A New Year's Resolution

There is yet to be a satisfactory solution to the problem of antisemitic comments being posted on the comment threads of mainstream media blogs. Some, like The Times, choose to pre-moderate comments; the Guardian's Comment Is Free post-moderates; some do not moderate at all. Damian Thompson, at the Telegraph, has come up with an ingenious solution, but one that I fear may prove rather expensive:

I spent the first hour of 2010 painstakingly deleting the ravings of an anti-Semite who had been waiting until the stroke of midnight to carpet-bomb this blog with exclusive “revelations” about the Elders of Zion who – would you believe it? – are engaged in a WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY to… actually, for the moment I forget what this conspiracy was supposed to be doing. Pulling the strings of international bankers and politicians, I shouldn’t wonder.

It’s a bit like when a rat scuttles across the floor of your flat: you don’t know whether it’s the same one you saw last night, or whether there’s a nest of the damn things. I can’t tell you if this most recent blogger is the same person who regularly soils our threads with stories of Jews drinking the blood of Christian children etc, changing his or her name from time to time. These posts are masssively long, boring and repetitious; but they also clearly incite to racial hatred and are therefore deleted – often by me, “Damian, the tool of international Jewry”, as these commenters affectionately know me.

It’s such a pain in the arse, it really is. So I’ve been wondering what to do about it. One answer would be to approve all posts before they appear – but why should the rest of you have to put up with a delay just because a couple of nutters are so obsessed with Jews that they can’t join a supermarket checkout queue without scanning it for Zionist secret agents?

So here’s my plan.

For every anti-Semitic comment that appears on this blog, I will make a small donation to a Jewish charity.

How much? Which charity? I think I’ll keep those details to myself for the time being. It’s my little conspiracy.

(Hat tip: Judeosphere)