On Wednesday afternoon, I left America Online – better known to me now as the Axis Of Likud – after about 18 months of fully unfaithful service. Their homepage, news facilities, additional features and crappy chat-rooms had always been a pile of cack, the tabloid construction and phraseology of it all upsetting my acquired delicate bourgeois sensibilities; and of course like all good little radicals I know full well that big business = bad stuff. The immensity of the AOL-Time-Warner conglomerate has been irritating the back of my brain for quite some time now, but what really got me going for the final time was their rabid pro-war stance and their rather crass level of anti-arab prejudice and hysteria-building.

Before I go into this further, however, I suppose I ought to explain how I came to be there in the first place. My initial excuse is that at the time, I happened to have an AOL CD and no other, and that – having no credit card as such – hardly anybody else would accept my kind of a low-rent debit card. After that, as Thelma says, I just let it slide. A couple of months before I cashed in my chips with them, I happened upon a supposed ‘readers-own-true-story’ type article, which supposedly written by an ex-copper from the English north, and detailed his own mainstream-media fed experiences of the great (coal) strike of 1984/5. After listing the usual Express/Mail/Telegraph propaganda about restraint under provocation, drunken hooliganism and Arthur Scargill getting himself beaten up by overworked and overstressed policemen just to get a bit of media attention, he ended with the classic rejoinder: “but of course, we face a much greater danger today…” Meaning of course, anthrax factories in the old carpet storeroom rented out to an asylum-seeking Pakistani family above the pub on the corner in Crouch End.

The crunch came when I clicked on a link just before the outbreak of the assault on Iraq, asking me “were you on the demo?” Foolishly expecting enthusiastic teenage reminiscences from February 15th, I was somehow put through to a message board exhorting me to “send a message of support to our boys in the Gulf”. Suddenly imbued with a new-found sense of patriotism that had come out of the ether and taken me over, I entitled my message “good luck boys…” and went on, “good luck with Gulf War 2 syndrome and radiation sickness and leukaemia and countless other cancers from DU munitions, bogus inoculations, and probably much worse besides”; or something like that, anyway. Oh yeah, and just for good measure, “you muppets”. A little childish you may think - as I probably do by now – but they really got me mad there. I say maaaad, brother. The next time that I managed to get online (this always takes 8 or 10 attempts with AOL) a couple of hours later, I found that I failed to gain access at the point at which my password was checked. I did start to worry at this point, but I had no choice but to phone customer services – to discover that my password had indeed been scrambled, and that - for expressing a different opinion from the herd - I had been suddenly, and without so much as a warning, excommunicated! Garn. Apologising profusely and expressing some surprise that Jim Henson’s cute felt marionette/puppets were now considered by the general public to be profoundly expletive in character, I was warned by a call centre employee that if this ever happened again I would most certainly be barred from AOL membership for life, before she gave me a new password and then enthusiastically attempted top sell me a year’s subscription to AOL Broadband.

Further light research on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s website – www.palestinecampaign.org – informed me further of AOL’s interests in the land of the chosen few. Apparently, “America On Line (AOL)- Purchased 100% of Ubique Ltd. in Rehovot in 1993 for $14.5m. Purchased Mirabilis for $287m (5/98)”; and it’s by now well-known that Intel Pentium 4 chips are almost exclusively manufactured in either Israel itself, or else in factories that are situated in illegal settlements which are innocuously termed as Israeli “development towns”. So that’s how I came to leave AOL – I now pay for Internet usage with my phone bill, mentioning no names. Clearly you can’t boycott everything unless you want to live under a tree and eat berries, but I can’t think of a better place to start than with AOL.