The Houthi slogan reads: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” The middle three exclamations of this might be considered enough to disqualify the Houthis from mainstream political support in the West. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Last Monday, as news broke that a British Labour MP was going to host Ahmed Al-Shami, a Houthi spokesperson, in Parliament the following day, the reaction was one of resignation, rather than anger. “Sigh,” commented one parliamentarian. “Troubling,” was the response from another. Nevertheless, those parts of the Labour Party committed to fighting anti-Semitism in British politics mobilized and, by the end of the day, the invitation had been withdrawn. There is no longer horror when new evidence emerges of, at best, a careless attitude toward this most hardy form of racism by members of the UK Labour Party. Horror requires shock, and no one is shocked any more to discover anti-Semitism in the largest left-wing party in Britain. Nor is the new rise of anti-Semitism on the left only found in Britain. Leaving Europe aside, in the US there are repeated scandals as the darlings of the Democratic hard left repeat anti-Semitic tropes, seemingly unwittingly. Sometimes, when these tropes are pointed out to them, they are remorseful — no doubt genuinely. But, at others, they simply fight back, regarding the attack as just another bit of partisan gamesmanship. As things stands, the situation in the US is not at UK levels, but if the Democratic Party is seized by its left wing then you could wager on the problem growing. Last Wednesday, in the UK, the MP Chris Williamson had his suspension from the Labour Party lifted. It had been imposed on him after he said that the party had been “too apologetic” about anti-Semitism. It is hard to be “too apologetic” for a problem that is not only extremely serious, but ongoing. But his claim fits a pattern. When one defines oneself as "anti-racist," one has to wonder who in mainstream politics would describe themselves as "pro-racist" Peter Welby Peter Willsman, a (now-suspended) member of the party’s ruling executive, claimed in July 2018 that anti-Semitism in the party had been made up by “Trump fanatics,” that he had “never seen any” evidence of anti-Semitism in the party, and that it should “ask the… rabbis: Where is your evidence of severe and widespread anti-Semitism in this party?” So deep-rooted is the anti-Semitism on the hard left that Willsman was able to deny it exists using the anti-Semitic trope of blaming your problems on unnamed Jewish enemies. So how did a party that proudly defines itself as anti-racist reach this point? It has certainly confused many Labour supporters. One of the defenses used by those accused of anti-Semitism is that they couldn’t be anti-Semitic because they are anti-racist. It is in that claim that the nub of the problem may be found. The political left in the English-speaking world has always been moralistic, perhaps partly as a product of its longstanding association with Christian socialism, or maybe due to the internationalism that has often accompanied it. As a conservative (in both the political and the philosophical sense), it is infuriating to hear the implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim to moral superiority that suffuses much left-wing political discourse. It is blinkered. Certainly there have been great fighters against racism on the left — as on the right. But when one defines oneself as “anti-racist,” one has to wonder who in mainstream politics would describe themselves as “pro-racist.” Usually, one solves the conundrum by identifying certain policies as racist, but this is up for dispute. And, on the hard left, “anti-racism” is sometimes conflated with “anti-imperialism,” for which you can read “anti-Westernism.” It was this “anti-imperialism” that led Jeremy Corbyn, as a backbench MP, to invite supporters of the IRA to Parliament just after an attack on the prime minister — and Lloyd Russell-Moyle to last week invite a Houthi spokesman just after an attack on a civilian airport in Saudi Arabia. This brings us back to anti-Semitism, because the route to anti-Semitism on the left is often through Israel. Israel is supported by the West and, therefore, in this “anti-imperialist” view, must be bad and its enemies good. Imperialism oppresses the downtrodden but, so the thinking goes, Israel is powerful and Israel is a Jewish state, so Jews must be powerful too, and can’t be downtrodden. This view allows the hate of the Houthi slogan to be excused: The Houthis are “anti-imperialist.” “Zionist” has become a code word for “Jew,” and there is an assumption that any Jew must support all Israeli policies unless they explicitly say that they do not. In this atmosphere, it becomes easy for the cultural memory of hatred and irrational fear of Jews to return — that hatred born of the conspiracy theory that secret cabals of Jews control the world, which latches on to any Jew with a famous name in a position of power, from Rothschild to Soros. And, if someone is so convinced that they are on the side of the angels, and those who oppose them are therefore on the side of the oppressors, then anyone who points out the problems with such tropes and such attitudes must be part of the problem. The problem for the hard left is that it is partly defined by its opposition to Western hegemony. And that kind of opposition is harder to view in moralistic terms when one’s fellow travelers include the Houthis and Hezbollah, or Russia and Iran.