ASÍ ES COMO LA BBC informaba sobre los grupos pacifistas contrarios a la guerra de Iraq. El artículo es de la revista británica New Statesman, de una línea editorial izquierdista; en estos momentos está disponible gratuitamente en la web de la revista, pero en breve pasará a ser de pago:

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.

Radio silence was imposed on the sinister and in many ways right-wing behaviour of the far left and has continued into the campaign for this month's elections. With the exception of the New Statesman and Tribune - and the Harry's Place website at hurryupharry.bloghouse.net - no one has found it worth noting that, for the first time since the Enlightenment, a section of the left is allied with religious fanaticism and, for the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact, a section of the left has gone soft on fascism.

Uno sólo puede imaginar lo que ha ocurrido todos estos meses en nuestro país... si es que había alguien con la honestidad de profundizar en la composición e ideario de los grupos anti-guerra y proponérselo a sus jefes de redacción.

(via Harry Hatchett)

ACTUALIZACIÓN: Ya os dije ayer que Roger Simon tiene uno de los weblogs más inteligentes de la blogosfera. No os perdáis su comentario al artículo que he citado más arriba, y la frase de Mao que trae a colación: "De izquierdas en la forma, de derechas en la sustancia".