There is a narrative on the hard left that calling out anti-Semitism is somehow at the expense of calling out Islamophobia. It is wholly false and divisive. In reality, Jews and Muslims need to stand together now more than ever.

I have seen the narrative take a number of forms.

1. “Not voting for [anti-Semitic] Labour is a vote for the [Islamophobic] Tories”

Patently untrue. There are other options. No one owes either major party their vote.

2. Equating criticism of Islamic extremism and terror (sometimes by Jews or their allies or other critics of Corbyn) with criticism of all Islam and Muslims.

This is as wrongheaded as suggesting that all criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic.

3. That standing up for Jews against anti-Semitism = support of everything Israel does = support for the oppression of Palestinians = somehow inherently Islamophobic.

There are so many non-sequiturs in here that I don’t know where to start. But I see it often.

It would be horribly ironic if the bigotry of hard left and hard right had the effect of *splitting* the targets of their hatred rather than *uniting* them. Coming from the left myself, this sort of thing used to be called solidarity.

And let’s be clear. There is not a finite amount of caring we can do about these subjects. There is room in any heart, any country, any discourse, to object to the marginalisation of both Jews and Muslims. Caring about one doesn’t use up all your care about the other.

There’s often an even more pernicious (and more usually unspoken) thought at work here, which is that Labour is somehow for Muslims and the Tories are for Jews. Whatever basis this has in psephological truth (I think very little) it is utterly cancerous to our social health

It should be just as possible to be a British Jewish Labour supporter as to be a British Muslim Tory. That it is increasingly hard to be either is an indictment of the parties themselves, not of Jews or Muslims.