As Jews were herded into a caged court, Islamists bellowed ‘Allahu Akhbar’: Villa Park was a failure of British leadership

For their troubles, the police herded a group of them into a caged basketball court amid chants of “death, death to the IDF”.

So this is where propaganda leads. Over the last two years, the sympathies of the country have been steadily turned against the Jewish state by a relentless stream of bias from the BBC, the United Nations and social media.

As a result, ordinary people were made to equivocate in their instinctive support for Israel after October 7, then to abandon it altogether. Night after night, they had been subjected to pictures of suffering civilians – never suffering Hamas combatants – combined with disingenuous reporting that demonised the Jewish state. How were they expected to resist?

Meanwhile, the Islamists, who had stood against Israel even while Hamas was knee-deep in the slaughter, whipped up the mob. It was only a few weeks ago that it emerged that a local Birmingham imam, Asrar Rashid, had vowed that Tel Aviv fans would be shown “no mercy” on our streets.

And we were supposed to believe that Israeli “hooligans” were the problem?

One of the darkest lessons of the last two years is one that George Orwell articulated eight decades ago. “One of the marks of antisemitism,” he wrote, “is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”

Gaza was the most photographed war zone in the world, yet the pictures of supposedly starving children were exposed as fakes. A quick browse through the SnapChat pictures people were posting in Gaza revealed much food and no hunger. Yet still the West believed the “famine” myth.

Similarly, it was quite obvious from the very start that Israel could have liquidated the entire population of the Strip in a single afternoon from the air, without risking the life of a single IDF serviceman. Now that would have been a genocide. Instead, we had what? Leaflets. Phone calls. Evacuations. Truckloads of humanitarian aid.

Yet still the West believed in the “genocide”.

To this we can add the myth of Israeli hooligans. Never mind that the petition to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv commenced shortly after the draw was announced, before anyone had even uttered the word “hooligan”. Never mind that it was quite obviously a retrofitted excuse designed as a smokescreen for hatred.

Our society, it seems, has such a finely-tuned nose for prejudice against black people, Muslims, gay people and cross-dressers that it has exhausted its capacity to smell antisemitism, even when the stench is overwhelming. The flimsiest of excuses throw us off the scent. The flimsiest of masks.

What’s the Yeats line? “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” That sums up the state of the nation. After decades of reckless immigration allowed a foreign antisemitism to take root in Britain, we are led by a class that is more concerned with the rights of migrant criminals than it is with the wellbeing of Jews.

There are some, however, who do not lack all conviction. From what I hear, most of them are making plans to move to Israel.

Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself by Jake Wallis Simons is out now