“Is Britain safe for Jews?”

That was the opening sentence of the lede—the lede of the lede, if you will (or even if you won’t)—of the opinion piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal. The next sentence laid out the case:

On Thursday authorities in Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, prohibited the fans of an Israeli soccer team from attending a match next month, even though the threats to cause trouble are coming from locals.

The game in question is scheduled for early next month as part of an international soccer tournament, and the Israeli fans have been barred because they might be victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it. A test, as instructive as it would be interesting to see, is whether British soccer teams and especially the teams’ owners will boycott those tournament’s games that are played in the UK, refusing even to take the pitch until Birmingham undoes its support for thuggery or until the British government overrules Birmingham’s instance of antisemitic bigotry.

Those locals, as the opinion expands, are primarily Islamists. Birmingham, and by extension the British government, through its studied inaction on the ban, so far indicate that they favor Islamist thugs and their thuggery over Israeli soccer fans and British non-Muslim subjects.

If neither government acts, then no, Britain is not safe for Jews, and that would be by British government, both local and national, design.

That would be beyond sad, it would be disgusting and despicable. The cradle of government by consent of the governed and of individual liberty would no longer be fit for civilized or even merely polite company.

Sometimes….

The subheadline laid out the concern and the potential for misunderstanding:

Attacks in Caribbean, aid cuts for Colombia and pressure on Venezuela blur lines between counternarcotics and regime change

When illegal narcotics are a nation’s major, if not primary, product, and that nation’s primary source of income is smuggling and peddling illegal narcotics, and especially if that nation’s illegal narcotics are killing so many of our children and young adults, then regime change becomes a necessary tool of counternarcotic operations.

The US does poorly at nation-building, which must follow—by someone—regime change. We were successful with Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII, but our record is very weak since then. Still, sometimes regime change is necessary, and this one, should it come to pass, will need the follow-on very carefully monitored—and guided, if the wrong builders show up.