This is a sad, bad time to be British. We were once known as a cheery, fair-minded island race, who despite our bad teeth and bad weather secretly felt rather sorry for the other nations of the world, who didn’t appear to have our unusual twin talent combo of creating brilliant pop music and winning wars. No matter that we had to get used to our diminished power in the modern world, our conduct during World War II — such a tiny country, to stand alone against the Nazis until the rest joined in — made us sure that we were the Good Guys.

No more. In an astonishing reversal of morality, Germany now outlaws public displays of antisemitism such as the chant of “From the river to the sea,” which refers to the replacement of the Israeli state by a Palestinian one. At London, Metropolitan Police helpfully hold the Palestinian flags of protesters while they clamber onto war memorials, and stand by amiably as the slogan is beamed onto the Houses of Parliament.

This led one Conservative MP, Andrew Percy, to state “It’s the pathetic response we’ve come to expect from the Met — a force that has at times appeared to act more like a PR arm for the protesters than a law enforcement agency.” The situation has also caused the Israeli minister of diaspora and antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, to call London “the most anti-Semitic capital in the West.”

The British government’s counter-extremism commissioner recently confirmed that the center of the capital has become a “no-go zone for Jews” every Saturday as the streets are turned into one big rage-room by tens of thousands of people overcome by their desire to see the destruction of Israel. Many of these are young people, generally both expensively educated and utterly inarticulate, rendered incoherent by a toxic blend of narcissism and not listening in History class — imagine if Veruca Salt joined the Stasi.

It’s not just the center of the city; in outlying neighborhoods, Jewish children have been told by their schools to cover the emblems of their faith, and religious Jews, who will not attempt to pass for Gentiles, are attacked in the street. As I’ve said, the police are neither use nor ornament.

During a march last month, a clip of a policeman assuring a distressed young Jewish woman that swastikas — seen on many Palestinian banners — “need to be taken into context”  and are “not necessarily anti-Semitic or a disruption of public order” went viral. Yet earlier that month, a young Iranian man was, after being wrestled to the ground by five police officers, arrested for carrying a poster which read “HAMAS IS TERRORIST.”

With every week the conga-line of this danse macabre grows longer. No one with any nous believes that this is about the number of deaths taking place in Gaza; the big giveaway is that the first London rally took place before Israel fought back — it was a celebration of Jew-killing, the oldest hatred dressed up in fashionable new clothes. Privileged white Left-wingers and Muslim traditionalists — who hold opposing views on every social or sexual attitude imaginable — have bonded over their shared loathing of Jews.

The latest figures on antisemitic crimes are the highest since records began 40 years ago; for the first time, there was at least one incident in every police region in the UK, which means that antisemitism now exists in regions even where there are next to no Jews. That’s always the tipping point when nations turn poisonous.

The London rallies are about tormenting the Jews — one of the oldest, most successful, and peaceful of immigrant communities in Britain. They are about envy more than indignation, blood-lust more than a desire for peace.

Aldous Huxley wrote, “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” 

Watching the swastika-waving, hate-spitting crowds who spill into the streets of London every Saturday — and the fresh’n’funky antisemitism alliance can be satirized with such imaginary names as the Funky Paraglider Fan Club and  Feminists for Rape — one is hard put to know how this terrible situation will end. It’s pretty certain, though, that, this time, it won’t involve us Brits being the Good Guys.