Founded in 1971 to combat white-supremacist groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) won a number of important legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazi groups, and other opponents of desegregation. Now it generates materials like its “field guide to anti-Muslim extremists”: a list of fifteen individuals that includes the historian Daniel Pipes, the apostate Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the British Muslim critic of jihadism Maajid Nawaz. Among Nawaz’s crimes are having tweeted a cartoon portraying Jesus and Muhammad, “despite the fact that many Muslims see [such depictions] as blasphemous.” Nick Cohen comments on what he calls “the white left’s first fatwa”:

Nawaz . . . and his Quilliam Foundation have struggled against both the white far right and the Islamist far right. They have defended liberal Muslims and, indeed, all of us from lethal blasphemy taboos and the threat of terrorism. They respect freedom of speech, including the freedom of their enemies to speak. . . . They think they should try to stop young Muslims joining Islamic State, not just for the sake of the Yazidis they will take into sex slavery, or the civilians they will tyrannize and kill, but for the sake of the young Muslims themselves.

A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten, and will use any smear to denigrate them. . . .

In the liberal orientalist world view the only “authentic” Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are “neoconservatives,” “native informants,” and “Zionists”; they are as extreme as the jihadists they oppose or, let’s face it, worse. In short, a section of the Western left has adopted the ideology of the Salafists, Khomeinists, and Islamists. . . .

Of course they could not leave alone Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became an atheist and denounced the faith of her childhood, and is hated by a section of the white left for doing what they do all the time. That Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards to protect her from Islamist assassins in no way restrained our Alabama witch finders.

The former Israeli chief justice Aharon Barak recently warned that the country could be headed toward civil war due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire the head of the Shin Bet, and the opposition thereto. To Amichai Attali, such comments are both “out of touch with reality” and irresponsible—as are those of Barak’s political opponents:

Yes, there is tension and stress, but there is also the unique Israeli sense of solidarity. Who exactly would fight in this so-called civil war? Try finding a single battalion or military unit willing to go out and kill their own brothers and sisters—you won’t. They don’t exist. About 7 percent of the population represents the extremes of the political spectrum, making the most noise. But if we don’t come to our senses, that number might grow.

And what about you, leader of [the leftwing party] The Democrats and former deputy IDF chief, Yair Golan? You wrote that the soldiers fighting Hamas in Gaza are pawns in Netanyahu’s political survival game. Really? Is that what the tens of thousands of soldiers on the front lines need to hear? Or their mothers back home? Do you honestly believe Netanyahu would sacrifice hostages just to stay in power? Is that what the families of those hostages need right now?

Israeli democracy will not collapse if Netanyahu fires the head of the Shin Bet—so long as it’s done legally. Nor will it fall because demonstrators fill the streets to protest. They are not destroying democracy, nor are they terrorists working for Hamas.