In Britain, Anti-Semitism Has Become Normal Again

Earlier this week, the general secretary of the British Labor party, Jennie Formby, told her fellow party members that it is “impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so.” Perhaps so, writes Stephen Daisley, but “that doesn’t mean you don’t try.” Formby’s point, however, was to give herself an excuse for being less zealous in tackling her party’s infection by anti-Semitism, starting with Jeremy Corbyn, the fanatical Israel hater at its head. Daisley adds:

A decade ago, when I first began researching and writing about anti-Semitism, the talk was of the “new anti-Semitism” but what confronts us today is anything but new. It is the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the poisoned well and the puppet strings—updated, repurposed, made shareable but recognizable still as tropes from the time of Christ and before. There is more awareness now than ten years ago—the volume and outlandishness of anti-Semitism make it impossible to avoid—but while there is concern and even indignation, our response is muted by the sheer banality of this ever-restive evil.

Anti-Semitism has lost its visceral punch, its power to appall. It has become pedestrian, mundane. Like the frog in the simmering pot, we feel the temperature rising but cannot conceive of the boiling point. This is how bias makes its way into the mainstream, and anti-Semitism, to our boundless shame, is once again an idea of the mainstream. It is ceasing to be a prejudice and becoming a point of view. . . .

The Labor party, one of the largest left-wing movements in the world today, is owed a great debt of blame here. Evidence that it has allowed anti-Semitism to spill over into the mainstream left is abundant. The former MP Jim Sheridan has been readmitted to Labor following suspension for announcing he had lost his “respect and empathy for the Jewish community” because of “what they and their Blairite plotters are doing to [the] party.” . . . As the campaigning lawyer Mark Lewis writes of Jeremy Corbyn, “he has moved the rock and the anti-Semites have crawled out. They are not going back.” Corbyn did not shift that rock alone and neither did the left. . . .

Taki Theodoracopulos is the star columnist—and a gifted one at that—at [the Spectator], a magazine known for being firmly Zionist and even philo-Semitic. Yet a root around the Spectator’s archives throws up reams of self-indictment. He has called New York “Tel Aviv-by-the-Hudson,” claimed Jews “control Hollywood,” and declares “Jews are not the types to let bygones be bygones.” He has lambasted “rich American Jews who encourage unacceptable and brutal behavior against innocents,” averred that “the Jewish lobby in America has stifled debate,” and has pronounced that “almost all the people who have made billions through insider trading, greenmailing, leveraged buyouts, and junk bonds are Jews.”

Read more at Spectator

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labor, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

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.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023