There’s a wonderful scene (they’re all wonderful) in Blazing Saddles where the baddies are recruiting people to attack and destroy the town of Red Rock, with arson, rape and murder as initial requirements. I never said it was a politically correct movie, just a brilliant one. And so a line of candidates is shown ‘for interview’. There’s evil looking cowboys (its a cowboy film) with bad teeth and big guns, there’s ’Red Indians’ with sharp knives and tomahawks, there’s Sumo wrestlers, KKK dudes and the wonderfully anachronistic (for a film set somewhere around the 1870s), Nazis.

And yesterday I saw this ‘call to arms’ for the ‘anti-fascist’ brigade they were calling up in case the hard-right Skinheads decided to turn up and pester asylum seekers or anyone else they fancied fighting. Which is, primarily, the police. On my own doorstep. Well, Finchley. A few doorsteps up the road.

I fucking hate fascists as much as the next (decent) man. Probably more so, if he’s not a Jew. Cos we have a ‘bit of a history’ with fascists. And the right wing scum, if any of them can even spell ‘right wing’ (though they can all read ‘Special Brew’), organised by Tommy Robinson and instigated by Nigel Farage (however much he denies), forgot to show up. Or were suddenly cowed by the quite serious sentences passed out to their ‘colleagues’ after the riots up north. Thus, not just in Finchley but right across the country were massive ‘anti-fa’ rallies, with no-one to ‘anti’. It was like turning up for a big Cup football match and the other team didn’t show.

But as I was marching towards Finchley I saw one of these posters and thought… ‘Zionists’… that’s me!!! But we’ve been promoted. No longer the quiet refugees seeking their own homeland to try and avoid pogroms and holocausts, oh no. Now we’re part of ‘the problem’. “Fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes”. Now I can officially join Mel Brooks long line of ne’er do-wells to go and wreak havoc in Red Rock. Just by being a Zionist. An organisation originally set up on socialist ideology. And now, according to some, part of the ‘hard right’ problem.

Just as it was conceptually flawed to make the tragic death of three schoolkids in Southport an excuse to pick on immigrants in general and Muslims even more generally, for the ‘other side’ to include ‘Zionists’ in their list of ‘baddies of the Right’ shows the very same paradigm of conflating separate issues for their own distorted value system.

So for any ‘anti-fascists’ reading this (as if), two plus do does NOT make 19 and Zionists are NEVER fascists. Unless there’s a good movie in the making.

Happy Thursday.

A xxxx