The only issue has been when and where the first mob attack on Jews would happen

I’ve just been listening to the news. The report on last night’s events in Amsterdam included an explanation of the meaning of the word ‘pogrom’. Because that’s where we now are. In 2024, in the middle of a European capital city, pogroms are back.

Not that anyone, surely, is surprised. The only issue in the past year has been when and where the first large scale mob attack on Jews would happen. (Although it was nothing of the sort according to Sky News, which this morning told us that “football hooligans target Israeli supporters as disorder unfolds”. Nothing to see here, move along.)

There were, it’s clear, racist chants from some Maccabi fans in Amsterdam. But if your response to that is to believe it’s therefore fine to have a pogrom against Jews in response, then you are part of the problem.

One of the most obvious lessons from history is that when verbal and written Jew hate is normalised, violence always follows. Always.

And it is somehow appropriate, albeit grotesquely so, that the first European pogrom of 2024 (last October an antisemitic mob stormed an airport in Dagestan airport hunting for Jews after a plane landed from Tel Aviv) should be in the country that houses the ICC and the ICJ, which are seeking to punish the Jewish state for having the temerity to defend itself against the mass slaughter of Jews.

It was Amsterdam yesterday. Where next? Take your pick from anywhere where the authorities and politicians offer the trite incantation “Never again”. It’s become one of the golden rules of the public square that those two words (which really mean “Always again: here, now”) are only ever uttered after assorted Jew haters have been given licence to spread their poison more or less as they see fit. And before the same Jew haters are allowed to spread the same poison again.

Here in the UK the police do next to nothing as tens of thousands are allowed their regular Jew hate-fest, marching alongside openly antisemitic banners and chanting Jew hate slogans. Indeed, it seems as if more often or not it is those who expose the antisemites whose collar is felt, rather than the Jew haters, who are treated as if they are performing some sort of revered democratic ritual when they march with their “anti-Zionist” (is there anyone who still falls for that one?) banners.

It is all of a piece. Hate preachers are allowed to enter and roam the country at will. The odd one or two are banned, but it’s like pushing water uphill, so blasé are the authorities about who is actually let in. They are welcomed on campus and into mosques as if they are prized visitors of whose presence we should be proud as a nation.

“Globalise the intifada”, they all demand. Well, it is indeed globalised – and last night’s pogrom was just one form of that globalisation. More – and, I am sure, worse – is coming, because it always does when the authorities let it. All of the past year’s acceleration in Jew hate has been entirely predictable. As is what comes next.