This brings me to the main point about the Left and the West. If the moral basis of the democratic Right since 1945 was to preserve the free world from Communism, that of the democratic Left was to preserve it from a revival of Nazism. Anti-Semitism was the common factor in both forms of totalitarianism, in practice if not in theory, and so both Right and Left have a particular duty to expose and defeat it whenever and wherever it emerges. The postwar Right, both in America and Europe, has not always been staunch in its support of the Jewish people in general and the Jewish state in particular, but at least since the era of Reagan and Thatcher support for Israel and opposition to anti-Semitism in all its manifestations have been articles of faith for the majority of conservatives in the Anglosphere. Not so on the Left: there the demonisation of Israel — and, by extension, of the “Israel lobby” — has tempted the liberal conscience into adopting the vocabulary and agenda of anti-Semitism, from the Stop the War Coalition after 9/11 to the Occupy and BDS movements more recently. Above all, the Left has — thanks to its long-standing aversion to such slippery notions as imperialism, orientalism and, of course, capitalism — made common cause with radical Islam, which often presents itself in a revolutionary guise, as it did during the Arab Spring. The proposition that the West is responsible for most, if not all, of the misfortunes of the world, has a perennial appeal to the liberal imagination. Once, it meant turning a blind eye to crimes committed by Communist regimes and their proxies; now it has translated itself into an uncannily similar attitude to oppression in the Islamic world. This betrayal of the West — not unlike the flirtation with fascism of French intellectuals between the wars that Julien Benda dubbed the trahison des clercs — goes far beyond a fringe phenomenon.

Take, for example, the cult of Malcolm X, a racist and Islamist demagogue who has exercised a toxic influence on black communities ever since his assassination in 1965, yet is now canonised by white intellectuals. In a “Thought for the Day” talk given last month on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, which has up to ten million listeners, Robert Beckford informed the British public that they should “continue Malcom’s quest for race, class and gender justice”. Professor Beckford holds a chair of theology and culture at Canterbury — the place where, 1,420 years ago, an Italian monk called Augustine arrived on a mission from Pope Gregory the Great, converted Aethelbert, the Saxon King of Kent, to Christianity, and founded a monastery there. Thus we have the irony that a Christian theologian in the birthplace of what would become the ecclesia anglicana uses the BBC’s bully pulpit to promote the ideas of the founder of Black Power extremism, who taught that Christianity was the religion of white slave owners and is responsible for the spread of Islam among African Americans.