What is antisemitism? What is Islamophobia? Or, to turn it on its head: can opposition to Jews or Muslims ever be ethical?

To my mind the best place to start is Dr.Martin Luther King Jr’s most famous phrase: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Too often the second half of this is forgotten. We have rightly given up judging people by that which is no fault of their own, or even no fault at all – skin colour, parentage, looks, disability, sexual orientation – but, it seems, at the price of abandoning the essential human faculty of judgment altogether.

9/11, the Bali bombings, the Madrid train bombings, Beslan, the Tube & bus bombings, Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Mumbai bombings of 2005 and 2008, Westgate mall, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Orlando, Nice, Tanta, Manchester Arena, Barcelona, Sri Lanka. In each case the mass-murderers have expressly claimed that they were killing in the name of Islam. Should this not be abhorred and opposed? If we pointed to such acts and said that they are essential to Islam and that all Muslims would like to commit similar given the opportunity, that would indeed be bigoted, wrong and worthy of the epithet Islamophobic. The way is open for peaceful Muslims to condemn them and assure us that is no part of their interpretation of Islam: and indeed the Ahmadiyyas, Sufis, Baha’is, Ismailis, Balochis, Azeris and Kurds do just that. But jihad bil saif – religious killing – is alas integral to Wahhabi, Salafi and Deobandi Islam. And those branches applaud this killing.

We should never forget the Muslims killed by Da’esh, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, the Taleban and many other Islamist groups throughout Asia and Africa. The numbers are hard to establish, but around 1,000,000 over the past 20 years is not an over-estimate. As my friend, the scholar David Hirsh wrote in 2017: “This is not a fight against Islam, it is a fight against a specific political movement which claims to be the sole authentic practice of Islam… Jihadi totalitarianism is a form of Islam, but it is only one form; there are other traditions, there are better ones; and they are much more widespread. Most Muslims hate and fear the Jihadis.”

There is a small but real jihadist threat to Western civilisation, and it is made worse by the likes of Corbyn, Melenchon and Ocasio-Cortez whose anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-American Marxism disables integration

It is not antisemitic to judge individual Jews by their words and deeds. In the same way it is not Islamophobic to condemn Muslims who incite jihad bil saif. A definition of Islamophobia that would catch people like Michael Gove, a man who wants nothing but peace & prosperity for his fellow-citizens, is unjust and cannot be supported.

Most Jews are serenely unbothered by Richard Dawkins: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” We have the moral maturity to realise that the bloodthirsty elements of the Tanakh were appropriate to their time, and 3,000 or more years later we have not just the right but the duty to lock them in their historical setting and be guided purely by the moral elements that chime, to use Steven Pinker’s phrase, with the better angels of our nature.  To fail to hold Islam – or indeed any other religion – to the same standard is the racism of low expectations. It is unworthy.