SUPPORT for Israel’s Gaza genocide rots the brain and degrades the ethics. The last few days have afforded two prominent examples.

Baron Cryer of Leyton is a former Labour MP now, like many such, grifting away in the upper house at a rate of £361 a day. Jonathan Turner is a barrister, an expert in competition law. His day rate is likely considerably more, illustrating the difference between organ grinders and monkeys.

Lord Cryer — he answered to “John” when he worked for this paper 30 years ago — has long subordinated whatever principles he may once have owned to self-advancement.

As chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the years when Corbyn was party leader, he did a fair impression of a chocolate teapot. He has only got worse.

Last week, he abused parliamentary privilege to tell the dozing peers that Stop the War Coalition was “engaging in the incitement of racial hatred against Jewish people.”

“Stop the War, by the way, has strong links to Hezbollah and Hamas, and therefore, I feel fairly sure, Iran and the clerical fascists of Tehran,” he claimed, adding that “membership of any democratic party, frankly, is incompatible with membership of Stop the War” or the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Every assertion here is false. Stop the War has never had any association with Hamas or Hezbollah. Still less has it had any connection with the Iranian regime.

Cryer could not evidence these claims, because there is none. But his remarks have a purpose, consistent with the thrust of state policy — criminalising anti-imperialism and harassing movements which threaten government foreign policy.

Given that Hamas and Hezbollah are both proscribed in Britain as “terrorist,” and that expressing any support for them is illegal, Cryer is clearly trying to create grounds for a police assault on Stop the War’s right to operate.

He is also demanding a witch-hunt of Labour members being allowed to support the anti-war movement, even though Stop the War came top of a 2020 poll when they were asked to identify their favourite campaigning organisation.

Cryer himself has loyally supported the Keir Starmer line of support for Israel. He did not back calls for a ceasefire in November 2023, when more than 50 Labour MPs did.

And he declined to attend a meeting of his own constituency Labour Party in east London that month, which voted for a ceasefire, citing concerns for his “personal safety.”

Lord Cryer is, therefore, a spineless genocide supporter, covering his complicity in a crime for the ages by using his unearned seat in the legislature to promote McCarthyism.

Turner is the chief executive of British Lawyers for Israel, a body devoted to weaponising the law in the service of a foreign power.

To date, the highlight of its work was bullying a London hospital into removing from its walls artwork by Palestinian children on the unevidenced grounds that Jewish patients were upset thereby.

Turner has, however, topped that by some distance with his latest remarks.

Disputing what he believes to be excessive calculations regarding Palestinian mortality in besieged Gaza, he said that Israel’s critics “ignored factors that may increase average life expectancy in Gaza, bearing in mind that one of the biggest health issues in Gaza prior to the current war was obesity.”

This as people in Gaza, including thousands of children, are being pushed towards starvation by an Israeli blockade. Has the dehumanising of the Palestinians ever gone further, in Britain at least?

Cryer and Turner together display what the solidarity movement is fighting against — assaulting democracy, smearing opponents and ultimately negating basic human decency. Supporting genocide corrodes the soul.