In the fall of 2015, the parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn assumed leadership of the Labor party, thus delivering it into the hands of the far left. Corbyn’s rise—with all that it might mean depending on the results of tomorrow’s parliamentary election—has been accompanied by the increasing frequency of anti-Semitic outbursts by Labor politicians and officials. James Kirchick comments:

The overripe anti-Semitic rot within Labor party smells worse than ever thanks to Corbyn, who, in addition to being a sympathizer of the Irish Republican Army and practically every anti-Western political tendency, spent more than 30 years on the backbenches consorting with a wide variety of Jew-haters. There was his well-known reference to Hamas and Hizballah as “friends”; his sharing a stage with Dyab Abou Jajah, the Lebanese man who called 9/11 “sweet revenge” and said Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion”; [and] his inviting the Israel Arab hate preacher Raed Salah to parliament. . . . Just recently, . . . it emerged that, less than a year before assuming the party leadership, Corbyn attended a ceremony in Tunisia where he laid a wreath on the grave of a PLO terrorist involved in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. . . . .

All this is necessary context for a recent survey that found 40 percent of Britons to be concerned about anti-Semitism on the right, but only 36 percent about anti-Semitism on the left. When the former is negligible and the latter is rampant, what explains the disparity?

One possibility is that Britons are simply unaware of the facts just enumerated and default to a conception that automatically correlates anti-Semitism with the political right. But this is hard to believe, considering the massive press coverage the various Labor anti-Semitism scandals have received in the less than two years that Jeremy Corbyn has been leader, and the absence of similar outrages on the right.

A second explanation is that many people don’t consider Corbyn & Co.’s obsessive anti-Israel activism to be anti-Semitism at all, but rather see it as a perhaps eccentric form of anti-imperialism—the premise presumably being that Israel is part of some global imperialist cabal or is a micro-imperialist power with regard to the Palestinians. This applies a nefarious double standard to anti-Jewish prejudice. . . . If Corbyn had spent 30 years sharing platforms with the [extreme-right] British National Party and Northern Irish Loyalist militants, would anyone at the Guardian or other fashionable precincts of the British left hesitate to conclude he was a racist, fascist, sectarian?

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.