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.”

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.