Roll on Friday
A solicitor whose firm reported him to the SRA for dodgy tweets has been struck off.
Farrukh Najeeb Husain directed his ire at Jewish barrister Simon Myerson KC and Jewish Times journalist Hugo Rifkind. In the posts he called Rifkind a “Zionist pig” and said that Myerson “wreaks [sic] of white privilege”.
He also referred to Israel as “ShitRael” and asked Rifkind if he was “just mentally retarded as a racist?”
Bevan Brittan, where Husain is understood to have worked as a self-employed contractor in 2021, reported the immigration and employment lawyer to the SRA for his posts.
At his SDT hearing Husain argued that he was anti-Zionist and simply opposed to the state of Israel, rather than antisemitic, and that he had drafted his tweets poorly and hastily.
But the regulator said he appeared “to conflate antisemitism, anti-Zionism and opposition to the Israeli government” and had ended up “demonstrating hostility towards Jews because they are Jewish”.
Husain represented himself during the proceedings but rather lost his rag with the SRA, and with Capsticks, which acted for the regulator at the tribunal, and with Campaign Against Antisemitism, which testified on the SRA’s behalf.
The lawyer accused the SRA of “weaponising new antisemitism” and of being “in bed” with Campaign Against Antisemitism. He also claimed that Capsticks barrister Louise Culleton was a British “imperialist” who “bang[ed] on about the Holocaust because [she] wants to hide [her] country’s own crimes”.
At other points Husain asserted that Myerson was a “fascist”, and claimed the expert witness from Campaign Against Antisemitism was himself an antisemite who was “engaging in the antisemitic trope that there is a collection of Jews who are self-haters, who have turned against their nation and who are spouting conspiracy theories”.
He also went after the SRA’s investigating officer, sending “offensive emails when he was displeased with the course of the SRA’s investigation”.
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