Let’s start with the mural. I assume you’ve all seen it by now. Not just because it has provoked the present, perhaps climactic row about anti-semitism in the Labour Party, but also because it’s “street art”. It’s by Mear One, a graffiti artist who defines himself as underground and anti-war. (His real name is Kalen Ockerman.) I probably didn’t need to tell any reader with progressive politics these qualifiers — to paraphrase Jerry Maguire, I had you at street art. Clearly, this is a man fighting the good fight.

And yet his mural is racist. Or, at least, Jews seem to think so. How can this be? To put it stupidly, how can someone so apparently left-wing be accused of something so apparently right-wing?

Let’s