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This is quite funny. Tony Greenstein, "a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a member of Jews Against Zionism," has done what might have been the short work of pointing out the many intellectual and moral blindspots of Channel 4's racist berk Richard Littlejohn. The occasion was a Littlejohn-hosted program on the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK.

The best apoplectic Brit blogger (and fellow Eustonista) Mr Eugenides shows how sad it is when Greenstein is unhorsed in this endeavor. This is Greenstein at Comment is free:

The main thrust of the programme was the alleged increase in anti-semitism. Yet even the statistics used by the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Anti-semitism show (paragraph 29, page 14) that there was a 14% decline in anti-semitic incidents from 2004 to 2005.

Oh dear, Tony, you shouldn't have linked to the report. For when you check the citation, you find this (pdf):

In 2005 the CST, a charitable organisation which provides security and defence services and advice to the Jewish community, recorded 455 antisemitic incidents, a 14% fall from 2004, but the second highest annual total since the Trust began recording incidents in 1984.

So anti-Semitic incidents fell from their highest-ever annual total in 2004 to their second highest-ever annual total in 2005. In other words, you've just cited a report that shows that anti-Semitic incidents are indeed at an all-time modern high.

Now, it's possible that Greenstein stopped reading at the comma after the word "2004", and so didn't realise his schoolboy error. The alternative – that he read the whole sentence, clearly understood it, and then deliberately misrepresented its import – well, that would be fatal for his credibility, wouldn't it?

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