All these remarks apply with equal force to Britain, Germany and the rest of Europe. The German newspaper which reprinted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons was immediately the victim of an arson attack. Danish Jews are such a tiny group that they are down to three synagogues but this has not protected them from increasing threats. In Britain there was much mirth and some outrage over the misdescription of Birmingham as a Muslim city by the Fox News commentator, Steven Emerson—and rightly so. Birmingham, it was pointed out, was only 22 per cent Muslim. But not long ago it was zero per cent Muslim, and already there have been attempts at an Islamic takeover of schools there. As the Muslim percentage of the city's population heads on up towards 30 per cent one can't help wondering whether there might be more such attempts. One wonders, too, quite how secure the Birmingham Jewish community feels—and whether its numbers are already diminishing.

In recent weeks we have seen Jewish schools and synagogues in Britain placed under armed police guard. Last year the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain hit a 30-year high. During the recent fighting in Gaza things became so bad that it almost seemed that we would see a British kristallnacht. Our Jewish community is already down to 290,000 and Maureen Lipman is far from the only British Jew considering emigration.

This is an utterly shameful situation when one thinks not only of the huge Jewish contribution to British life but also of the fact that many British Jews came to this country as refugees because it was a bastion of freedom. Even in 1940 they could feel secure here: but are we any longer the Britain of 1940? After all, British Jews are an entirely peaceable community; they threaten no one. Attacking them for what Israel does is no more acceptable than attacks on the Muslim community would be because of the (much worse) deeds committed by IS or al-Qaeda.

Posing the problem like this will, of course, be unpopular. I have Jewish friends who tell me that although they frequently go to Israel they don't really like a society mainly composed of Jews, that Jews do better as minorities in other countries. It is the sort of crude generalisation that, generally speaking, only community members are allowed to make about their own community. But the situation is now so serious that we need to break out of such constraints and face the facts about what the growth of Muslim communities means. As things stand, the liberals whose main concern is to denounce Islamophobia are in fact agreeing to expel the Jews from Europe. This was exactly what Hitler wanted to achieve.

As the euphoria of the giant marches and the orchestrated solidarity with Paris dies down, what we have to deal with is that unless we stop and reconsider quite fundamentally, we will simply be carrying out the programme of the Third Reich.