Seumas Milne’s dark embrace

We’re all too familiar with Guardian Associate Editor Seumas Milne’s brand of far-left, anti-West extremism: his apologias for communist totalitarianism; his malevolence towards Israel, as well as his open support for “resistance” movements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Gaza.

So, while his warning against Western military intervention in Libya in yesterday’s CiF (Intervention in Libya would poison the Arab revolution) didn’t break any new ideological ground, it’s certainly worth noting the following passage:

The embattled US-backed Yemeni president Ali Abdallah Saleh claimed on Tuesday that the region-wide protest movement was “managed by Tel Aviv and under the supervision of Washington”. That is easily dismissed as a hallucinogenic fantasy now. It would seem less so if the US and Britain were arming the Libyan opposition. [emphasis mine]

That such a vile anti-Israel conspiracy theory – positing the existence of a powerful and sinister Jewish state secretly pulling the political strings in the region – can gain traction in the Arab world is sadly all too predictable, but the banality of such a narrative shouldn’t blind us to the political pathos which it feeds.

As such, when Milne argues that military intervention by the U.S. and Britain would grant such a conspiracy theory greater credibility, its hard not to conclude that he’s suggesting that such intervention could reasonably be interpreted as evidence in support of such a conspiracy.

If Seumas Milne truly supports, in even the broadest sense, political progress in the Arab world, he’d be using his considerable influence to disabuse the Arab world of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories – institutional racism and scapegoating which poisons their societies and stunts real progress – not lending credibility to such fantastical notions about the corrupting influence of Jews and Israel on their lives.

While there is no shortage of such extreme ideologically driven agendas at the Guardian, its important to note that Milne’s embrace of the most malevolent political forces in the world truly places him in a league of his own.