The Left defines itself as international. This may explain the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of the Left’s support for Muslim and Islamist causes with which they have nothing in common. It is commonplace, but still strange, to observe some sheikh or imam on a platform calling for the murder of adulterous women, homosexuals, and Jews while some prominent Leftist sits next to him nodding in agreement — as happened recently when Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and a hardened Trotskyite, sponsored Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi and applied the word “scholarship” to the man’s subsequent preaching of hate.

Livingstone is now thrusting his twisted emotions on to the Left, the Labour party, and indeed the whole nation. Bradford is a Midlands city with a large Muslim population, not long ago the first to call for the death of Salman Rushdie and burn his Satanic Verses novel in public. Their member of Parliament was George Galloway, another hardened Trotskyite, notorious for glorifying Saddam Hussein to his face as “indefatigable” and proposing that Bradford be a Jew-free zone. At the last election, he lost his seat to one Nasreen (shortened to Naz) Shah, a woman in her forties and originally from Pakistan. She turns out to be little different from Galloway. She has compared Israel’s policies with those of Nazi Germany and proposed that all Israelis be transported to the United States — at last a “solution” as she chose to put it, one that returns their land to the Palestinians.

Mrs. Shah was suspended from the Labour party, and obliged to retract and apologize for her anti-Semitism. Whereupon Livingstone took the row on himself, defending Mrs. Shah and claiming that Hitler had wanted to send Jews to Palestine and was therefore a Zionist, and anyhow the Israel lobby effectively prevented him from speaking up. Livingstone proved that he was merely giving vent to prejudice when he then did the rounds of the media studios to give interviews. In one studio another Labour MP, John Mann, in an angry confrontation called him “a disgusting racist” and “Nazi apologist.” Livingstone has been suspended from the Labour party and a large number of MPs have turned to their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, with the further demand that he be thrown out of the party once and for all.

Corbyn has been leader for only a few months, in which his true character has so far been veiled. His opinions are Trotskyite nonetheless and he may or may not tailor them for immediate political gain. A long-standing critic of the European Union, for instance, in the face of the coming referendum, he has done a U-turn. A known supporter of Hamas and Hrzbollah, he probably shares Livingstone’s anti-Jewish hostility but would find it inexpedient to say so. The future of the Labour party hangs in the balance. The lesson to draw is that British politics have a new and unavoidable dimension. Muslims are brought up and educated to hate Jews, and as their numbers grow in the country that hatred is spreading into the general culture. Islamization is operating.