As Labor politicians in Britain continue to prove themselves to be anti-Semites, their party has taken to pointing to the Tories’ “Islamophobia problem” in order to change the subject. Brendan O’Neill comments:

[I]t is wrong, and historically infantile, to speak about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the same breath. This isn’t to say that there is no anti-Muslim prejudice. Of course there is. Some people are deeply suspicious of Muslims and even view them as the despoilers of our apparently hitherto pristine European civilization. And some Tories—very minor Tories—appear to have shared memes or articles that contain such views. That’s bad. But anti-Semitism is different.

Anti-Semitism is older. It is far more entrenched in certain European circles. It is far more historically given to mass acts of violence, from pogroms to extermination. And—the really crucial bit—its re-emergence always tells us something important about the destabilization of society and its descent once again into irrationalism, conspiracism, scapegoating, and fear of modernity. That is why the recent return of anti-Semitism, . . . leading to the casual spread of pseudo-radical conspiracy theories and even to horrific anti-Jewish violence . . . in countries like France, Belgium, and Sweden, deserves our serious attention. Because this return of the old hatred speaks to an unhinging, a moral disarray, a crisis of reason. And yet if we focus too hard on this, and try to have a reckoning with it, the opinion-forming set will breathe down our necks: “And Muslims? What about them? You don’t care?” It looks increasingly like a tactic of distraction.

Anti-Muslim prejudice unquestionably exists, but Islamophobia is an invention. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the Runnymede Trust, one of Britain’s leading race-equality think-tanks. It openly boasts that it is “credited with coining the term Islamophobia . . . in 1997.” And what does this term mean? It doesn’t mean racial hatred. Runnymede’s definition of Islamophobia, which has been adopted by [London’s] Metropolitan Police, includes any suggestion that Islam is “inferior to the West,” and even the belief that Islam is sexist. If you think Islam is “unresponsive to change,” you are Islamophobic. And, get this, if you “reject out of hand,” “criticisms of the West made by Islam,” you’re an Islamophobe. So even to ridicule Islam’s view of the West is apparently to be infected with the “cancer” of this so-called racism. . . . That is chilling.

The war on Islamophobia is in essence a demand for censorship. To compare this “racism” invented by the chattering classes twenty years ago to millennia of outbursts of violent hatred for the Jewish people is historically illiterate and morally repugnant.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.