There was a horrendous far-right gathering in London yesterday. Racist cries cut through the air like a knife. One attendee wished death on an entire race. Others celebrated the mass murder of ethnic minority people. Some even wore fascist-adjacent uniforms, showing off their supremacist ideology to a shocked city.

People in London were cosplaying as Hamas murderers. And we’re told to worry about some noisy blokes in tracksuits having a run-in with cops?

I am speaking, of course, about the ‘March for Palestine’, not that collection of right-wing hotheads at the Cenotaph. Yes, those rowdy men were a menace. They certainly caused a headache for the cops. They accounted for the ‘vast majority’ of the 126 arrests made yesterday. But for the most visceral racism, the kind we dreamt had been scrubbed from our society, it’s the other demo you had to look to.

Essentially there were two far-right marches in London yesterday. There was the one the left are wringing their hands over today: the Cenotaph event. And there’s the one the left was actually on: the anti-Israel event. It was the latter that sounded fascistic to me, at times literally.

It was on the left’s march that we heard grotesque utterances you’d normally expect from fascists. One attendee said ‘Death to all Jews’. A mob gleefully chanted about the Khaybar massacre – a 7th-century slaughter of Jews by Muhammad and his army. This is a chant with one aim and one aim only: to strike terror into the hearts of Jewish people.

Some attendees wore Hamas-style bandanas. Just a month after Hamas committed one of the worst acts of racist barbarism against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, people in London were cosplaying as Hamas murderers. And we’re told to worry about some noisy blokes in tracksuits having a run-in with cops?

There was the usual Holocaust minimisation. Placards compared Gaza to Auschwitz – a grotesque lie designed to defame the Jewish state as the heir to the evil once visited upon the Jews. A woman waved a placard showing the Star of David mixed with the swastika, the implication being as clear as it was bigoted: Jews are the new Nazis. This is Jew-taunting, pure and simple. I saw nothing as morally rancid as this at the Cenotaph gathering.

It is true, of course, that not everyone on the ‘March for Palestine’ holds disgusting views like these. And yet, how many times can a person of good conscience march in the vicinity of Jew-haters before he thinks to himself, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this’? This is the fourth big ‘pro-Palestine’ demo at which there have been vile flashes of Jew hate. To mingle with anti-Semites once may be regarded as misfortune. To do it twice looks like carelessness. Four times? There’s no excuse for that.

The left’s rage against the right-wing mob at the Cenotaph strikes me as a cynical effort to distract attention from the vile racial animus we saw on the ‘pro-Palestine’ march.

Not only do they seem relaxed about sharing the streets with people who celebrate anti-Jewish massacres – they also provide moral cover for these lowlifes by saying: ‘Look over there! Look at the racist gammon whipped into a frenzy by Suella Braverman!’ Whether intentional or not, the result of their fury over the right-wing mob has been to bury the fact that fascistic hatred for Jews was given voice on the streets of London yesterday.

Yes, hard-right troublemakers are a problem. But to my mind, their threat pales into insignificance in comparison with the orgy of anti-Semitism we’ve been living through since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. This points to grave cultural fissures in our society and everyone who cares for our country’s future needs to start taking this more seriously.