Tweets: Solicitor sent messages to KC and journalist
The High Court has upheld the decision to strike off a solicitor over tweets on Israel and Palestine, saying they showed “unvarnished antisemitic racism”.
Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that not only were the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s (SDT) findings open to it but they were also correct.
“Indeed, the tribunal could not rationally have reached any other conclusion than that Mr Husain had, over a long period, repeatedly tweeted in terms that were both grossly offensive and antisemitic,” he said.
The SDT decided last year that Farrukh Najeeb Husain’s tweets shifted from making potentially valid political points “to being purely offensive and stooping to use racist and antisemitic language”.
During the course of the hearing, it said, Mr Husain’s position “transitioned from portraying himself as a stout defender of freedom of speech to being a person who had been angry and depressed and not able to control his impulses when sending offensive and antisemitic tweets”.
This shed light on his “lack of restraint, lack of judgement and lack of insight on his conduct”.
The SDT said it was concerned that he would behave “in similar vein with clients and members of the public who did not share his views or who he perceived were challenging him”.
Mr Husain, who qualified in 2014, was struck off for multiple tweets on the Israel/Palestine conflict back in 2021 aimed primarily at Simon Myerson KC, as well as Hugo Rifkind, a journalist at The Times. Both are Jewish.
There were offensive tweets on other ethnicities and sexualities as well, while Mr Husain had been offensive to the official at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) investigating him, calling her “a Zionist apologist and fascist” and accusing her of being against him because of comments he had made about Sikhs.
Mr Husain challenged the SDT decision on freedom of speech grounds and Chamberlain J endorsed the reasoning of the Bar disciplinary tribunal in the case of Jon Holbrook, which said that for the expression of a political belief to be such that it diminished the trust of the public in the particular barrister or in the profession as a whole would require something more than the mere causing of offence.
It said: “At the very least, the relevant speech would have to be ‘seriously offensive’ or ‘seriously discreditable’…
“Even in such cases there would have to be a close consideration of the facts to establish that the speech had gone beyond the wide latitude allowed for the expression of a political belief, particularly where the speech was delivered without any derogatory or abusive language and the objection was taken to the political belief or message being espoused, rather than the manner in which that belief or message was being delivered.”
This meant there was a two-stage test, Chamberlain J said. First, were the tweets antisemitic and/or offensive or inappropriate? If so, did they amount to a breach of the SRA principles and professional conduct?
It was clear the SDT had found some of the tweets “seriously (rather than just barely) offensive” and did not misdirect itself as to the high bar required, he held.
The SDT used the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition and examples of antisemitism, and the judge rejected Mr Husain’s criticism of it doing so, discussing instead how to apply it consistently with article 10 rights of freedom of expression.
The SDT’s conclusion that a number of tweets individually and collectively demonstrated a hatred or prejudice towards Jews “was not only open to it but also, in my judgment, clearly correct”, he went on.
Chamberlain J said: “When on 3 May 2021 Mr Husain tweeted that ‘No Muslim should buy The Times, it is a bigoted pager with numerous Zionists working for it like David Aaronovich, Daniel Finkelstein etc.’, he singled out two prominent Jewish journalists.
“There was no reason to mention these individuals other than they are well known to have Jewish ancestry. There were many other journalists writing for The Times who had also expressed views which could be described as ‘Zionist’ using Mr Husain’s very broad understanding of that word as encompassing anyone who supported the existence of the State of Israel. They were not singled out.
“On 23 May 2021, Mr Husain referred to the same two individuals and added a third ‘Zionist… idiot’: Hugo Rifkind, another prominent and well-known Jewish journalist. In context, the word ‘Zionist’ being used as a code word or ‘placeholder’ for ‘Jew’.
“The tribunal was also entitled to see in these posts a reflection of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the media is controlled by Jews and the antisemitic trope that Jewish citizens are more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of the countries of which they are citizens.
“The tribunal was entitled, and in my view clearly correct, to regard these posts as instances of antisemitism.”
Other tweets said the establishment of Israel involved the displacement of the Palestinian people by Jews who in the immediate past originated from outside the land.
While these fell “in principle” within the bounds of legitimate political debate, the judge said Mr Husain “chose to deliver it in racially charged terms”, using phrases such as “Zionist pig”.
The judge went through multiple other tweets that he found the SDT was entitled to see as “attempts to racialise” the point Mr Husain was making.
In one, Mr Husain said: “Israel wants to sing at Eurovision so they should relocate to Eastern Europe where Netanyahu and his vile kind along with Turds like Yitzhak Shamir emerged from.”
Chamberlain J observed: “If a statement of this kind had been made about black politicians whose ancestors had come from Africa, there would be no doubt about how to categorise it.
“There should be no doubt about this post either. It is an example of unvarnished antisemitic racism.”
There were parts of the SDT’s judgment which “could be seen” as reflecting a view that speech which denied the Jewish people their right to self-determination and/or claimed the existence of Israel to be a racist endeavour was ipso facto antisemitic.
“If and to the extent that the tribunal took that view, they were in my view wrong to do so,” he said, noting that the IHRA definition did not say this either.
But any such error was “not material”, because the many other tweets “amply justify the tribunal’s ultimate conclusion” that, when viewed collectively, the tweets were “founded on hatred or hostility towards Jews”.
Chamberlain J added: “Indeed, the tribunal could not rationally have reached any other conclusion than that Mr Husain had, over a long period, repeatedly tweeted in terms that were both grossly offensive and antisemitic.”
He also rejected Mr Husain’s appeal against sanction, finding “no error of law or principle or approach” by the tribunal.
This judgment seems in itself to be antisemitic, conflating strongly criticising the political ideology of zionism (most of whose adherents are not jewish) with hatred of jews as a whole. And using the widely criticised IHRA definition in its decision making is troubling. Why is it assumed that naming 2 prominent zionist journalists means that all jews are being criticised? It seems a long stretch. Maybe there are other, more obviously antisemitic posts not mentioned here? Otherwise, this seems a highly disproportionate sanction.