Isn’t it remarkable how similar anti-Zionism is to anti-Semitism? The latest proof of an intimate link between these two ideologies comes from Philadelphia. There, last night, a baying mob gathered outside a Jewish-owned restaurant to accuse the owners of being complicit in ‘genocide’. Guys, the 1930s called, they want their bigotry back.

Last night’s protest was a genuinely vile affair. Actually, ‘protest’ is far too grand a name for this kind of gathering. It was more like a mini-pogrom, the noisy harassment of a restaurant for its sin of being founded by a Jew. The restaurant is called Goldie. It is owned by Mike Solomonov, an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised, award-winning chef. ‘Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide’, the mob screamed.

Everything is fascism except fascism. It is doublespeak on steroids

It was a ‘blatant act of anti-Semitism’, said Josh Shapiro, the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania. Goldie was ‘targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli’, he said, and that isn’t politics – it’s ‘hate and bigotry’ reminiscent of a ‘dark time in history’.

Absolutely. The Philly incident directly echoes horrors of the past. Jewish-owned restaurants were frequently targeted in the anti-Semitic hysteria unleashed by the Nazis in the 1930s. False rumours were spread about the ‘dirty kitchens’ of Jewish-owned restaurants. Jewish-owned businesses, including eateries, were smashed to smithereens during the calamity of Kristallnacht.

One should never rush to compare events in the present to events in the 1930s. But really, it is almost impossible to speak about what happened in Philadelphia without at least thinking about Nazi Europe. To target a restaurant solely because its owner is of Jewish and Israeli heritage is unconscionable. It is racist. It is ‘deeply anti-Semitic’, as the left-wing Philly politician Ben Waxman said.

What is most bizarre is that the Goldie-demonising mob was no doubt made up of the kind of leftish people who have spent recent years fretting that Trump is the new Hitler. People who have wrung their hands over populism and Fox News and right-wing demagoguery, denouncing it all as 1930s-style hate. And yet here they are in 2023 doing the Brownshirts proud by intimidating a Jewish-owned business.

We have seen this time and again since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Supposedly ‘progressive’ activists who’ve been wailing for years about ‘the return of the 1930s’ have themselves behaved like throwbacks to the 1930s.

They have minimised the fascistic horrors carried out by Hamas. They have marched alongside radical Islamists who have crowed with glee over ancient massacres of Jews. They have turned a blind eye as people have branded the Jewish state a Nazi-like entity that now does to Palestinians what Hitler once did to Jews. That’s Jew-baiting, pure and simple. It’s an attempt to denude the Jews of their moral status by likening them to the monsters that murdered their forebears. Like the Philly mini-pogrom, it is a blatant act of anti-Semitism.

The rank hypocrisy of 21st-century ‘anti-fascism’ stands exposed like never before. Self-styled anti-fascists rage against the ‘gammon’ who vote for Brexit or gender-critical feminists who dare to say they don’t want people with penises – aka men – in their private spaces.

Yet when an event takes place that really does echo the violent anti-Semitism of the 1930s, they stare at their shoes. They make excuses. Maybe those pesky, evil Israelis had it coming, they say. This week, some bright young things at Columbia University will host a teach-in on the ‘7 October counteroffensive’. Counteroffensive? I’m sorry but you’ve spelt racist pogrom wrong there.

To virtue-signalling activists, Trump is Hitler, Brexit is the 1930s, Tucker Carlson is Goebbels. But the 7 October slaughter of Israeli Jews is a ‘counteroffensive’. Targeting Jewish-owned restaurants is ‘radicalism’. Calling for a global intifada alongside literal anti-Semites is a ‘peace march’. Everything is fascism except fascism. It is doublespeak on steroids.

Surely the Philadelphia pogrom masquerading as a protest will be a wake-up call to decent people. It is clear now that the radical animus for the Jewish State is pock-marked with darker, older hatreds. From its feverish boycotting of Israeli produce and people to its apologism for literal anti-Semitic violence, the Israelophobia of the influencer left echoes the 1930s far more than anything on the right does.

If people gathering at a Jewish-owned business to scream ‘genocide’, a word that haunts and horrifies Jews, doesn’t give the ‘pro-Palestine’ elites pause for thought, nothing will. We’re about to find out just how morally lost these people are.