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.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.