The people who defame Israel and wish to undermine its status in the world are not anti-Semites — or so they will tell you, every chance they get. Their denial of anti-Semitism is essential to their moral position. In their own view they are good progressives, therefore absolutely innocent of racial or religious discrimination. Their propaganda campaign, which they hope eventually will escalate into economic warfare, is intended merely to reshape Israel's policies.

What they oppose, they want to assure us, is Israel's position in the West Bank. Their increasingly loud and self-confident BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) is not, as they tell it, a struggle against the Jews. They simply want to bring Israel into line with enlightened leftist opinion in Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

Allow me to redraft the above misrepresenting piece of bile.

The people who criticise Israel government policy and who wish to remove its US-led immunity from true scrutiny are not antisemites. To be an antisemite you must display unreasonable and blanket condemnation of all Jewish people. The critics of the Israeli government are often moved towards denial of the antisemitism they are routinely accused of, mainly by ardent, blindfolded and insecure supporters of the Israeli regime, but they are seldom otherwise troubled by the term which, after all, does not apply to them. They are a mixed bunch (including a good number of Israeli Jews as well as many Jews outside Israel), but they do not claim to be progressives and would never make saintly assertions about their total freedom from racial or religious prejudice, though they often try quite hard to avoid stuff like that. Their campaign to raise awareness of the Israeli government's unjust discrimination against Arabs in both Israel and the occupied territories, as well as the ever-worsening grabbing of the best land for the exclusive use of Jews, not to speak of the dividing of Palestinian families with a concrete wall (we can discuss their military atrocities another time maybe) is certainly intended to persuade Israel to reshape its policies.

We do oppose Israel's land-grabbing in the West Bank. The "BDS" movement, for want of a better term, is an attempt to persuade the Israeli government to treat all it citizens fairly, not just Jews. It has nothing to do with some hidden leftist agenda (let's leave those fairy tales to the conspiracy theorists), and is certainly not a "struggle against Jews". Jewish people in history have endured more than their fair share of discrimination and level-headed people of whatever political persuasion know that further discrimination against Jews would leave us all in just as miserable state, or worse, as we're in at the moment. And, not least, it would be morally indefensible.

Get your bloody blinkers off, will you? Just because some of us don't share your unthinking brand of right-wing extremism doesn't mean we're all bloody commies, you know.