WITH their closed minds and sheep-like instincts, left-wing posers are nothing if not predictable.
As soon as the terror group Hamas began its murderous assault on Israel almost a fortnight ago, it was grimly certain that the rent-a-mob radicals would soon be demonstrating in our cities, full of condemnation for the Jewish state and support for its enemies.
Just as inevitable would be the looming appearance of a pompous declaration by a bunch of virtue-signallers from the arts world, so puffed up with self-regard that they seem to think shallow observations should be treated with all the reverence of a UN Security Council resolution.
That’s the time-honoured, twin-track way in progressive Britain — the troublemakers take to the streets of the metropolis while the troubled souls of the luvvies take to the letters pages of metropolitan journals.
That is exactly what has happened in this case.
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On Saturday there were huge protests across urban Britain by the anti-Israeli brigade, whose placards were emblazoned with puerile slogans and whose mouths were full of anti-Semitic chants.
Mass slaughter
Then today, bang on cue, a blog on the website of the London Review Of Books — an achingly right-on literary publication — carried an open letter signed by 2,000 artists, writers, musicians and actors who had come together to make a collective protest against the military actions of Israel and the support of the British government for them.
Representing a group called Artists For Palestine, the signatories called Israel “the occupying power”, raged against the blockade of Gaza, warned of violations of international law and attacked Israel’s record on human rights.
What these anguished creative types wanted was “an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine”.
But they don’t deserve a hearing at all because their outlook is so unbalanced and prejudiced.
Their contempt for Israel is so strong that it renders all their views worthless.
Their boasts about their humanitarian concerns come across as insincere because they are so one-sided.
What they reveal is not that they are motivated by compassion but instead have been indoctrinated by left-wing propaganda about colonialism.
Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution, once described the starry-eyed Western ideologues who supported his oppressive regime as “useful idiots”, and that is exactly the right term for these deluded apologists for terrorism.
What could be more idiotic than the text of their letter which has a massive hole at its centre?
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Incredibly, the signatories managed to produce five paragraphs of verbiage about the present crisis in the Middle East — quite rightly acknowledging the suffering of innocent Palestinians — without even mentioning the sinister terror organisation Hamas.
It has ruled Gaza since 2006 with a rod of iron and is today directly responsible for the descent into the cycle of violence, having launched more than 2,000 missiles at Israel before embarking on their campaign of mass slaughter, kidnapping, rape and intimidation.
Indeed, the current Hamas assault has been one of the most sickening in modern history, on a par with the worst excesses of al-Qaeda and Isis.
At the end of last week, I talked to a reservist with Israel’s special forces, and he pointed out to me that even the Nazis tried to cover up the genocidal horrors of their foul regime.
In contrast, he said, the Hamas fighters openly revel in barbarity.
Infused with their pathological loathing for the Jews and Israel, they burn and reportedly behead babies, rape women and hold grandparents hostage.
In one particularly gruesome incident, a pregnant Israeli woman who had been seized by Hamas went through the horror of having her baby ripped from her.
She was left to die in agony while the baby had just a few seconds of life before being butchered.
To avoid mentioning any of this is a disgraceful act of politically motivated self-censorship.
The luvvies’ letter bangs on about Israel’s “war crimes”, the drive for “genocide”, the air strikes on Gaza and the “deliberate killing of civilians”.
Yet Hamas perpetrated far worse.
Moreover, Israel has been responding to the violence, not initiating it.
There was a scattering of big figures who had signed this letter, among them actors Steve Coogan and Maxine Peake, the writer Sally Rooney, author of the hit novel Normal People, which was turned into a flesh-baring TV drama, and the best-selling black author Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose book Why I Am No Longer Talking To White People About Race has become the bible of critical race theory.
Political vanity
But most of the names are utterly obscure.
Most would not be household names even in their own households, which just makes their attention-seeking and grandstanding all the more absurd.
Unaccountable and unelected, they are in no position to lecture any democratic government about its policies, particularly not one under siege like Israel.
The attempt by the Artists For Palestine to hog the limelight this week has just been a gigantic exercise in political vanity.
What makes this gang of desperate self-publicists think that their opinions should carry special weight simply because they work in the cultural sector?
Does their employment in that field give them some kind of insight into the Middle East?
Why not have an open letter from accountants or joiners or driving instructors?
Actors have no special wisdom. As Laurence Olivier, Britain’s greatest, once said, their two jobs “are to remember their lines and avoid the furniture”.
Maxine Peake, previously a loud supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, claims “people know I have a social conscience”.
What people know is that, when it comes to Israel, she is arguably too immersed in left-wing ideology to have a real understanding of the issue.
And that applies to the rest of her gang.
Artists For Palestine has served one purpose — it has revealed how brainwashed the anti-Israel mob really is.