What a Recent Survey Suggests about British Muslims and Anti-Semitism

A polling company last week released the results of a major survey of British Muslims who live in areas where they constitute at least 20 percent of the population. The results, according to Tom Wilson, are not encouraging:

What the findings of this poll point to is that there is now a sizable portion of the British Muslim community that holds views completely at odds with the pluralistic values that liberal democracies depend upon to function and survive. Take what British Muslims think about other minority groups such as Jews and homosexuals. In the . . . poll, 52 percent said they thought homosexuality should be made illegal in Britain. And what respondents had to say about Jews was no less shocking. Well over a third repeatedly endorsed wildly anti-Semitic statements.

No less than 44 percent of Muslims agreed that Jews have too much power in the business world, 38 percent said Jews have too much control over global affairs, 39 percent said Jews have too much influence over the media, and 26 percent said that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars. Additionally, 34 percent agreed that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” However, when questioned, only 10 percent could accurately identify the number of Jews actually murdered in the Holocaust.

Cautious estimates from other research suggest that Muslims may be responsible for somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, despite making up only 5 percent of the population. Yet talking honestly about this problem remains difficult. The notion that one minority group might be responsible for directing bigotry against another seems to be incomprehensible to polite opinion. The overarching narrative remains that racism happens only in one direction, from the Caucasian majority toward everyone else.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, European Islam, Homosexuality, Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF