As Labor politicians in Britain continue to prove themselves to be anti-Semites, their party has taken to pointing to the Tories’ “Islamophobia problem” in order to change the subject. Brendan O’Neill comments:

[I]t is wrong, and historically infantile, to speak about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the same breath. This isn’t to say that there is no anti-Muslim prejudice. Of course there is. Some people are deeply suspicious of Muslims and even view them as the despoilers of our apparently hitherto pristine European civilization. And some Tories—very minor Tories—appear to have shared memes or articles that contain such views. That’s bad. But anti-Semitism is different.

Anti-Semitism is older. It is far more entrenched in certain European circles. It is far more historically given to mass acts of violence, from pogroms to extermination. And—the really crucial bit—its re-emergence always tells us something important about the destabilization of society and its descent once again into irrationalism, conspiracism, scapegoating, and fear of modernity. That is why the recent return of anti-Semitism, . . . leading to the casual spread of pseudo-radical conspiracy theories and even to horrific anti-Jewish violence . . . in countries like France, Belgium, and Sweden, deserves our serious attention. Because this return of the old hatred speaks to an unhinging, a moral disarray, a crisis of reason. And yet if we focus too hard on this, and try to have a reckoning with it, the opinion-forming set will breathe down our necks: “And Muslims? What about them? You don’t care?” It looks increasingly like a tactic of distraction.

Anti-Muslim prejudice unquestionably exists, but Islamophobia is an invention. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the Runnymede Trust, one of Britain’s leading race-equality think-tanks. It openly boasts that it is “credited with coining the term Islamophobia . . . in 1997.” And what does this term mean? It doesn’t mean racial hatred. Runnymede’s definition of Islamophobia, which has been adopted by [London’s] Metropolitan Police, includes any suggestion that Islam is “inferior to the West,” and even the belief that Islam is sexist. If you think Islam is “unresponsive to change,” you are Islamophobic. And, get this, if you “reject out of hand,” “criticisms of the West made by Islam,” you’re an Islamophobe. So even to ridicule Islam’s view of the West is apparently to be infected with the “cancer” of this so-called racism. . . . That is chilling.

The war on Islamophobia is in essence a demand for censorship. To compare this “racism” invented by the chattering classes twenty years ago to millennia of outbursts of violent hatred for the Jewish people is historically illiterate and morally repugnant.

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.