Where is the evidence to support charges against the Tories' new ally, asks Stephen Pollard.

There are few things more despicable than anti-Semitism, but here's one of them: using a false charge of anti-Semitism for political gain. Yet it seems there are few depths to which some will not sink in their desperation to damage David Cameron.

Last month, the Tories' new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament elected its first leader, Michal Kaminski, an MEP from Poland's Law and Justice Party. Mr Kaminski is a mainstream, centre-Right politician who would, were he British, fit naturally into the Atlanticist, free-market wing of the Conservative Party. As the first MEP from Eastern Europe to lead a group in the parliament he is, in many ways, a beacon: a man who was brought up under Communism but who hero-worships Thatcher and Reagan, and a living representation of the freedom brought by the collapse of Communism.

But no sooner had he been elected, than allegations started to be spread, suggesting that he was an anti-Semite. A Tory MEP, Edward McMillan-Scott, justified his decision to stand against Mr Kaminski for the parliament's vice-presidency (for which he was expelled from his party) by accusing him of having "fascist links" and saying he "symbolised the rise of disguised extremism in Europe". A New Statesman writer then collected a series of slurs, which were taken up by Denis MacShane MP, the former Europe Minister and now the chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. Mr Kaminski was, wrote Mr MacShane, guilty of "Jew-baiting".

As editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and Mr MacShane's predecessor at the EISCA, I am more alive than most to anti-Semitism. But there is simply no evidence that Mr Kaminski is an anti-Semite, only a series of politically motivated assertions. The main accusation is that Mr Kaminski "tried to cover up one of the worst anti-Jewish atrocities in wartime Europe", as Mr McMillan-Scott put it, referring to the 1941 Jedwabne massacre in which a group of Poles murdered their Jewish countrymen. He continued: "In 2001, the then president of Poland organised a national apology, but Kaminski opposed it."

The intention is clear: to accuse Mr Kaminski of sympathising with the murderers. But this is a grotesque distortion. Mr Kaminski's argument was that apologising for the collective guilt of Poles let the individual murderers off the hook. Far from trying to cover up the massacre, he was using the president's apology to make a wider point: that the massacre was not committed by "the Poles" against "the Jews", but was a vile crime committed by specific individuals against their fellow nationals. If veterans of the Communist era were into apologies, he said, they should apologise for something for which they were responsible, such as the regime's anti-Semitic campaign of 1968.

A further accusation is that, in an interview, he said that he would apologise only if someone "from the Jewish side" apologised for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941. Mr Kaminski flatly denies this, and no one has produced a shred of evidence to contradict him.

The other specific claim is that Mr Kaminski was a member of the National Rebirth of Poland, as it is now known. Certainly, that organisation is now anti-Semitic and neo-Fascist. But when he joined it, as a 15 year-old, Poland was under Communist rule, and the Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski was a magnet for many anti-communists as one of the few Polish nationalist groups. Experts say that the group was not anti-Semitic back when Mr Kaminski was a member. And even if it had been, are politicians to be judged on their behaviour as 15 year-olds? Is John Bercow still to be held accountable for the views of the Monday Club?

None of the supposed evidence sticks – but that is because there is another story altogether going on here. Mr McMillan-Scott is a euro-enthusiast, who sought to undermine his own party's position from the very moment David Cameron announced his intention to pull out of the federalist European People's Party. To those whose loyalty is, above all else, to a European federation, the new grouping is beyond the pale.

I know myself the tactics that such people use. I worked in Brussels for seven years from 2001. Early on, I condemned the banning of the Belgian far-Right party, the Vlaams Blok, which had a number of elected officials. I argued that, repellent as the party was, democracy meant that it had a right to exist and seek election. From then on, almost any view I expressed on Belgian politics was met with the lie that I was a Vlaams Blok supporter.

Far from being an anti-Semite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists. Ironically, it is Mr McMillan-Scott who has repeatedly called for Israel to engage with Hamas – an organisation which is committed by charter to the destruction of Israel. Yes, the resurgence of anti-Semitism is a serious and worrying issue – but to use it to further your political ends is mudslinging of the most disgusting kind.

Stephen Pollard is Editor of 'The Jewish Chronicle'