Nick Cohen: telling lies about Bethnal Green

“Last week, [Oona] King and a group of mainly Jewish pensioners gathered for a 60th anniversary memorial service for the 132 people who died in the last V2 rocket attack on London in 1945. Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: ‘You fucking Jews’.”

So Nick Cohen claims in the Observer, 17 April

Dead Men Left points out that “Jonathan Freedland was at the memorial service Cohen refers to. He witnessed the horrid egging incident, and recorded his account in the Observer‘s sister paper, the Guardian. He is quite clear that no slogans or chants were heard. Cohen, not present at the event, and providing no source, claims that racist abuse was hurled. This gives every appearance of being pure invention.”

Dead Men Left, 18 April 2005

Freedland later returned to the estate where the egging incident occurred, and his findings concerning the motives for the attack are far from clear-cut.

Guardian, 16 April 2005