The man who took down Corbyn over antisemitism gives Farage a free pass

Stephen Pollard is proud of the role he played in exposing antisemitism within the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – as you’d expect from the man who edited the Jewish Chronicle during Corbyn’s leadership. “No paper in Britain has done more than the JC to expose Mr Corbyn’s foul associations,” he once wrote.

Times, though, have changed. Corbyn is no longer Labour leader, and Pollard is now just a columnist in the JC, rather than its editor. Time seems to have changed his response when a party leader is accused of antisemitic connections, too.

The Guardian has been reporting a series of revelations on Nigel Farage’s schooldays, including claims he threw racist abuse at a private school classmate, and that he made gas chamber jokes to Jewish acquaintances.

Pollard is, once again, outraged – but this time his ire is aimed at the Guardian. In an article titled “The Guardian, the BBC and the weaponisation of antisemitism against the BBC”, Pollard insists Farage should be “judged on his actions today, not on schoolboy insults from half a century ago”.

This is an extraordinary reversal by any account. It was not remotely common nor acceptable in the late 1970s– Farage’s schooldays – to make jokes about the Holocaust to British Jews, many of whom lost relatives just three decades earlier in a mass atrocity.

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And as Pollard is surely well aware, when left wing activists claimed antisemitism was “weaponised” against Jeremy Corbyn, it was rightly called out as itself a claim diminishing the import of racism, and even suggesting that Jews were conspiring against a left-wing leader. Surely Pollard would not so easily throw around that same word himself, just because Nigel Farage’s politics are closer to his own?

Pollard insists that Farage should be judged for his more recent actions, instead of what he did as a schoolboy. Perhaps he is right, but he certainly seems unaware of Farage’s more recent actions.

Maybe Pollard would like to consider what Farage meant in 2017 when he complained that a “Jewish lobby” has disproportionate “power” in US politics? Maybe he would be more interested in Nigel Farage’s repeated appearances on the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show – especially given Jones has regularly hosted notorious antisemites and given them a friendly audience?

Surely, once Pollard learns of some of Nigel Farage’s more recent actions, an appalled column and a campaign will follow? Because if not, he risks looking awfully insincere…