Earlier this month, David Rose reported that Azhar Ali, a Labor party candidate in an upcoming British by-election, had been a trustee of a mosque that had brought several visiting preachers who expressed enthusiasm for terrorism. Some of Ali’s own vile comments about Jews and Israel also came to the surface and the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, at last expelled him. Starmer responded more quickly when Graham Jones, another Labor candidate for parliament, made similar remarks. Are the two incidents, and especially the party’s clumsy, foot-dragging reaction to the first, a throwback to the leadership of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, on whose watch anti-Semitism festered in the party’s ranks?

Rose observes:

One of the most depressing aspects of all this is something that is still too difficult to mention in sections of polite society: that the places where politicians are most likely to say vile things about Jews are those with large Muslim populations, where far too many voters have been conditioned by preachers such as those who give Jew-hating sermons at the Sultania mosque.

It’s a fact that “rock-solid” Ali was once a campaigner against extremism, and advised New Labor governments about it for five years. So if we were to be charitable, and prepared to conclude that he may merely be unprincipled, we could observe that he happened to think some inflammatory comments about Israel would help him get selected and win him votes.

The case of Jones, is, if anything, more depressing still. It suggests that despite the vigilance exercised by Starmer, there are far too many on the old, white, “anti-imperialist” left who instinctively assume the worst of Jews and Israel, and ultimately share the view that the Jewish state is a “settler-colonialist” entity that, ideally, should not exist.

And who is going to replace Ali in the by-election? Most likely the vicious George Galloway, a Workers Party of Britain candidate who has declared in print, “I glorify the Hizballah national resistance movement.”

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.