You all know that Harry's Place are meshuggeneh. Their McCarthyism, witch hunts against trade unionists and the Left, hounding of Muslims whom they take a dislike to (99% of them), and slavish devotion to rationalising every outrageous crime perpetrated by the state of Israel, marks them out as pure prime time crazy. Their Islamophobia and gravitation toward far right territory led to a break with their former star writer on the left's alleged crimes and complicities in Yugoslavia: one Marko Attila Hoare for whom, I am glad to see, there are limits.

Lately, Harry's Place awarded posting rights to the deranged racist Terry Fitzpatrick, who has established himself at the Socialist Unity blog as an unpleasant and dangerously deluded man with a persecution complex. Apparently, Andy Newman tolerated him because of his glorious past as an anarchist bank robber and anti-racist, sometime back in the 1970s. It transpires that Fitzpatrick has been engaging in a campaign of racist harassment against Lee Jasper for some years now. He accuses Jasper of crack dealing and pimping, and calls him, among other things, a "fucking n*****r ponce". Under Socialist Unity's post on the subject, Fitzpatrick is allowed to repeat his charges.

Lately, Harry's Place launched one of their routine psycho-ceramic campaigns to vilify an opponent as antisemitic - an accusation that Fitzpatrick is handy with too, which is why he was welcome at Harry's Place. Their target was Operation Black Vote, which criticised a heavy-handed police raid on a Nation of Islam mosque in Brixton (the police alleged that they believed it was a "cannabis factory"). The accusation was a variation of the 'Links' game that Justin Horton described on this blog a few years ago. OBV sided with the Nation of Islam, which is antisemitic, so therefore OBV must be antisemitic too. That particular attack was composed by Edmund Standing, whose bilious attacks on Muslims, Muslim organisations, the Quran, political correctness, the left (etc etc) have now spilled over into a libel against a moderately left-of-centre anti-racist organisation.

Lee Jasper, of OBV, wrote a rejoinder to the attack, while also pointing out that Harry's Place hosted an outright racist crank among its writers. He pointed out that Fitzpatrick had been stalking him and subjecting him to the most vile racist abuse. The usual Harry's Place dirt piled on, refusing to take his claims seriously, minimising their import, changing the subject, denouncing the victim of said racism. For such people, the only real victims of racism are Israeli war criminals. As Andy Newman puts it, "Jasper was then not shown solidarity as a victim of racism, but further harassed, and harried over unrelated issues of what his views are on Louis Farrakhan. ... Jasper was accused of being a liar, and being obsessed with race."

Lee Jasper himself writes that "Harry’s Place refused to take my complaint seriously. They trivialised that compliant, they denigrated me as a victim of serious racist abuse and they sought to obscure that compliant by constant counter accusation and showering me with personal abuse." Evidently, some of Fitzpatrick's grotesque racist abuse was allowed to appear on the HP blog itself. Jasper notes that the blog sought to cover for Fitzpatrick, since as soon as Fitzpatrick's racist harassment was reported to the police, and he was charged, "all of his most rabid and racist comments were removed by Harrys Place overnight". Finally, reluctantly, Harry's Place withdrew Fitzpatrick's posting rights, and barred him from the blog. Their final act of arse-covering was to note that Fitzpatrick has long had an association with the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, for which he has written articles in the past. Searchlight, Jasper notes, has been curiously, sadly silent on this issue. They too migh wish to consider why Fitzpatrick has been allowed to draw on Searchlight's immense bank of credibility long after it had become clear that he was a delusional bigot.