Earlier this month, British police visited the home of the journalist Allison Pearson to investigate whether a social-media post she had made a year ago constituted a hate crime, or, perhaps, a “non-crime hate incident.” Melanie Phillips explains that

it seems that she had called a group of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration “Jew-haters” (“seems” because in true Stasi fashion she wasn’t even told what she’d written or who had complained about it).

And what exactly is a “non-crime hate incident”? It is when the police investigate (and implicitly threaten) someone who has said or written something politically incorrect. Phillips continues:

This is utterly inimical to a free society. Or rather, it certainly should be. Yet it’s now utterly out of control. According to statistics from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces, more than 13,200 “hate incidents” were recorded in the twelve months to June this year; . . . police forces have recorded such incidents against a nine-year-old who called a primary-school classmate a “retard,” and against two secondary-school girls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish.”

One might think that, with such strict standards on expression, the British government would have also investigated the protest that prompted Pearson’s offending declaration. But that assumption would be mistaken:

For more than a year since the October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place in the streets of London and other cities aimed at intimidating Jews, chanting for their mass murder and the destruction of the world’s one Jewish state, and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of “genocide.” These demonstrations—and countless smaller but similar incidents—have left many British Jews too frightened to go into central London or use public transport.

Yet by and large the police have treated these behaviors neither as crimes (which they are on multiple counts in law) nor even as “non-crime hate incidents” (even though they are certainly peddling hatred under any reasonable definition). The police have simply stood by and allowed the streets to be made unsafe for Jews—while harassing Allison Pearson for protesting about it.

In a sense, the most successful negotiation with Hamas was the recent agreement securing the release of Edan Alexander, the last living hostage with a U.S. passport. Unlike those previously handed over, he wasn’t exchanged for Palestinian prisoners, and there was no cease-fire. Dan Diker explains what Hamas got out of the deal:

Alexander’s unconditional release [was] designed to legitimize Hamas further as a viable negotiator and to keep Hamas in power, particularly at a moment when Israel is expanding its military campaign to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas as a military, political, and civil power. Israel has no other option than defeating Hamas. Hamas’s “humanitarian” move encourages American pressure on Israel to end its counterterrorism war in service of advancing additional U.S. efforts to release hostages over time, legitimizing Hamas while it rearms, resupplies, and reestablishes it military power and control.

In fact, Hamas-affiliated media have claimed credit for successful negotiations with the U.S., branding the release of Edan Alexander as the “Edan deal,” portraying Hamas as a rising international player, sidelining Israel from direct talks with DC, and declaring this a “new phase in the conflict.”

Fortunately, however, Washington has not coerced Jerusalem into ceasing the war since Alexander’s return. Nor, Diker observes, did the deal drive a wedge between the two allies, despite much speculation about the possibility.