisation is concerned.

Gilad Atzmon is a boorish, vulgar, stupid bigot of worthless political opinions. But Atzmon's view of Respect is consequential in that Respect has a corresponding view of him. That is why I specifically referred to the source of the second quotation - the newspaper of the Socialist Workers' Party, for which the Respect 'Coalition' is a front organisation.

Regular readers will know of the mutual admiration of the SWP and Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon was an invited speaker at the party's Marxism 2004 event last summer, on the subject 'How can Palestine be free?' As helpful guidance for Atzmon's audience in advance of his speech, Socialist Worker commended his crude anti-Jew propaganda as "Gilad's fearless tirades against Zionism". Atzmon was, in fact, just the chap for Socialist Worker to turn to a few months later to provide not this time a fearless tirade, but instead an exhortatory encomium for the Respect campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow. Now, comrade, why would it do a thing like that?

No need to write back, for I am confident I know the answer already and search merely for the best historical parallel. My feeling is that the nearest thing to Respect is the fortunately short-lived British People's Party, founded in April 1939 (on which, see Richard Griffiths' 1998 invaluable study of pre-war British antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 55-8). The BPP executive came, nominally at least, from the Left. Its General Secretary, John Beckett, had been an Independent Labour MP, and its treasurer, Ben Greene, a stalwart of the Peace Pledge Union, had been Labour candidate in Gravesend. Its stated aims included 'the security of labour in its industrial organisation' and 'the abolition of class differences' - but it was obvious what its real campaign was about. In the Hythe by-election of July 1939, the BPP issued a pamphlet called Alien Money Power in Great Britain, which attacked the Tory candidate for his work for a City firm whose directors included several Jews. The party candidate, St. John Philby (father of Kim Philby), indignantly denied the charge that Hitler was insane:

No madman had ever restored one of the greatest races in the world to the position of one of the foremost nations in the world as it was at the present time.

The BPP's time had already passed, but its pro-fascist and antisemitic ideology is a more enduring feature of British electoral politics, as we have lately seen.