The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland recognizes that Iran’s Ahmadinejad has stepped across a major line, but naturally Freedland’s got to find a way to blame it on himself. In his view, the reason for Ahmadinejad’s genocidal raving is that the Islamic world was “infected” by the West: The sickness bequeathed by the west to the Muslim world. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

I read the transcript of an interview with Basmallah, a three-year-old girl, again aired on Saudi TV, who was introduced as a “Muslim girl, a true Muslim”. Here’s the exchange:

Host: Basmallah, do you know the Jews?

Basmallah: Yes.

Host: Do you like them?

Basmallah: No.

Host: Why don’t you like them?

Basmallah: Because they are apes and pigs.

I shuddered to read such a thing. But it was translated and distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, and, like others, I wondered about the group’s motives: Memri was founded by a veteran of Israeli military intelligence. (On the other hand, few challenge the accuracy of Memri’s translations: unpalatable though they are, the texts Memri finds are all too real.)

Such has been my standard operating procedure, constantly trying to see if there’s a way to contextualise these incidents, to see them in proportion. My motivation was not complicated: I prefer my Jewish identity to be positive, rather than defined by a perennial defence against anti-semitism.

But everyone has their limits and last week I reached mine. On Thursday the president of Iran chose to stand with the cranks, neo-fascists and racists who deny the factual truth of the Holocaust.

“Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces,” said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Although we don’t accept this claim…”

Suddenly, the usual apologetics won’t work.

And that last line is the most interesting part of this article, as Freedland openly admits he’s an apologist for Islamic Jew-hatred.