Pond-dwellers can't take the moral high ground

Time to catch up with Seth Freedman’s piece about Rowan Laxton, the UK senior Foreign Office official who unleashed a torrent of antisemitic abuse in a health club during Cast Lead and who was prosecuted for it last week – and found guilty.
At times like this Freedman oozes oleaginous sanctimony. It’s as if he is saying “Look at me, I am condemning antisemitism so how can you possibly call me antisemitic?”. Well – we do. This is the man who spoke of the “cancer of Israeli settlements”. The man who wrote:

“but surely if there was no zionism, there’d be no objection to letting the palestinians be part of the future state, and hence they’d not be “the same battered Palestinian population on its doorstep”. once you remove zionism from the equation, the rest of the racist policies currently in place ought to collapse like a house of cards, and the country becomes a democratic state for all its citizens.”

And Freedman has made a number of Nazi analogies, as AKUS documented here on CiFWatch.
Sure enough Freedman slips into this unctuous homily about the Laxton case the Livingstone Formulation (the antisemitic accusation that Jews use the charge of antisemitism as a means of stifling criticism of Israel (‘antisemitic’ because it denies the right of one – and only one – minority to protest about racism)) :

There are those, myself included, who refuse to ascribe to the theory that all anti-Israel sentiment is rooted in antisemitism: to take such a view, as many do, is both disingenuous and dishonest, and is more often than not employed as a means of stifling any honest criticism of Israeli government actions.

And next we get a “dog whistle” word (a device which is Freedman’s speciality):

The fear and paranoia that engulfs much of the Jewish community in England is only fed by actions such as Laxton’s [emphasis added]

The sentence is anyway nonsensical. “Fear” suggests that Freedman recognises a genuine emotion; “Paranoia” suggest that he thinks the fear is unfounded or exaggerated. It can’t be both. “Paranoia?” Antisemitic incidents as measured by the CST were higher in the first six months of 2009 than in any full year since records began in 1984.
What then gives Freedman the right to suggest that fears of Jews in the UK are unfounded or exaggerated? What unbridled arrogance! A statement you will never hear from Seth Freedman (or any Guardian author for that matter): “The fear and paranoia that engulfs much of the Muslim community in England is only fed by actions such as those of the English Defence League”.
Where is Freedman’s  recognition of the appalling fact that in a western democracy where individual safety should be guaranteed by the rule of law, British Jews should be forced to take on the duty of the state and spend millions of their hard earned cash to protect schools, synagogues and communal buildings from the threat posed by the unholy Jihadi/SWP alliance?
And why is it that the Guardian’s stable of one trick ‘as-a-jew’ ponies – Freedman, Lerman and Klug – think they are the bees’ knees when it comes to telling the world about antisemitism?
POSTSCRIPT
Freedman has a new piece on CIF about Yom Kippur. Should he wish to use CiF Watch to apologise to all those he has offended over the past year, we would be delighted to accommodate him.

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