You know what free association is. Freud invented it. You say a word and I say what comes into my head and my choice tells us something about my mind. Anyway, the writer Mehdi Hasan took issue with Howard Jacobson on Twitter and I took issue back. But it's what happened next that provoked this column. A series of people then got involved, some of them very angry with me. Take J, a professional woman photographer based, I think, in Bristol. "Journalism is dead," she tweeted me, "we've a nation of Muslim hating warmongering scribblers, sickening!"
Then J posted a tweet accompanying a story from the Catholic Herald in 1975 about how Jimmy Savile was about to go to Israel. He was shown receiving some scriptures from a couple of British rabbis. J's accompanying comment was "Savile love(d) Israel! It's not a secret!" .
Until that point no one had mentioned either Israel or Jimmy Savile. The only conceivable point of the tweet was somehow to link paedophilia, Israel and - in this instance - me. A couple of minutes later another woman - M - retweeted J's Savile tweet and then added a comment of her own. A friend of hers "in catering" had witnessed "Zionists" wearing Jimmy Savile masks at a Purim celebration.
I tugged on the thread of this one to see where it would lead. How did her friend know they were Zionists? Easy, she replied, they were members of the Zionist Federation. Purim had been in March so I then asked her where in the country this had happened - it would then be easy enough to check. She didn't reply.
As far as I could tell the two tweeters, J and M, were both white Englishwomen, one in her early 40s one in her late 20s. So I decided to see whether I could understand them better by looking at their own free association. What, over the months, did they tweet and retweet? Let's start with J. A recurrent theme of her tweets was a conspiracist anti-Zionism. She retweeted an accusation about John McCain ''fabricating'' Daesh beheading videos, linking to a virulent US antisemitic site, Veterans Today. She retweeted an article from a website run by the cultist Lyndon LaRouche purporting to prove that Golda Meir had deliberately allowed a boatful of Moroccan Jews to be sunk pour encourager les autres.
She claimed to have seen 'Zionists' wearing Savile masks
She was militantly on the side of Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Putin in Ukraine. She believed the establishment was enmired in child abuse. She thought the Russian RT channel a more reliable source of information than the BBC. She believed airliner MH17 was brought down by shadowy persons but certainly not the Russians or their allies. On Srebrenica she retweeted someone arguing that "Zionist corporate media blame the Serbs for everything". She sees Zionists everywhere. They are the phlogiston of her intellectual cosmos.
As for M - she purports to be a militant lesbian, pro-sex work, pro-transgender, with a Holocaust surviving recently deceased grandfather. She hates Israel, the police, the armed forces, other feminists, large corporations, the Ukrainians and - quixotically - "white people". She wishes cancer on her enemies. She also appears to be a Muslim convert. She was upset that Daesh had beheaded Copts on a Libyan beach but explained that "to ignore the reason for anger at the Coptics would be negligent". Which was that they "have been in receipt of US military funding for years and used as intel for US".
M's whole persona seems to be based on a violent identification with any group she considers to be downtrodden or beleaguered, and a violent separation from the society into which she was born. She also makes stuff up. J's pattern is similar. Both are middle-class Twitter rebels, in revolt against The Man. And in their minds most of you, dear readers, are The Man.
