Racism is a retarded and repetitious mental deformation. I would be tempted to call it "boring" if its consequences were not so grave. It produces nothing new and nothing interesting, and so it is with some tentativeness that I assert that the story of Israeli doctors stealing the livers, hearts and kidneys of the victims of natural disaster strikes me as a new form of a 2,000-year-old hatred or at least an exceptionally rare version of it. Jews are so depraved, the Haiti story runs, that even their willingness to show their common humanity and help strangers in distress should never be trusted. For Jews are not human: they are bestial creatures who use the cover of altruism to dupe credulous gentiles and hide from them their true intention to murder the people they pretend to be saving.

Presented with the conspiracy theories of such vileness and with such a pedigree, Clegg proved that he was unfit to be called a liberal or democrat, let alone deputy prime minister of this country. True, he asked Baroness Tonge to stand down as a Lib Dem spokeswoman in the House of Lords but petulantly resisted all demands to expel her from the party. The Centre for Social Cohesion, which monitors white supremacist and radical Islamists, has repeatedly asked him why he did not act. Instead of behaving like a mature politician, Clegg's temper snapped and he screamed that no one should dare question his honour. "The very suggestion that I might explicitly or tacitly give cover to racism, I find politically abhorrent and personally deeply offensive," he cried to the Jewish Chronicle, while doing precisely nothing. The Liberal Democrat leader who accused David Cameron of not dealing with supposed anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe could not speak plainly against the tropes of actual anti-Semitism in his own party. 

Lord Wallace, the Lib Dems' Foreign Affairs spokesman in the Lords, went further and deployed the low tactic of turning accusations of racism back on the accuser. The worst he could say about the baroness was that she was "over-emotional". His lordship, however, explained: "The reason why we resist expelling her from the party is that we do sadly find the current Likud Party very intolerant of all criticism."

His thinking ran thus: racist ideologies are not the products of repellent minds, but merely the result of an excess of emotion. Those who oppose them do not do so honestly because they know what horrors anti-Semitism brings. On the contrary, they rather than the baroness are the truly disreputable people, who are only raising this minor matter because they are the allies of the Likud. The Lib Dems are tolerant. It's Tonge's critics, not Tonge herself, who are intolerant and show their prejudice by insisting on standing up to those who say that a Jewish conspiracy pulls all strings and that Jews are murdering gentile children. 

The Liberal Democrats turn the world upside down, make black white and two and two five. In their imagination, it is intolerant to oppose bigotry, small-minded to stand up against fanaticism.

As it is impossible to write about Jews in the present climate and expect to have a sensible debate, let me replace them with blacks. Suppose a leading Lib Dem peer had said that black people were by their nature mentally inferior to whites. Would you expect liberal society to be satisfied if Clegg did not expel her from the party and screamed and shouted about his honour instead? I suspect most people would demand that he proved he knew the meaning of the word by taking action. Suppose the same Liberal peer were to go on to bring up the most poisonous myth of white supremacy and say that young black men were touring the cities looking for white women to rape. In those circumstances liberal society would consider it outrageous if Lord Wallace were to dismiss complaints by saying, "The reason why we resist expelling her from the party is that we do sadly find the current Zanu-PF party very intolerant of all criticism."