Countering Violent Extremism

Now calling himself Lord Walney like a preoperative trans-Tory who needs to prove that he can live in his new identity, the former John Woodcock MP was driven out of the Labour Party for being a sex pest, and you would have to be one hell of a sex pest to be driven out of the Labour Party for it.

Yet he has been put in charge of the Government's latest racket for "countering violent extremism". This time, it is not even pretending to be directed at the actual sources of the problem. That is just as well. Wooders, as he is probably known while he refines his Bertie Wooster accent, is up to his neck in all three of those sources.

As a hardline Blairite neoconservative, he is an enthusiast for the violently extreme practice of "regime change", and for the violently extreme methods of domestic repression that accompany it. Not unconnectedly, he is a dedicated spokesman and bag man both for the violently extreme regime in Saudi Arabia, which inspires, funds and directs one of the two terrorist threats on the streets of Britain, and for the violently extreme regime in Israel, which is, at the very least, the idol of the other such threat.

Wherever in the world there are white supremacist events, then there are always Israeli flags. Look out for them. They are never absent. Holocaust deniers speak to, over and under them as a matter of course. The same publication will routinely carry an ultra-Zionist article and a neo-Nazi article on the same or facing pages. And Israel and Saudi Arabia are now allied, so that Sunni Islamists and the Far Right are now allied the world over, including in Britain. Truly, an Axis of Evil.

A fourth violently extreme threat, already very much the experience of many communities with close ties to Britain, is also on the horizon. The violently extreme regime in India has close ties to Israel, to a Saudi Arabia that is as indifferent to Indian Muslims as it is to Palestinian Muslims, and to a neoconservatism, including a Blairism, that is as ignorant of Indian Christians as it is of Palestinian Christians. And of Dalits. And of Punjabi farmers.