The atrocity of this historical allusion

What did you get for Christmas? I got called a Nazi. That's a bit of an exaggeration. I actually got called sexist and ageist, my sexism and ageism "echoing" Nazism. But still, Nazism was invoked.

How I can be an ageist at my age I don't know. Nor does it seem allowable that I should be accused of sexism, given the low opinion of my own sex I entertain. Nazism, however, is another thing again. People should think twice before accusing you of actual or echoed Nazism. I accept that there is a certain Aryan something-or-other about my bearing and demeanour, even when I am out of uniform, but appearances set traps for the unwary. What if I were Jewish? What if I had family who had been killed by the Nazis? How would the person who Nazified me in the letter pages of this very paper feel then?

I'll try it, of course, should a Fourth Reich materialise around me and should I find myself having to answer questions of a racial nature – "I echo Nazism," I'll say to Goering's great-great-grandson, "despite anything you may have ascertained to the contrary, I am one of you. Barbara Smoker said so in a letter to The Independent."

Barbara Smoker, should you have forgotten, is the 79-year-old woman (if that is not an ageist, sexist thing to call her) who is taking the BBC to the Court of Human Rights to compel it to open "Thought for the Day" to atheists. What I have to decide is whether I should be taking her to the Court of Human Rights for calling me an echo of the Nazis. Perhaps they could save time and run the two cases together. "Is this what we want to hear on 'Thought for the Day', m'lud, atheists charging anyone who disagrees them with them of racism, supremacism and calculated extermination?" Except that that might look as though I were taking the side of the BBC, which I would never do. I might be a Nazi but I am not a fool.

Forgive my embroiling you in this. I do not as a rule reply publicly to people about whom I have already written. I have my shot, they have theirs, they slink away defeated – I see no reason to take it further than that. Once, it's true, I did challenge Steven Berkoff to a game of table tennis – that arbiter of all disputes, whether of the heart or the mind. As to the outcome of that challenge, who won and by what margin, my lips are sealed. Wild horses etc. Other than to say that had we been competing for a cup, it would now be on my mantelpiece.

In the matter of Barbara Smoker, however, I relax all rules. No reticence, no indifference, and no table tennis. Here is matter too deadly to take lightly.

"Howard Jacobson ridicules me for bringing a legal action against the BBC rather than collecting knitting patterns or taking old-time dancing lessons," Barbara Smoker writes. "How sexist, how ageist, can you get? It echoes the Nazis' relegation of women (of whatever age) to domesticity." What I actually said was: "That a woman of 79 should choose to busy herself this way, when it would be so much easier for her to while away her hours collecting knitting patterns or taking old-time dancing lessons with fellow secularists her own age, is entirely admirable".

Never mind whether Ms Smoker has spent her life amid discourse so slippery it means the opposite of what it says; and never mind whether a little more time listening to "Thought for the Day" would have taught her, at the least, that "entirely admirable" does not mean utterly ridiculous. What counts is that she chooses to misread and to report falsely what I wrote. That I did go on to ridicule her in the course of my column, I do not deny. Ridiculous, I said, to argue that we live in a secular world but that secularity never gets a look in. Ridiculous to campaign for the right to voice a thought, and then to fail to find a thought to voice. But this was ridicule on intellectual grounds. And to have taken issue with me here would have denied Barbara Smoker the chance to nab me as a sexist, an ageist, and as one who reminds her of Nazis – rallying cries, all, for the closed of mind.

In the give and take of controversy, there is often to be found a species of hysterical deafness, a pathological refusal to listen to your opponent that is nothing but the conscious sign of your buried desire to silence him. Pursue Barbara Smoker into the internet and you find that she produces and sells her own facetious anti-Christmas Cards. I am myself no lover of Christmas cards, neither the look of them as aesthetic objects, nor, for the most part, the sentiments they express. But their existence causes me no offence. And since their pietism is purely seasonal and absent-minded, I do not feel that it engulfs my world. What the noise in one's head must be to need see off these trifles with rival trivia of one's own, to feel one must hound even the most residual manifestations of an ailing faith, to give those who think differently from you no breathing space, I cannot imagine. But that it is an illness of sorts, I do not for a moment doubt.

An illness and a wickedness. The Nazi tarbrush, wielded irresponsibly, in a pet, or to rouse your allies in a common but unassociated cause, does damage to us all. It makes a mockery of history, minimising the actual atrocities of Nazism. When everything is a bit awful, nothing really is. And it weakens the obligations of memory and consideration we bear to one another. Why me, Ms Smoker? What is the unholy nature of the thrill you feel, squeezing my name and the word Nazi into the same paragraph?

Think about why you need to.