[The Left/Liberals/the Metropolitan elite/bruschetta munchers/the chattering class]* are in bed with [jihadism/radical Islam/the enemy/Islamofascism]* posted by Richard Seymour

*Deleted as appropriate.

Look, I fully appreciate that Nick Cohen must have something to do, somewhere to situate himself, something to eat (and drink), and a place to sleep. It isn't that I begrudge him these things. But if he must persist in his present degeneration, why pay him to write at all? Why can't he have a spot on the Moral Maze, where he may bark and howl freely, and be paid for the same? If he has to be allowed to write, at least take away his cut and paste privileges and stick him on an agony aunt column. It is nothing more noble than brute sadism to put him through the arduous routine of machinations in the office and cacchinations at the bar.

Take this, for instance:

When Radio 4 invited the exeditor of the Erotic Review to analyse The Road to Guantanamo, a vague notion that had been bubbling in my mind for months became a certainty. Liberal London has gone mad. It has cut its last mooring with rational debate and is floating away on a sea of self-delusion.

"I felt radicalised by it," cried Rowan Pelling, as she announced that Channel 4's film about the three British Muslims from Tipton the Americans arrested in Afghanistan had turned her into a militant. "I really did."

For those of us who see the former purveyor of genteel pornography around Soho, it was a terrifying declaration. Will the bombshell turn into a human bomb and take out the decadent sex shops which once sold her magazine with an exploding Donna Karan bag?

Ah, a little suicide bomb humour. But mark this: "radicalised" for Nick Cohen is now a synonym for "strapped with a suicide belt and ready to detonate", just because some Muslims happen to be involved.

More:

Anyone who reads the papers knows that although the "Tipton Three" are innocent, the Americans had reasonable grounds for picking them up. They listened to Islamist imams in Britain, studied in a jihadi school in Pakistan and went into Afghanistan when the war began.

Now, I want to say something else about this later, but one thing that does bear remarking on is that the evidence that they listened to "Islamist imams" is contradictory accounts from some who knew them, while the stuff about the "jihadi school" in Pakistan is pure fiction: they attended a mosque in Karachi at one point, but there is no claim that they "studied" there, much less for jihad. Some elements of journalistic accuracy are swept aside for the sake of Cohen’s ‘point’ (which is?).

Anyway, insensible on this issue, he moves on has a go at the Archbishop of Canterbury over Sudan (regurgitating his Observer piece) and attacks Clare Short for having hosted a meeting with Hizb ut-Tahrir in the Houses of Parliament:

[T]he allegedly Left-wing feminist Clare Short hosted a Commons meeting to defend Hizb ut Tahrir, a far-Right party that wants to establish an Islamic empire, persecute homosexuals and force women into second-class citizenship. She couldn't see that she was making a nonsense of her professed principles.

This is a curious statement: it isn't a mystery that the reason this meeting took place was because there is a threat to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir under new 'terrorism' laws and despite the fact that it is not a violent or terrorist organisation. Short was not defending the politics of the group, but it's right to exist as a legal organisation. Cohen defends free speech for Nazis and racists, but Muslims must have special conditions attached. What was that about making a "nonsense" of one's "professed principles"? It's fair to say that there isn't a coherent argument in Cohen's article, just a sequence of reactionary gripes spuriously unified as auto-left critique.

Aaronovitch was harping on the same themes earlier this week, adumbrating much the same case and strongly implying that they were in fact guilty of having fought for the Taliban on the basis of the same extrapolation from a minute pool of heavily selective 'evidence'. Look, if torturers in Guantanamo Bay couldn't find any evidence, and the British police force couldn't find a reason to charge them after arresting them when they got back from Torture Island, perhaps sedentary fatso journalists should shut their fucking faces before letting their spleens spurt? Since when did you all become Miss Marple (or, more accurately, Inspector Clousseau)? Meanwhile, the Telegraph has reacted to the publication of Moazzam Begg's book about his experiences in Guantanamo by floating US claims that a Begg 'confession' that he had trained with Al Qaeda was not obtained through torture as he claims.

There can be no doubt about the function of all of this: it is to minimise and distract from American crimes in Guantanamo, now coming to the fore. What else does it mean when those who specifically upbraided the Hussein regime for torture, yet can’t discuss torture by Americans without seeking some way to impugn the victims? What an outcry there would be if someone spent a lot of time trying to explain that some of Saddam's torture victims had fought against him (as indeed some obviously did). How many spit-flecked column inches would it have generated if some antiwar commentator had complained about the lack of "ambivalence" in the presentation of Iraq's torture methods? To put it very mildly, charges of left-wing complicity with this and that are uniquely unimpressive coming from this lumpen layer of hacks.