Having been flown to Israel at the expense of Donald Trump's biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson, Jonathan Pollard has been given a hero's welcome by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Although Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had never wanted Pollard to be released at all, the neoconservative silence is deafening, and it contrasts starkly with the bellyaching from that corner about much of the coverage of the death of George Blake, who, unlike the Cambridge Apostles, was just a basically foreign mercenary who got a better offer.
The lionisation of Sergei Skripal also sits ill. Real traitors, such as Pollard and Skripal, both of whom did it for the money, are somehow all right. Yet a man who was objectionable precisely because he had had nothing to betray, and who had been recruited on that clear understanding, was somehow the embodiment of evil merely for having done what such men do.
As for why Stalinist and Nazi sympathies and sympathisers are treated so differently, there is nothing complicated or mystifying about that. It is about the Second World War. And you are the ones who keep up the cult of Churchill. The wonder is that your cult of Thatcher has not translated into treating Maoists more sympathetically again, since the Peking Plotter was always exceedingly partial to them in what had become, by her time, the three-cornered Cold War. Give that one a few more years, I reckon.
The pictures of Netanyahu and Pollard explain the role of Israel in American and, especially, British politics these days. Supporting Israel means opposing the dark-skinned Other abroad, and thus also at home. The motivation is fear. Just as there will be a Spanish-speaking majority in all 50 of the United States by the end of this century, so, if next year's British census went ahead, then it would confirm what everyone already knew, that every ward east of the Irish Sea now contained at least some people whose political roots were at least partly in the liberation struggle of the Global South, and that those residents tended to be younger.
Always the world in one city, for many decades London has been the capital of that struggle. For five years, a major political party was led by a man who was steeped in it, and who greatly increased that party's membership not least by bringing in people whose principal political identity was as anti-racists and anti-imperialists. Jeremy Corbyn did little or nothing to help himself against the racist and imperialist backlash, but BAME voters remain fiercely loyal to him even now, and he remains a political megastar on the Three Continents, among whose poor and huddled masses he probably has more influence than any other single individual, if only he would use it.
The Labour Party, meanwhile, has reverted to type. It was always going to do so. By far the biggest rebellion of the Corbyn years was the mass abstention on a motion calling for an end to British support for the Saudi war in Yemen until there had been an independent investigation into civilian casualties. And who can forget Labour MPs' reaction to Hilary Benn's speech on Syria, wildly cheering and applauding a war? Ed Miliband's imposition of a three-line whip had kept Britain out of Syria, but Corbyn had been too weak to do the same.
And now, Labour is led by a man who is open to white replacement theory and to a British version of the Israeli Nation-State Law, attempts at drafting which would be a satirist's dream come true until it all became horribly real. It was Corbyn who subjected Labour to the IHRA Definition, but it is Keir Starmer who has granted to the questionable representatives of no more than 40 per cent of Britain's infinitesimal Jewish population the right to sit in judgement on allegations of anti-Semitism, empowering them to expel people from a party of which they themselves were not members or even supporters.
If Jews are a "race", then where is the independent panel of black people to judge allegations of the anti-black racism that runs rampant among the Labour Party's staff? Judaism is a religion to which anyone may convert, so where is the independent panel of Muslims to judge allegations of anti-Muslim bigotry in a party whose only hijabi MP has been permitted not to give her address in court for fear of physical attack by members of her own party and supporters of its Leader?
Where is the independent panel of Christians to judge allegations of discrimination against those who are often very left-wing economically and even more commonly very anti-war, and whose Christianity leads them to dissent from the extreme social liberalism that Starmer and his supporters are glad to see entrenched economically as neoliberalism and then imposed on the world by force of arms?
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, which into the present century included at every level the full range of views on Israel and Palestine, has seized the opportunity to shore up what it thinks is its own new base by requiring fealty to a State that was founded (in point of fact, by anti-British terrorists) on the premise that one group of white people, having been wronged by other white people, was entitled to compensation in the form of any territory that it happened to choose in the nonwhite world, and to hell with the nonwhite people who were already living there.
As for the Liberal Democrats, they welcomed with open arms the MPs who had left the Labour Party after the adoption of the IHRA Definition because it was still not racist and imperialist enough for them. Clearly, the Lib Dems were. They then imposed Luciana Berger as the parliamentary candidate for Finchley and Golders Green in an act of race-hustling that was as shameless as it was probably illegal and mercifully unsuccessful. The people now running the Labour Party fall over themselves to say how much they want this person back.
Loose Luciana, the well-munched Berger, has had some things to say about me in her time. So I would welcome her as the Lib Dem candidate for North West Durham. Just as I would welcome whoever was the Labour candidate, campaigning for Starmer to become Prime Minister in order to counteract white genocide by enacting his Nation-State Law. In any event, I am the Independent parliamentary candidate for North West Durham. What are you doing?