There is an unending supply of dubious claims in the British media. Some, however, are rather more easy to discern than others. When Prozac Nation author and noted plagiarist Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote in the Guardian – at the height of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza – of an upwelling of “the purest antisemitism since the Nazi era” evident everywhere outside America, it didn’t take a genius to start raising eyebrows. “Excepting a business trip I took to England, Scotland and Ireland in early 2002,” wrote Wurtzel, “I have not been to Europe since 9/11. It’s become an unbearable place to be”. A startling claim indeed – though, as Steven Poole was moved to wonder, if Wurtzel hadn’t in fact been to Europe in the last seven years, how exactly did she arrive at this assessment? The same way, presumably, she found out that Chomsky’s work pertains to “the distinctions between Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy”.

Other dubious claims are not quite so easy to spot. The Observer, for instance, recently reported some scary statistics under the heading “Rise in anti-Semitic attacks ‘the worst recorded in Britain in decades’”. Citing figures produced by the Community Security Trust, “the body that monitors anti-Jewish racism”, and comments made by CST spokesman Mark Gardner, the report painted a bleak picture of anti-semitism in Britain, with reports of “members of Britain’s Jewish community fleeing the UK with antisemitic incidents running at around seven a day this year”.

Leading Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland later relayed the same statistics from the CST. “According to the Community Security Trust, the body that monitors anti-Jewish racism,” he writes, “the four weeks after Cast Lead began saw an eightfold increase in antisemitic incidents in Britain compared with the same period a year earlier. It reports 250 incidents - nearly 10 a day - the highest number since it began its work 25 years ago.” Freedland goes on to jab the finger of blame firmly in the direction of the left. There is “more than a sin of omission here” he claims – continuing:

“At the London events, there were multiple placards deploying what has now become a commonplace image: the Jewish Star of David equated with the swastika. From the podium George Galloway declared: “Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943.”

“Now what, do you imagine, is the effect of repeating, again and again, that Israel is a Nazi state? Even those with the scantest historical knowledge know that the Nazis are the embodiment of evil to which the only appropriate response is hate. How surprising is it if a young man, already appalled by events in Gaza, walks home from a demo and glimpses the Star of David - which he now sees as a latter-day swastika - outside a synagogue and decides to torch the building, or at least desecrate it? Yet Galloway, along with Livingstone, who was so careful in July 2005, did not hesitate to make the comparison (joined by a clutch of Jewish anti-Israel activists who should know better).”

So determined is Freedland to indict the left for helping foment such despicable anti-semitic attacks that he drags in the most threadbare claims to support his argument. Are we really meant to believe that the kind of person inclined to torch synagogues is going to be spurred on by a particular sensitivity to the evils of Nazism? Are we really meant to believe that those who are sensitive to the evils of Nazism are likely to be so profoundly affected by the fusion of a swastika and the Israeli flag (not the isolated Star of David) that the bloodlust will descend upon them at the mere sight of a synagogue?

The Guardian’s editors joined in a few days later. As they stated in a Leader column:

“There is an ill-considered tendency to reach for the language of Nazism in order to excoriate Israel, regardless of its impact on the climate of tolerance. Last month, a rally in defence of the people of Gaza that included verbal attacks on the so-called “Nazi tendencies” of Israel was followed by actual attacks on Jewish targets in north London.”

It is hard to imagine a sentence more irresponsible than the one with which this passage concludes. Where exactly is the connection between the rally, the verbal attacks, and the physical violence except in the minds of the paper’s editors? Replicating Freedland’s logic, the paper is insinuating what it cannot substantiate, let alone prove. And once again, it cites the Community Security Trust’s figures on “anti-semitic incidents”.

So who in fact are the CST? As it turns out, the organisation have a record of producing spurious accusations of anti-semitism. Their 2007 “Anti-Semitic Discourse” report (pdf), for instance, condemns the “Boycott Compendium” of the laudable Boycott Israeli Goods campaign as exemplifying a “highly pernicious form of anti-semitism”. Its Director of Communications even wrote to the Independent recently to condemn an innocuous letter by Rod Cox as “repeating the self-serving canard … that Jews are cunning co-ordinated liars”, and concluding that “[f]or Cox and so many others, [Independent writer] Howard Jacobson’s identity obviously counts for far more than his many carefully written words and articles ever will” (you can read the original letter, and Gardner’s reply, here). Yet the organisation has had its “anti-semitic incidents” figures replicated right across the British media, including by the BBC, the Independent and the Telegraph.

It is certainly true – at least on a certain fringe of the left – that “some within its ranks now risk sloppily allowing their horror of Israeli actions to blind them to anti-Semitism”, as the Guardian suggests; but this process has been hugely exacerbated, if not primarily driven, by the spurious accusations of anti-semitism continually levelled against critics of Israel by its supporters. It is true also – as though it were ever open to doubt – that those despicable individuals who vandalise graves, spread anti-semitic graffiti and target Jewish people with verbal abuse or physical violence on account of their ethnicity or religion deserve to be condemned in the strongest terms. Israel and its supporters are emphatically not congruent with the Jewish community in general – much as its most fervent supporters, in enthusiastically conflating the two, have again helped contribute to that impression. But, in an apparent attempt to present an image of moderation and distance itself from the “crazies”, the Guardian has not only been levelling spurious accusations of fomenting racism at the left. Along with the rest of the British media, it has been purveying claims that “anti-semitic incidents” are at an all-time high – the kind of claim that always seems to emerge, expressed in ever-more alarming terms, with each fresh spike in Israeli violence – via a source with a record of publicly conflating criticism and activism against Israel with anti-semitism. Vigilance against racism is a very necessary endeavour. But where, we might ask, is the vigilance against those who would impugn critics of Israel with unfounded accusations? If this recent performance is anything to go by, it is nowhere to be seen.