If this is free speech, Mr Paulin, then give us silence

Tom Paulin has made a small reputation as a poet and a much more successful one as a pundit. He is a regular panellist on BBC2's arts programme The Late Review, where he dilates on the week's cultural highlights. He has now widened his audience to include the huge Arab readership of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, which quoted his considered opinion that he had never believed that Israel had the right to exist, and that American-born Jewish settlers "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists; I feel nothing but hatred for them."

The Board of Deputies of British Jews is consulting its lawyers with a view to making an official complaint to the police about Mr Paulin's remarks, under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, which makes it an offence to speak out publicly in such a way as to incite violence against identifiable groups outside the UK. It will then be a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether to take Mr Paulin to court. Is this a sensible way of dealing with him?

We should not set out to break a butterfly on a wheel - but Mr Paulin knew that he was speaking to an audience who, for the most part, believe literally in what he was saying. He also knew that as a University of Oxford lecturer he was liable to be taken a good deal more seriously in the Arab world than he is taken here. His comments therefore cannot be forgiven as the poetic licence of an ivory-tower poet and critic who is ignorant of politics, ignorant of history. Like Salman Rushdie's remarks about Mohammed and the Koran in The Satanic Verses, Mr Paulin spoke deliberately and knew exactly what he was saying.

Even under normal circumstances it would be hard to overlook Mr Paulin's words, but these are not normal times. The war between the Palestinians and Israelis, for that is what it has become, fought with suicide bombs on one side and tanks and rockets on the other, has intensified the sensitivities of Jews everywhere, in Britain as in Israel, to the point at which accusations of anti-Semitism and Zionism are being more freely disseminated than at any time I can remember.

In Britain, we pride ourselves on freedom of thought and of conscience, but there have always been curbs on absolute freedom of speech, especially in times of political tension. Lord Devlin in his 1967 Report on the Press declared that diversity of opinion is the essence of freedom, yet Devlin himself, a distinguished Lord Justice of Appeal, would have been the first to uphold the distinction in British law between a healthy diversity of views and comments which incite violence and race hatred.

I nevertheless believe that the British Board of Deputies would be unwise to pursue Tom Paulin into court. Whatever the outcome, legal action runs the risk of making a martyr of him - and Mr Paulin, a radical Irish Protestant, would exploit that to the full. He could argue that his statements, however inflammatory, were remarks made as a private individual in a newspaper interview, and that they should not therefore be compared to, say, the anti-Islamic comments of Mr Rushdie.

If legislation pending in Brussels had already been enacted, Tom Paulin would probably be facing a custodial sentence. The EU wants to harmonise European law on xenophobia and racism so that any expression of hostility towards someone based on their "race, colour, descent, religion or belief" can be judged a criminal offence, punishable by a prison sentence. That way madness lies, or at any rate gross intolerance. The Weakest Link's Anne Robinson, and A.N. Wilson in this paper, might have ended up behind bars for their half-mocking abuse of the Welsh. The late Auberon Waugh would have had to write most of his abrasively witty columns at Her Majesty's pleasure.

For all its outbreaks of racism, Britain is, by and large, a vastly tolerant country compared with almost anywhere else in the world. We tend to find it hard to judge what transcends the boundaries of free speech to the point at which it should be banned, even while we applaud when the historian David Irving's Holocaust denial loses him his court case, or privately believe that any individual who preaches rabid anti-Semitism deserves to be prosecuted, since theirs is a deliberate and systematic attempt to incite their listeners to harm Israel and the Jews.

Paulin's offensive remarks might seem venial by comparison, but they have enraged many Jews who believe that anti-Semitism is on the increase in Britain under the guise of liberal dismay at the tactics of Ariel Sharon, and that even two years ago this almost casually violent language simply would not have come to the lips of a well-known liberal academic. There is a stridency here which disturbs me. There is nothing anti-Semitic about taking the side of very many Israelis who are appalled by Mr Sharon's iron fist, and who believe that Palestinian terrorism can be stopped only when Israel withdraws from the occupied territories. In Britain this should be a discussion which can be held without name-calling. What Mr Paulin has done is to make such necessary discussion more fraught and difficult. He should break his sullen silence and apologise publicly and unreservedly for his comments.