A similarity between the Ken Livingstone affair and Islam.

The similarity is thus.

Self-appointed moral authorities (i.e. the sanctimonious) tend to be a nasty lot. They’re normally into the business of denying free speech to their opponents and/or arresting or killing them.

Religion is responsible for about half the massacres, wars and pogroms throughout history.

Self-styled anti-racists are very much out of the same mould: a bunch of self-styled moral authorities. And the current “I’m less anti-semitic than thou” spat in the Labour Party is essentially a quarrel between two branches that anti-racist theology. Each branch claims to less anti-semitic and less racist than thou.


Islam.

As to Islam, as one Muslim commentator (I forget his name) pointed out, there is similar rivalry between Muslim countries: each wants to be seen as more Islamic than others. And that leads to increasingly ridiculous and literal interpretations of the Koran. (Of course other religions have their share of fundamentalist nutters).

This all leads to the ultimate absurdity: the pure evil that is ISIS and the numerous other “ISIS like” organisations in the Middle East.