The Spectator’s Notes | 30 April 2005

Fascism is a bigger part of this election than most people realise. We know about the BNP already, but the growing force is Muslim extremism. The tactics are nasty. Look at the website of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) and you will see lists of MPs whom MPAC wishes to make the victims of what it calls ‘political jihad’. MPAC had to apologise for attacking Lorna Fitzsimons, the MP for Rochdale, for being Jewish (she isn’t, in fact), but this does not seem to have cramped its style. Its aim is to ‘eliminate all pro-Israeli, Zionist MPs from power’. An item against Mike Gapes, MP for Ilford South, calls him a ‘Zionist Islamophobe’, a ‘Zionist warmonger’ and a ‘Zionist scumbag’, and describes his seat as ‘Tel Aviv South’. Early in the campaign came the throwing of missiles by Muslims (not MPAC, so far as I know) at Oona King, the half-black, half-Jewish MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and the Jewish ex-servicemen with her who were holding a remembrance ceremony in the East End. When Mosleyite anti-Semites fought in Cable Street nearby in the 1930s, the Left fought back, but today, when many anti-Semites are Muslim, it stays pretty quiet. Over in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, the fascism is deadlier. Gerry Adams has arranged for the tactical expulsion of two unnamed, low-level IRA men from Sinn Fein over the murder of Robert McCartney, while allowing approval to be shown for the more important suspects. George Bush has seen Mr McCartney’s sisters, but Tony Blair has not. In the republic the justice minister is calling for a ‘giant police bid’ to prevent an IRA criminal mini-state. In the North, our Prime Minister still will not countenance a policy which does not include these criminals in government. It is as if he wouldn’t allow the Greater London Authority to exist unless Stephen Lawrence’s killers had seats on it.