Well that didn’t last long.  The Chicken Yoghurt recently marked Tony Blair’s new job as Middle-East peace envoy with a parlour game in which commenters might suggest other similarly implausible roles (Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, that sort of thing). Channel 4 gave us another hilarious example with last night’s documentary The War on Britain’s Jews?, in which professional bigot and poor man’s Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, took it upon himself to lecture us upon bigotry – specifically the  “alarming resurgence” in anti-semitism.

Yet less than 24 hours after the broadcast of Littlejohn’s lazy, opportunistic and cynical broadcast, one of his principal contributors, Professor David Cesarani, had expressed measured but significant doubts about the helpfulness of Littlejohn’s sledgehammer approach to an important and sensitive topic:

 ”Littlejohn missed the indigenous and more insidious forms of anti-Jewish prejudice that can lead to exclusion and worse. Jews were readmitted to England and gradually given equality despite, not because of, the fact that they were Jewish. They were tolerated while they conformed to the dominant social and cultural forms and they trimmed their traditions so as to fit in.

The regimen of tolerance, embodied in liberal political culture, determined that there were good Jews and bad Jews. Watch out if you were assessed as the wrong type of Jew: too orthodox or too secular; too rich or too poor; too noisy and obtrusively Jewish or too keen to blend in. Worse, the assessment could flip-flop depending on circumstance.

This ambivalence, which is quite distinctive, makes it hard for British people to think of themselves as anti-Jewish although they are often thinking stereotypically even when they approve the Jewish presence. The same process has been applied to other immigrant groups, with significant historical variations.”

Of course, you’d never divine such a nuanced argument from the programme, which contented itself with serving up lurid clichés of anti-Semitism (desecration of cemeteries, smear campaigns in elections) as if these were a) generally representative of the discrimination which Jewish Britons experience and b) on a scale quite different from the hostility experienced by other religious and ethnic minorities.  Littlejohn, like so many of those who cry crocodile tears over anti-Semitism, is far less interested in tackling such bigotry than he is in hijacking the issue to attack his usual targets, Muslims and the Left.