Johann Hari

In one of his semi-literate columns this week, Dick Littlejohn says – yet again – that the left loves to “smear” him as racist, homophobic, sexist etc.

Regular readers will know I am extremely cautious about calling anybody racist or homophobic. They are extremely serious charges, and if you throw them around simply at people you disagree with, they lose their power and their potency. I have an on-going row with some of my friends on the left about Melanie Phillips, for example. Obviously I strongly, spewingly disagree with Melanie on almost everything – from drugs to asylum seekers to the role of markets to gay rights to the family, you name it – but I see no evidence that she is in any way racist or homophobic. (Indeed, I believe she is neither).

But it is demonstrably true that Littlejohn is a racist and a homophobe. It is not in any sense a “smear.”

Let me offer some firm evidence.

When Jews are being murdered, Littlejohn (quite rightly) responds with disgust. For example, he has condemned “the grotesque wave of anti-Semitism once more engulfing the world” and repeatedly invokes the Nazi Holocaust as one of the worst crimes in human history.

But when another genocide was being perpetrated – this time by black Hutus against black Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 – he wrote, "Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them."

Note the (possibly subliminal) use of the word ‘monkey’. Note the implicit idea that black people’s ethnic identifications are ridiculous – from a man who constantly ridicules the “smelly” French and “dictatorial” Germans.

But more importantly, note that in Littlejohn’s mental universe, a genocide perpetrated against people now regarded as ‘white’ is one of the worst crimes imaginable, but the exact same crime perpetrated against black people is a matter of aggressive indifference. Is this not classical racism?

Nor is this an isolated event. When a BNP supporter named Tony Martin shot a child burglar in the back as he was running away, Dick Littlejohn leapt to his defence. Despite the fact that Martin says Britain should be run by a dictator and has called for the extermination of gypsies (or “pikeys”, as Littlejohns calls them), Dick wrote, “In court Martin, a man of unblemished character, was portrayed as a bloodthirsty madman with a pathological hatred of gypsies… Eccentric? Yes. Mad, only in the sense that he was being driven to his wits' end by the criminal activities of local gypsies.” Littlejohn later commented, “True, [Martin] hated gypsies. He had every reason to hate them. He and his neighbours had been terrorised by them for years.”

Note how Littlejohn ascribes collective guilt to an entire race of people – one of the purest signifiers of racism. Try this for any other ethnic group, and the racism becomes obvious. “True, I hate blacks. I have every reason to hate them. I was burgled by black people on two different occasions.” “Of course I hate Jews. I have every reason to. They killed Christ.” “Of course I detest the Japanese. Look what they did to Alec Guinness in 'Bridge Over the River Kwai.'”

Of course individual gypsies commit crimes, just as individual white people, Sikhs, Jews, Arabs and members of all other ethnic groups sometimes do. A non-racist blames the individual, and seeks to arrest and charge them for their crimes. A racist generalises the act of the individual to the group, and hates all of them, even those who had nothing to do with the crime. Littlejohn manifestly falls into the second category.

His prejudices about gay people are equally proveable. In 1995 in the Daily Mail, he took to joking about gay-bashing in a column ridiculing attempts by the South Yorkshire Police to become more alert to the concerns of the gay community, who are disproportionately subject to violent crime. Littlejohn contacted a “tyke friend of mine” who “reliably informed me there are no homosexuals in South Yorkshire. [The friend said,] 'Not live ones, anyway. We send them all down to London.'”

That’s it. That’s the punch-line. No live gays in Yorkshire… they are all, it is implied, killed or driven out. Would any non-homophobe think this was funny?

Again, this is part of a long pattern. Littlejohn constantly compares gay people to followers of the most extreme and bizarre fetishes. In his unreadable book ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’, he attacks one man who came out so he could openly live with his male partner by demanding, “'Why? If he had a predilection for wearing a nappy made out of Bacofoil or retiring for the evening with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head would he have felt obliged to share that with us too?”

Dick incessantly attacks such people as “proselytising homosexuals and lesbians”, and elsewhere refers to them “recruiting outside schoolgates”, clearly playing to the demonstrably false and homophobic link between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Littlejohn’s favourite tactic is to imply that anybody who wants equality for gay people is somehow mentally disordered and “obsessed” with homosexuality, rather than simply trying to make sexuality legally and socially irrelevant.

For example, Dick has accused Tony Blair of being “obsessed with poovery”, says “the C of E is drowning in a sea of poovery”, and contrived to get the word “poofs” into a lengthy attack on yours truly (perhaps the proudest day of my life).

Littlejohn’s comments about Blair and the CofE are a fascinating example of psychological projection, because if anybody is “obsessed with poovery” or “drowning in a sea of poovery”, it is Littlejohn himself.

The brilliant Marina Hyde of the Guardian has helpfully compiled a log of Dick’s references to homosexuality. In 2003, he referred “24 times to gays, 17 to homosexuals, 15 to cottaging, seven to rent boys, six to lesbians, six times to being "homophobic" and four times to "homophobia" (note Richard's scornful inverted commas), twice to poovery and once to buggery. That's a mere 82 mentions in 90-odd columns.” In 2004, he excelled himself, and “referred 42 times to gays, 16 times to lesbians, 15 to homosexuals, eight to bisexuals, twice to "homophobia" and six to being "homophobic" (note his scornful inverted commas), five times to cottaging, four to "gay sex in public toilets", three to poofs, twice to lesbianism, and once each to buggery, dykery, and poovery. This amounts to 104 references in 90-odd columns.”

It is a demonstrable, provable fact that Richard Littlejohn is a racist and homophobe.

If you really want to deny it, Dick, sue me, and I will be very happy to accept the verdict of a British court. In the meantime, spare us your lying bullshit about these facts being “a smear”, when you are happy to smear the victims of genocide as irrelevant tribal morons, smear gay people as closet paedophiles, and smear the supporters of gay equality as insane obsessives.

You couldn’t make it up? Littlejohn does – every week.