For the past several weeks, the UK’s opposition Labour Party has been engulfed in controversy over charges of anti-Semitism. Americans may find it odd that in Britain this issue is considered a leftist phenomenon, but the collapse of the political center has brought to the fore what August Bebel once called “the socialism of fools.”

The saga began in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-Left backbench MP, shocked the political establishment by winning the leadership contest, further evidence that British politics has been going through Douglas Adams’ Infinite Probability Drive.

Almost immediately Jewish groups expressed concern about Corbyn’s record, and his previous references to terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends.” The following year, a party inquiry was launched after Bradford MP Naz Shah was found to have shared some post on Facebook calling for Israel to be “relocated” to the U.S. Also suspended was former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who proves Enoch Powell’s maxim that “all political careers end in failure,” although Livingstone’s political finale – which consisted of hiding in the disabled restroom at the Millbank studios to dodge reporters’ questions about his latest eccentric comments about Hitler and Zionism – fell especially flat.

Fifty years ago this month, Bolivian government forces shot dead the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, ending a decade of Communist activity by the celebrated guerrilla fighter.

American officials, in a private memo, described the cold-blooded killing as “stupid,” and it is easy to see why. Afterwards, as the body was laid out for the world to see, some local people began to cut off bits of his hair as relics. Rather than showing Che's defeat, the image of his corpse bore a striking resemblance to Andrea's Mantegna's “Lamentation of Christ.”  In death, Che became more powerful than ever.

Shortly before the killing, Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinello had acquired the rights to buy his Bolivian Diary, and was directed by the Cuban authorities towards Marxist photographer Alberto Korda to find a picture to illustrate it. Korda gave him an image he'd taken seven years previously, and which had until then appeared only on his own wall. When the book was published the following year the photo, showing Guevara looking into the distance and wearing a beret and severe expression, appeared on the front. Today it is known as Guerrillero Heroico - the “Heroic Guerrilla Fighter” – and while the word...

Those following Britain's increasingly eccentric politics will have heard of a new craze called Moggmentum - a sort of semi-ironic campaign to make Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg prime minister. And yet it may have ended with the country's unofficial Test Acts debarring religious believers from public life.

Rees-Mogg, nicknamed “the honourable member for the early twentieth century,” looks and talks rather like a British politician would in a Dick Van Dyke film set in Edwardian London. In an age of levelling, when even British public schoolboys can sound like Ali G, Rees-Mogg speaks in an Etonian drawl about his childhood nanny, whom he once took with him on campaign when he first ran for parliament in the tough Scottish constituency of Central Fife. He lost that, but eventually found the safe seat of North East Somerset, close to where he grew up and very much in the deepest heart of Deep England.

Back in 1999, when he was first trying to launch his career, it was thought that Rees-Mogg's “anachronistically posh” accent ruined any hope he had in politics, and yet like Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or UKIP's Nigel Farage, as well as his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson...

At the start of the Syrian migration crisis, an Israeli security official warned of a coming “European intifada.” Few noticed it at the time. But after a series of attacks on largely Jewish targets in France and Belgium, the new reality finally hit home in January 2015, when armed men opened fire at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Since then,  terrorist atrocities have escalated through Paris, Nice, Belgium, Sweden, Berlin, and London. They include the murder of a priest by two Islamists in Normandy as he was saying Mass.

Charlie Hebdo is a tedious and tasteless publication that makes fun of dead children and has predictable 1968 views on almost everything, except one of the most sacred: criticism of Islam. The day of the massacre Hebdo featured as its front page a caricature of Michel Houellebecq, whose controversial new novel was published that week. Soumission is set in a France in the near future in which an Islamist party has come to power with the connivance of both the Left and Right in order to defeat the nativist National Front. Houellebecq, already in trouble for criticising France's second largest religion in a previous work, has...

To be a political leader, especially of a progressive liberal party in 2017, and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible. I seem to have been the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in – in which case we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society.

Tim Farron's recent resignation speech was about as bitter and inflamed as politics gets in Britain's centrist party, the eminently reasonable and slightly dull Liberal Democrats. Mr. Farron, an evangelical Anglican from a working-class Lancashire background, had taken over the third party after its near-destruction in the 2015 election. Previous leader Nick Clegg – a multilingual, part-Dutch, Westminster school-educated former MEP married to a Spanish lawyer – represented almost a caricature of the global elites written about by Christopher Lasch. Farron came from a much older English left-wing Christian tradition that especially flourished in the country's rocky fringes and became the basis of the Liberal and later Labour parties.

Farron seemed to be in a good position coming out of the divisive and sometimes painful referendum last year, representing the disappointed...