Mick Hartley

Khaled Hassan, in the Telegraph – As an Egyptian, I know this truth: deranged anti-Semitism is normal in the Arab world.

For the past 14 years, my professional life has been dedicated to a single discipline: mitigating risk. In this field, one anticipates the usual obstacles – a scarcity of resources, a failure to grasp the scale of a threat, or a simple deficit in technical know-how. These are the standard hurdles of the trade.

Since relocating to Britain in 2016, however, I have been confronted by a challenge of an entirely different order. It is a cognitive and moral blind spot so profound it has redefined my understanding of risk itself.

In this country, we excel at recognising the peril of anti-Semitism. We meticulously document the alarming rise of the world’s oldest hatred. We convene conferences, host government briefings, and launch parliamentary inquiries to dissect and decry it.

We do everything, in fact, except the one thing that truly matters: applying our vigilance where the threat is most acute and culturally entrenched.

And that would be, in the Arab world. Or, more generally, in the Muslim world – where antisemitism isn’t an aberration, but the norm.

It confuses the existence of prejudice in Britain, where it is rightly treated as a social disease to be eradicated, with another country where it is not even recognised as a sin.

This refusal to acknowledge a qualitative difference is not liberalism; it is a form of civilisational suicide. It is the reason, that instead of applying increased scrutiny to cases like that of the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, he was able to naturalise and become a British citizen.

It explains why, at a time when the BBC diligently investigated historical allegations against Nigel Farage, it platformed Alaa’s sister, Mona Seif, without the most basic due diligence into her social media, which appeared to glorify Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.

This same naivety is why Britain’s political leadership, including the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, could repeatedly engage with Alaa’s family and with Alaa himself during his imprisonment in Egypt, yet seemingly fail to detect their documented history of extremist and anti-Semitic sentiments. It is why Britain looks the other way when individuals with such profiles incite virulent hatred.

This approach privileges a feel-good narrative of universal sameness over the uncomfortable truth. It leaves the most toxic strains of hatred to fester unchallenged, while we pat ourselves on the back for condemning their milder cousins in our own backyard.