A loud blast by Nick Cohen in the New Statesman -- of all places -- against the far left's love-in with Islamic fascism begins with the following fascinating insight into the news values of the BBC:

'Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that's where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?

'Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn't a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn't this a story? It's a great story, I cried. But why don't you broadcast it? We can't, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won't let us.'

This is, of course, a telling commentary on the anti-war bias of the BBC. But the alliance that Cohen is describing with such outrage is hardly news to those of us who have been banging on about the unholy nexus between the left and Islamic fascists since the Iraq issue started to dominate political life. For as Cohen acknowledges, this moral corruption extends far wider in British society than the Socialist Workers' Party, which has never exactly been an advertisement for democracy or liberal thought:

'Read the liberal press and you will find that the rage of middle-class liberals and British Islam burns as brightly as it did in February 2003. As I have argued before on these pages, that rage is morally ambiguous. Disgust at the Bush administration has pushed liberal opinion around the world into the shameful position that it would not back the opponents of Saddam Hussein. The result of the breakdown in international solidarity is that an Iraqi or Kurdish socialist is more likely to get a fair hearing from the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times; the Daily Telegraph than the Independent.'

And also more likely than from, ahem, dare one say it, the New Statesman itself. Cohen's exculpation of the Statesman from his tirade is astonishing, given that the eye-popping virulence of that magazine's hostility to the Iraq war, hatred of President Bush and vicious prejudice against Israel and the Jews (remember its 'Kosher Conspiracy' front cover?) line it up squarely in the very left/Islamofascist nexus that has attracted Cohen's ire.

The fact is that huge swathes of people from the soft left, centre and even the right -- including executives at the BBC -- went on those anti-war demonstrations and marched with righteous indignation shoulder to shoulder with people who happened to be shouting 'All Jews to the gas'. And yes, of course it is appalling that the MAB has such bigoted attitudes towards women and gay people; and yes, it was appalling that the gay campaigner Peter Tatchell was roughed up at such an event; but wouldn't it be nice if such victims of Islamic bigotry, who are themselves protesting against 'Israel persecuting Palestine', could bring themselves to mention that the Jews of Israel (and elsewhere) are a principal target of Islamic incitement and mass murder?