Imagine having to be reminded not to be racist. Imagine if officialdom itself felt it necessary to whisper in your ear: ‘Lay off the racial hatred, yeah?’ That’s the mortifying fate that befell ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers on their latest big demo in London yesterday: the Metropolitan Police handed them leaflets pleading with them not to ‘incite hatred’ or express support for Hamas.

The shame of it. If there was a march so morally iffy its attendees had to be reminded not to cheer a medieval terror group that recently carried out the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, I simply wouldn’t go. There’s a delicious irony amid the grimness: the radical left loves to damn the Met as institutionally racist, and yet here was the Met having to tell the left to tone down the Jew hate.

Once again decent Brits will be saying, loudly and unequivocally, that Jews do not stand alone.

There will be no need for leaflets like that on today’s march against anti-Semitism. Thousands of people are heading into central London not to flirt with racism, but to condemn it. Not to rub shoulders with Hamas sympathisers, but to slam Hamas for its anti-Semitic barbarism. Not to damn Britain as morally irreparable – as some ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers have done, mainly because of Britain’s support for Israel – but rather to appeal to the moral decency that still courses in the veins of this great country.

The noisy minority have had their say every weekend for the past six weeks. Now it’s time for the silent majority to speak. Now it’s time for those of us who abhor anti-Semitism, long for the defeat of Hamas and who believe Israel has every right to defend its people and its democracy from violent neo-fascism to raise our voices in the streets.

I have been on many demonstrations in my life. But I can say without a flicker of doubt that today’s march will be the most important I have ever attended.

The fallout from Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October exposed an alarming moral faultline across the Western world – not only over Israel/Palestine but over Western civilisation itself. Britain and other nations seem split between a loudmouth activist class that thinks the West corrupt, racist, oppressive, and probably deserving of attack by ‘resistance’ movements like Hamas, and a less loud swathe of society that is watching this orgy of fashionable self-loathing with growing horror. Today, the latter group finally has a chance to say: enough.

The main reason I’m attending the demo is to let the Jews of Britain know they are not alone. The silence from so-called anti-racists as anti-Semitism soared in the wake of 7 October was shameful. We’ve seen Jewish schools attacked, Jews harassed as they leave their synagogues, posters of the Jewish children kidnapped by Hamas defaced and destroyed. And yet from the chattering class’s self-styled warriors against racism, there has been a chilling, shaming silence.

These are the kind of people who think it’s racist to ask a person where they’re from. Who can forget the days-long storm they whipped up when Lady Susan Hussey asked charity worker Ngozi Fulani, ‘Where are you really from?’ And yet they say nothing when Hitler moustaches are drawn on the faces of kidnapped Jewish toddlers. Or when their own fellow marchers gleefully chant about ancient massacres of Jews. Or when the word ‘Gaza’ is daubed at the entrance of a Holocaust museum.

These are the kind of people who wring their hands over the racism of ‘cultural appropriation’. Who unwittingly contribute to the gaiety of the nation with their mad prohibitions on the wearing of sombreros or Native American headdresses. And yet they say nothing when people culturally appropriate the uniform of the demented anti-Semites of Hamas and parade through central London. Dressing like a Mexican – bad. Dressing like a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation – knock yourself out.

Our zany student unions are at the forefront of the rage against white folk wearing ethnic clobber. And yet when the Union of Jewish Students recently sent a template letter condemning anti-Semitism to every student union in the land, only five signed it. The blue-haired moral guardians of campus life are more offended by a drunk rugby lad in a Latino hat than they are by the violent, visercal return of Jew hatred.

And these are the kind of people who cheered the #MeToo movement. Who describe everything from a wolf whistle from a building site bloke to an unwanted come-on in a bar as proof of ‘rape culture’. Yet when actual rape – not rape culture, rape – was unleashed by the monsters of Hamas against the women of Southern Israel, they stared at their shoes. As Nicole Lampert put it, it’s ‘MeToo unless you’re a Jew’.

The hollowness of the preening ‘anti-racism’ of our betters stands starkly exposed. It is now abundantly clear that for them ‘anti-racism’ is little more than a tool of moral distinction, a means of differentiating themselves from what they presume to be the bigoted masses. Such elitist showboating is worse than useless in the face of real racism, as we have discovered these past six weeks.

So now, those of who really do hate racism have to step up. Think about the message that is sent to Britain’s Jews when our influencers and intellectuals go dumb in the face of soaring anti-Semitism. When the opinion-forming set that rages against racism day in, day out has so little to say about anti-Jewish racism. When the cry of ‘MeToo’ suddenly evaporates following the brutalisation of Jewish women by racist, misogynistic terrorists. It tells them: you don’t matter. You are lesser citizens.

This is intolerable. It is unforgivable. Today’s march is as important as the great stand-off on Cable Street in 1936, when ordinary people stood shoulder to shoulder with Jews against Oswald Mosley’s fascists. For once again decent Brits will be saying, loudly and unequivocally, that Jews do not stand alone. That we have their backs. That this remains a good, fair and enlightened country. See you there?