The Midnight Train Going Anywhere

Nick Cohen uses his Observer column, not only to engage in his ritual denunciation of everyone who was right when he was wrong about Iraq, but also to damn Julian Assange, not the most attractive of characters, for daring to want to be "the centre of attention" (not a fault in newspaper columnists, obviously) despite having been born and raised neither in London nor in New York.

There will be those who say that that is a coded, though not a very coded, way of saying that only Jews are entitled to be heard on any subject. The allegation of anti-Semitism is worthless when it comes from the people who screamed it daily for years against anyone who questioned the war in Iraq, which is now hilariously being presented as having been opposed by the Israeli Government all along, as if we really will believe absolutely anything, even the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even a link between Iraq and 11th September 2001, and even that. But those who present this as Cohen's meaning will have missed the point.

It is in reality a coded, though not a very coded, way of saying that the only people entitled to be heard on any subject are those who have lived their entire lives in the tiny world of upper-middle-class sectarian Leftism that has followed, or which has simply been, the trend in academic Marxism away from economic concerns towards a ferocious support of unbridled capitalism precisely because it entrenches unbridled social liberalism and is irreconcilably secular in general and anti-Christian in particular.

Many of them, including Cohen, and even more so David Aaronovitch, once looked to the Soviet Union, seen as the embodiment of their aspirations, to spread their revolution throughout the world by means of limitless armed force and with a total disregard for innocent life. No less surely, all of them, though few as outspokenly as Cohen, now look to the United States, seen as the embodiment of their aspirations, to spread their revolution throughout the world by means of limitless armed force and with a total disregard for innocent life.

Cohen thinks that that whole way of thinking is incomprehensible to anyone who has ever stepped outside his own metropolitan, stinking rich, sectarian Leftist and, yes, largely Jewish (though very aggressively atheistic) milieu. He is right. It is.