On his CommentCentral blog on the Times site, Danny Finkelstein recorded the casual bigotry of Professor Richard Dawkins who remarked upon the

fantastically successful

Jewish lobby through which Jews

more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.

If you are dismayed by that, there’s worse — far worse— in the readers’ responses, to which one sharp-eyed and horrified reader of this blog has drawn my attention. The self-evidently loony calumnies perpetrated by the likes of Mearsheimer and Walt (distressingly given a positive review by Jonathan Mirsky in this week’s Spectator) and Jimmy Carter have been absorbed as the truth by significant numbers of people. And not just in the UK — at a conference in Canada the other day, I met a young woman who subscribed to all the usual left-wing nostrums and who told me how alarming the Jewish lobby was because Israel’s interests were antithetical to those of America whose foreign policy it had subverted. In vain does one point out that the power of the Jewish lobby in America pales beside that of Saudi Arabia; that the most powerful lobby on behalf of Israel is composed of the Christian evangelicals; that the main reason the US supports Israel now is because it views it as a vital strategic ally in the region; that the vast majority of American Jews are Democrats who loathe President Bush and have always been opposed to the war in Iraq; that Israel told the US from the start that Iraq was the wrong target and it should be attacking Iran instead; and so on and on.

It’s no use whatever, of course. Waste of breath. Because what you are arguing against is sheer irrational bigotry. You argue with them because you just can’t believe that apparently rational human beings can be impervious to reason. But they are. That’s why they’ve swallowed this poisonous crud in the first place. And history tells us that ostensibly intelligent, cultured, educated and civilised people can and do believe demonstrable lies about the Jews. You know that. You’ve read about the Nazis venerating Goethe and listening to Mozart, of course. But when you meet the modern equivalents, you just can’t believe it.

We’d all better start believing it. This evil has returned. And it has to be fought by being exposed, named and shamed.