Over at Comment is Free yesterday, Madeleine Bunting posted a reasoned response to Martin Bright and David T of Harry’s Place over their attacks on an earlier piece she had published on CiF. She wrote:

“I simply cannot see the point of a witch-hunt against anyone who has ever read Qutb or Mawdudi. This is McCarthyism of the worst kind. We might as well hound out of British politics anyone who has read Lenin. The kind of scenario David T paints of an entryist Islamism trying to establish a ‘perfect Islamic state’ is a fantasyland and I can’t understand why a serious journalist such as Martin Bright endorses it.”

David T then proceeded to post his own “reasoned response” to Bunting, which concluded: “you, Madeleine Bunting, are an absolute disgrace. Your participation in this debate has been entirely malign. You seem to see your role as being to cover up for, and whitewash, political extremists and bigots of the worst sort. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Then, when the CiF moderators deleted this, David T started bleating about censorship. (And this from a man whose website repeatedly blocks links from Islamophobia Watch, with the result that we have to redirect them via tinylink.com.)

Eventually CiF editor Georgina Henry was forced to step in and close the thread down because of the repeated posting of “abusive attacks on the original author” – no doubt by the same right-wing bigots who frequent the comments section at Harry’s Place.

And now David T has announced that he will no longer be blogging at CiF. He objects to the fact that CiF allows Azzam Tamimi of the British Muslim Initiative and Taji Mustafa of Hizb ut-Tahrir to post there but not far-right white racists like Nick Griffin or David Duke: “Islamists and jihadists are part of the ‘big debate’, but other fascists are not.”

Well, I imagine most CiF readers will be breathing a sigh of relief. David T will now be free to wallow in his own hatred of liberals and the Left at Harry’s Place, along with his co-thinkers drawn from the racist right who enthusiastically back him up with their vile anti-Muslim rants. Frankly, they deserve each other.