When the media luvvies’ favourite radical, Matt McCarten, and his Unite union cohort Mike Treen are not targeting fast food employers and cinemas owners, they are the local arm of the international anti-capitalist movement.

So what joy during the holiday break when they and their mates were able to get out their placards in support of Hamas-ruled Gaza and to denounce the Israeli “aggressors.”

Sadly for them, the demos attracted only lukewarm support and even on talkback radio the weight of the presenters (notably Radio Live’s Michael Laws and almost the entire Newstalk ZB lineup) was strongly anti-Hamas if not pro-Israel.

The only relief from some well-worn media clichés was the revelation that an Invercargill café-owning Turkish immigrant and his wife brought their intolerant Muslim ways with them by banning two Israeli-born sisters.

But Matt’s mates went one better in London by combining their “international day of action” against Israeli by destroying a Starbucks coffee shop opposite the Israeli embassy.

That surely outranks the New Zealand Unite union’s claim of a world first in 2005 when it staged a strike against Starbucks, owned in New Zealand by Restaurant Brands, a listed company that also operates KFC and Pizza Hut.

In global left-wing circles, Starbucks holds a special place as a “funder of Israel” and claims that it is donating “all of its profits” in recent weeks “directly to the Israeli army.”

(If you don’t believe this, check out Brendan O’Neill’s debunking in this Spiked article and his link to a You Tube item.)

Another favourite of Unite agitprop is McDonald’s, which also has its own role in the anti-capitalist conspiracy that major American corporations are donating profits to Israel (as if…).

O’Neill’s account of Israel-Starbucks conspiracy is thorough and disturbing because such myths are hard to expose in the mainstream Western media and are fuelled by rampant anti-Semitism in the Arab media.

He says the Starbucks conspiracy is based on CEO Howard Schultz’s Jewish background, his personal support for Israel and a hoax letter (first published as a parody on an anti-Zionist site.

(Incidentally, Starbucks closed its handful of outlets in Israel on business grounds – presumably Israelis, who serve some of the world's best coffee, had better tastes.)

But just as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is held as true in the Arab world, even though it is a fake, so the hoax Schultz letter is reason enough, it seems, to trash the London Starbucks shop.

The international Left has long embraced the trappings if not the actions of radical jihadism – even down to adopting the odd gesture of throwing shoes because they are meant to be a terrible insult in Arab countries.

All of this, O’Neill sums up, is a display of political irrationalism based on rumour and prejudice:

“The Starbucks story…shows how susceptible the anti-Israel movement is to myth and misinformation. Because it is not grounded in any clear anti-imperialist ideas, or shared vision or argument on Israel/Palestine, this grouping can be easily invaded and energised by all sorts of myths, horror stories and hoaxes. Lacking a political anchor, it can be swayed by waves of conspiracy and speculation.”

In other words, Israel is the perfect surrogate for all that the Left hates about the Western culture and values – that’s why none of them are out calling for the overthrow of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.