Tolerating certain types of hate...that is two-tier racism

AS the neuropsychologist Dr Jens Foell has written: "As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you've got a table with 11 Nazis."

- Alex Hearn

Its suggestion is that people who sit comfortably with blatant racism are themselves racist.

Perhaps this needs more context. It's possible, after all, that the others are trying to persuade the Nazi to see the error of his ways, in which case the implied guilt by association would be unfair. Yet if the Nazi was talking about racial purity with the others' tacit consent, it would be entirely different.

So when Nazi salutes and swastikas are displayed with no negative reaction from those around them, when anti-Jewish placards go unchallenged and the crowd joins hateful chants, what are we to conclude? Every week for the last 11 months, we have witnessed such scenes with our own eyes at the so-called "peace marches" against Israel.

They have been systematically locking down city centres across the UK for almost a year now. The main organisers of the pro-Gaza marches are the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, the group involved in the destruction of kosher food items in supermarkets.

A REPORT for a parliamentary committee on the group's Facebook presence branded it "a cesspool of antisemitism".