Sorry, celebs, the ‘far right’ slur doesn’t work anymore

I see Kneecap have put their name to a new movement ‘against the far right’. The Guardianistas in balaclavas are hooking up with other smug celebs to call for an end to ‘narratives of division and racism’. Wait – this is the same Kneecap that said ‘Up Hamas’ after Hamas butchered more than a thousand Jews? The same Kneecap that posted a pic of themselves grinning like loons the day after that act of fascist mass murder? The same Kneecap whose oldest member – the twat in the tricolor tea cosy – published an image of himself reading the collected speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, a book that calls Jews the ‘descendants of apes and pigs’?

I know only a fool would expect moral consistency from crap rappers, or any other prattling showbiz person. But for these theatre kids larping as ‘hoods’ to hold forth on the horribleness of ‘division and racism’ really takes the biscuit. You can’t sing the praises of a virulently racist army of Jew-killers one day and then say ‘Oh no, racism’ the next. You can’t publicly smirk over a book that depicts Jews as subhuman and then lament the ‘divisions’ in our society. You can’t crack a wide smile hours after the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust and then expect to be cheered as an anti-racist. Not on my watch, anyway.

It’s called the Together Alliance. It’s the usual suspects from the NGO world and the preening celeb set. Friends of the Earth is in the mix. And CND (they’re still about?). There’s the TUC, Stand Up to Racism, the Stop the War Coalition. And there are politicians, comics and pop stars too, including loads of Labour MPs, a band called the Wombats and Lenny Henry. ‘The voices of division in our country are growing louder’, says their founding statement. So they plan to hold a ‘major demonstration’ in London next year. It promises to be the largest gathering of tossers since those glorious Remoaner meltdowns of 2016.

It’s almost touching that people like this still think they can lecture us about ‘division and racism’. Just as I’d never listen to a sermon on the evils of bigotry from anyone who said ‘Up the KKK’, so I think I’ll pass on Kneecap’s ‘anti-racist’ fingerwagging. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is in the alliance, too. That’s the movement that applied for a permit to march against Israel at 12.50pm on 7 October 2023, during Hamas’s pogrom. They couldn’t even wait until the dead Jews were cold. I’m not listening to poncy blather about ‘division’ from lowlifes who rubbed the salt of Israelophobia into the wound of anti-Semitism on the darkest day in the history of the Jewish State.

The Muslim Council of Britain is a signatory – a group whose deputy leader once used the words ‘beloved preacher’ about a scumbag imam who said the Middle East must be liberated from ‘the filth of the Jews’. Zack Polanski of the Greens has joined, too. Okay. So when are you going to do something about your deputy leader who called a rabbi an ‘animal’ for fighting with the IDF, and your members who likened the slaughter of Jews on 7 October to ‘the French resistance’? As for the Stop the War Coalition – one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the prospect of being berated about ‘division’ by Stalinist nutters who praised the Iraqi ‘resistance’ (ie, al-Qaeda).

They really don’t know, do they? They really are unaware of how catastrophically their moral authority collapsed after 7 October. This is the bottom line: if you praised the hard-right Islamists of Hamas, we don’t want to hear a word from you about the ‘far right’ in Britain. If you spent the past two years marching shoulder to shoulder with nutters calling for more jihad against the Jewish nation, you can shove your homilies about ‘division’ where the sun doesn’t shine. The jig is up. The grift is over. We don’t believe a word you say about racism.

You see the same thing in the US. Last week, NYC’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, reiterated his belief that Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’. This is the same Zohran Mamdani who refused to condemn the inciting cry of ‘Globalise the intifada’ and who rubs shoulders with Twitch loon Hasan Piker who called Orthodox Jews ‘inbred’, referred to a Jewish man as a ‘bloodthirsty pig dog’, and played down Hamas’s sexual crimes against Jewish women. If a mayor-elect were to hang around with someone who’d once called a black man a ‘monkey’, we would give his thoughts on racism a wide berth – I propose we do the same with Mr Mamdani.

The idea that these armies of luvvies and cranks have the right to lecture us about racism is too preposterous for words. We should be lecturing them. No one in my life has ever called a rabbi an animal or promoted books that refer to Jews as pigs or played down the rape of Jewish women by fascist men. How about we get those good people, those ‘normies’, to have a word with the Smart Set that has spouted so many iffy views these past two years?

The Together Alliance frets that a ‘far-right party [is] topping the polls’. They mean Reform UK. We can all see what’s going on here: a party that millions of working-class Brits intend to vote for is being demonised as fascistic on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. The Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers of America’s coastal elites did the same, branding Trump ‘the new Hitler’ and his millions of working-class voters as either idiots or racists. These people aren’t anti-fascist – they’re anti-masses. This is a revolt of rich poseurs and smug activists against ordinary people who have the temerity to think for themselves. It’s the cast-iron law of the 21st-century left – scratch an ‘anti-fascist’, find an anti-democrat.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.