A couple of people have emailed to say that my mentions of Neil Clark are boring and unworthy of me. I should, they say, have bigger fish to fry.

And the thing is, they're right. But...

The reason I give his outpourings entirely unmerited and disproportionate coverage is that I find it both bizarre and wrong that a man who is a proud apologist for a genocidal butcher should be treated as having anything worthwhile to contribute to the mainstream media (I leave out the 'blogosphere', since no one can, or should, be able to control the content people choose to put on their own sites).

Reading Clark's opinions in the mainstream media is little different in spirit from reading David Irving's, both in their apologias for mass murderers and in their use of unreliable sources. Would Irving be commissioned by, say, the Guardian, to offer his thoughts on the appointment of a new French foreign minister? Merely to pose the question is to show the absurdity of it. Yet a man who eulogises another genocidal butcher - and, equally offensively in its way, who harks back with nostalgia to the tyranny of the Warsaw Pact - is. And so I think it is necessary to show just how wrong and stupid Clark is, lest anyone take him seriously on any matter of importance.

He has also sought - albeit with utter incompetence - to silence criticism of his methods through a libel writ against Oliver Kamm. Not that one should be surprised that a defender of Communist tyranny or Slobodan Milosevic does not believe in the right of others to criticise him or his views.

It is also, I have to confess, sometimes fun to shoot fish in a barrel.

I'm sorry if it's boring when I mention Clark. And I get the message - I'll do my best to resist the temptation to mention him, and try to make this a Clark-free zone.

But I hope you see why, trivial and stupid as he is, it's important that his idiocy is properly ridiculed.