Many people thought it, some even said it. If Jews were going to face violent attacks in Europe and America in the modern era, they were going to come from Muslims. There was plenty of evidence: after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, one of the jihadi terrorist team made for a kosher supermarket in Paris, took hostages and murdered four of them before himself being killed. He didn’t hole up in Tesco.

So much for Jewish shoppers. A few months earlier a French Algerian Muslim just back from Syria chose for his target the Jewish Museum in Brussels. He murdered four people.

So much for Jewish tourists. Two years before that a jihadi on the run from killing three French soldiers, targeted a Jewish school, murdering a Jewish father, his two children and one other child.

So much for Jewish children. From these incidents and others grew a perception that the presence of a large number of Muslims in the West, and the radicalisation of a few of them was creating a threat to Jewish existence in some Western countries.

Some Jews took the logic a step further, As Dana Regev, an Israeli journalist based in Germany wrote earlier this week in the wake of the attack in Halle, “Some in the Jewish community — albeit not many — were foolish enough to think that the far right in Europe was now occupied with the 2015 immigration wave, mainly from Muslim countries. Some even had the audacity to celebrate the extremists’ rise.”

I wrote here in the JC about just this phenomenon in June 2018.

If we didn’t know better before, we surely do now. The Halle attacker, an internet-radicalised far rightist called Stephen Balliet, took his bombs and home-made gun to the synagogue in Halle after having first thought about attacking a local mosque. Frustrated by the security at the synagogue he shot a woman on the street and then went into kebab shop and killed a man there. Mosque-synagogue-kebab shop. You can almost hear his mind working.

It is almost exactly a year since Robert Gregory Bowers, 4,180 miles away in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and three semi-automatic pistols, murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue. 

What linked Bowers to Balliet was a very particular ideology. Fourteen months before Pittsburgh a torchlit rally called “Unite the Right” had been held in the Virginia town of Charlottesville. The key slogans chanted by the dozens of mostly well-dressed young men parading near the campus were “You will not replace us” which in many mouths become “The Jews will not replace us!”

The Jews will not replace us? Many people watching and hearing this slogan will have been confused. How are Jews in danger of replacing all these white guys? Mathematically it’s a difficult one. If they had been shouting “the Mexicans will not replace us” that would have been unpleasant and stupid, but might have made a little more sense.

The answer is that in the far right’s demonology, Jews do not replace white folk with Jews, but with everyone else – Muslims, Mexicans, black people, Chinese people, above all with mixed race people. Because what Jews want to see is the “mongrelisation” of the white race, its loss of racial identity and the dilution of its power. Once this has been accomplished then the stage has been set for global governance, for the New World Order, the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) in which the Jews – the only remaining group with a clear and separate identity – can rule over the planet. 

This is not a new strand of thinking on the racist far right. The idea of Jewish global government, of course, animates the forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, created before the First World War, and then viral immediately afterwards. And the sophistication – that Jews sought to weaken the white race by strengthening the cause of inferior races – was present almost from the start. For well over a century there was a strong strand of pseudo-social science that posited the danger of Jewish-inspired race-mixing. You’ll find it well represented in the segregationist propaganda of the post-war period in America. The active involvement of many Jews in the civil rights movement was regarded as proof if any were needed that this strange religion – so loyal to itself – was involved in destroying the white way of life.

Before Israel was founded Jews were, of course, nationally deracinated, the juif errant having scant loyalty to any particular country. After the Jewish state was created Jews were held to be loyal only to that. It would not matter to us then if tides of inferior persons invaded the West. In fact it would help us. And in ideologically racist minds, the Muslims or the blacks or the Latinos themselves being brown easily identifiably different and therefore inferior, could be not clever enough to organise their own takeover. For that you need someone infernally intelligent. For that you need Jews.

This history explains why some of us are so alarmed at the singling out of George Soros as an enemy by even sections of the mainstream right in America and Europe. It’s because the charge that a billionaire Jew is the organising genius of the undermining of nationality, of the challenge to “white” or “Christian” identity; that he is the prime mover in creating a globalised world, and is decisively active in promoting the cause of migrants and refugees from the US southern border to Hungary, fits almost exactly one of the most persistent and anti-Semitic charges. In fact the only charge missing is that Soros kidnaps Christian children and us s their blood in his matzohs.

I had seen and read all this on the fringe. Every now and again in my career I have received a letter or a postcard reminding me of my responsibility for bringing in Asians to drive out whites. But I never really thought that at the end of such a green ink screed could be someone who, eventually, might get in touch with dozens of like-minded people, discuss with each other what they’d like to do about it, become emboldened and then find means of enacting their very own bloody pogrom. 

But we live in the days where you can find online the comrades to egg you on, the means to publicise your actions, the resources to arm yourself,  and – if you act entirely alone – the capacity to avoid detection. And then you can go looking for Jews. Or Muslims. Or Latinos. Or kebab shop cooks. 

The far right is back to its Jew-killing. As you were. It’s 2019, Hitler is in his Valhalla and all’s wrong with the world.

David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times