Best 11 quotes of Nick Cohen on MyQuotes

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

Former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades - I'd do it myself if the price was right.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.

Humans are social primates, and socialising with the rest of our species requires a fair amount of routine self-censorship and outright lying, which we dignify with names such as ‘tact’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’.

In Britain today friends of mine live like dissidents in a dictatorship. They meet in secret. They vet new arrivals to ensure they are not spies. They are ex-Muslims living in a supposedly free country who fear their enemies will damn them as apostates and kill them. How extraordinary that they must hide their true beliefs from all but intimate friends for fear of the consequences. And how shameful that they have no anti-fascist Left worthy of the name to defend them.

In libel, truth is an absolute defence. If writers and publishers can justify what they say, they may leave the court without punishment. In privacy cases, truth is not a defence but an irrelevance. The law intervenes not because the reports are false, but because they tell too much truth for the subject to cope with, and open him up to mockery, to pain … to disrespect. Privacy rights allowed the wealthy to suppress criticisms, even though the criticisms were true. They could demand respect, even though they were not respectable.

My parents joined the Communist Party but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the Left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.