Could there be a pogrom in London?

Thousands of British Muslims and Muslim immigrants marched through London on Thursday, chanting, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The Army of Muhammad is coming to kill you, too.” Khaybar, of course, was the site of a massacre of a Jewish tribe conducted by the Prophet Muhammad.

While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer cracks down on speech critical of immigration , he ignores the threat the United Kingdom’s Jews now face. British commentators and human rights advocates rationalize violence against synagogues as understandable given Israeli policies. This is equivalent to burning a church because of disagreement with Italy or vandalizing a mosque in protest of Saudi Arabia.

The real irony is that the same elites who engage in intellectual somersaults to say polemical attacks on Zionism have nothing to do with antisemitism now rationalize attacks on Jews as stand-ins for Israel. To warn against “visible Jewishness” is akin to issuing a travel warning for 1930s Germany without ever addressing the real problem.

Under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s direction, the Labour Party effectively became a hate group . Corbyn demonized Israel and Jews, consorted with and apologized for terrorists, and withheld judgment about violence depending on who its targets were. After Corbyn’s fall, many centrists sighed with relief. The explosion of antisemitism in British society, media, and universities shows celebrations over the defeat of antisemitism were premature.

What makes British antisemitism even more dangerous today is that it grows on both the Left and Right. On Thursday, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis voiced the fear of British Jewry. “Many in the British Jewish Community are feeling trapped between the anvil of the hateful far right and the hammer of the conspiratorial extreme left,” he wrote. “We call upon all decent people to reject hatred from wherever it comes.” Decency, however, is in short supply.

For many in Europe, pogroms, the extreme outburst of violence against Jews that included murders, beatings, rapes, and vandalism, are something foreign. My family survived czarist pogroms when my great-grandfather hid his sons, including my then-6-year-old grandfather, in a tailor workshop belonging to the czar within a small garrison. Up until his death, he could recall vividly watching Russian soldiers fire point-blank at baying mobs of Cossacks and neighbors seeking to scale the garrison. Soldiers fired not to save the lives of the families inside but rather because the workshop belonged to the czar. My great-grandfather then fled to the U.K. and onward to America.

Pogroms were not only an artifact of czarist Russia, however. In the mid-20th century, it was the Arab world’s turn. Despite romanticized and sanitized narratives about how Jews and Muslims lived together in peace and harmony prior to Israel’s creation, Jews from Cairo to Baghdad could not take their security and safety for granted in the 19th- and 20th-century Middle East. The flight of 700,000 Jews from Arab countries to Israel was neither spontaneous nor an accident.

In the mid-19th century, multiple pogroms swept major Persian cities. They were frequent across Europe dating to the Middle Ages, often blessed by the same churches that today turn a blind eye or rationalize violence against Jews. Birmingham was home to the original blood libel.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Back to the present day, could it happen again? In Paris, teenagers have attacked multiple Jews and even raped a Jewish girl, justifying their actions as the attacks occurred in their hatred of Jews and Israel. French authorities could say they were isolated incidents, but those teenagers were raised in an environment that indoctrinated them in antisemitism and rationalized hate and violence. The French and Belgian police understand the problem. They are the first to acknowledge the no-go zones that dot their cities.

The problem with London is that authorities seem to believe political pandering trumps morality. Denial is widespread. Antisemitism is normalized and violence rationalized. Jews are no longer safe in London, and so long as authorities refuse to address growing violence, it is only a matter of time until London suffers its first pogrom since the Middle Ages.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.