Last November, I had a truly extraordinary experience. Ι was invited to London, spoke at JW3 — the city’s main Jewish cultural and community centre — met members of the community, and had the honour of being the guest at the Melaveh Malkah dinner of a small, however very vibrant and diverse community Kesher Kehilah, hosted by a local Jewish Family in Golders Green.

It had been years since I had seen people so closely knit, so deeply bound to one another, and so instinctively compassionate. So profoundly warm.

Yesterday morning, I read, with dismay, the news that four of the community’s ambulances were set alight last night.

What happened was not unexpected. They had been bracing for it because this is the reality they live in every single day, and have for a long time, much like all Jewish communities across the diaspora.

Their synagogues are often concealed within houses so that they are not immediately visible, and so that they too do not one night go up in flames. This also ensures that people can worship without being confronted by ignorant left-wing fascists, arm in arm with Hamas’s thugs and assorted low-life morons, trying to bar their entry in the name of imaginary genocides.

And there is nothing new about this “genocide” rhetoric. This is a lie was fabricated as early as 1982 and has since been endlessly recycled.

So much for “genocide”: from 1.8 million people in the West Bank and Gaza in 1982, the population has risen to 5.7 million today.

What is taking place in Europe and across the wider West today is neither accidental nor self-contained. Nor will it end here. This is not the march itself; it is merely the overture.

Europe is going down. The West is going down — submerged in apathy, disinformation, and a variety of political correctness so corrosive that it tears freedom of speech to shreds the moment that speech strays beyond the boundaries of this approved madness.

This is a West that no longer dares to state plainly that Islamism — a fanatical sect that preaches, in the name of “Allah”, that unbelievers must be “corrected” — has no place among us. Nor, for that matter, does neo-Nazi violence. Nor does the violence of the Alt-Left when it dresses up its thuggery as ideology.

All of this is eating away at the West from within. And the tragedy is that, for as long as people insist on believing that the issue is merely “the Jews”, rather than the swelling ranks of empty-headed zealots who see enemies everywhere — in colour, in sex, in sexuality, in ethnicity, in “class”, in wealth — and who surrender themselves blindly to a grim fairy tale that wishes to kill the world in order to “revive” it back into the 6th century AD, obliterating everything that Western civilisation built, the decline of the West will be more spectacular.

The Jews will leave in waves, just as they did after Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in France, and as they are doing again now after October 7, and they will come to Israel where, I say this plainly myself, one genuinely does feel safer than almost anywhere else, once one has been marked out by these fanatics, whether by birth or by circumstance.

Europe and the West are what will remain behind with them: the fascists of both extremes, the parasites, and those incapable of building anything of their own, who instead vent their resentment and envy at what others have built, even though they themselves live off it.

For Europe in particular, it would be the tragic — and sadly well-deserved — future of a continent that, once again, watches its destiny unfold yet chooses to do nothing about it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)