Owen Jones is lying about Israel. Plain and simple.

Owen Jones’s column in the Guardian is headlined ‘Anti-Jewish hatred is rising – we must see it for what it is.’ Sadly the article falls well short of that headline’s aspiration.

At one point in the piece Owen singles me out for criticism: ‘Take Douglas Murray, a writer with a particular obsession with Islam.’ (I suppose ‘obsession’, rather than ‘interest’, say, is intended to suggest something untoward. But I confess that I am indeed especially interested in one of the major stories of our day.) Owen goes on to say of me:

‘“Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill” was his reprehensible description of a Palestine solidarity demonstration last month. This is not simply an unforgivable libel against peace protestors – Jews among them – who simply object to their government’s complicity in the massacre of children. It makes it much harder to identify genuine anti-Semitism.’

Now I have had to pick Owen up on this before. But here we go again.

The last time there was an exchange between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Owen appeared on primetime BBC TV and seemed especially eager to claim, during a lengthy anti-Israel rant, that Israel was particularly interested in killing children. He said:

‘“I don’t want to just throw statistics around – I’ll give you one example of one of those children.  Omar Misheri [sic]. He’s 11-months old, he’s a little boy, the son of a BBC journalist and he was killed in a so-called “targeted strike”.’

Now as I noted here last year, the case Owen appeared to be referencing was the tragic case of Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi. The son of a BBC Arabic Journalist, he was indeed killed in a strike.