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 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.