It was the best of times and the worst of times. Indeed, as wrote Dickens about the French Revolution, it was. Looking back on the last two years since the October 7 war started with the barbaric killings by Hamas, I pause to reflect on how our lives have changed.

How there is no going back to what was, to before, to then.

Visiting Europe at the moment makes me consider, even further, how the world has changed. What was up is down and down is up.

In Copenhagen, the Resistance Museum narrates the rise of fascism and collaboration with the Nazis together with the increased resistance, especially during the latter years of the war. Denmark never had a large Jewish community, and the majority of them were saved by brave Danes who rowed them to safety in Sweden. Some were deported to Theresienstadt, but the overwhelming majority survived. Roughly 50 were deported to Auschwitz, the rest were not due to pressure by the Danish government. Additionally, they were able to receive packages from the Red Cross in Theresienstadt. (The hostages held in Gaza received no such visits.) As a result, over 95 per cent of Danes survived, by contrast in Poland 95 per cent were murdered.

In Hungary, there were close to 950,000 Jews before the war. When Germany invaded in mid-1944, they deported about 450,000 within a five-week period, the majority from the countryside and not Budapest. The Budapest Jews were forced into a tiny ghetto in late 1944 for about six weeks where many died from starvation and disease. The Arrow Cross hunted the Jews and pulled out many from the ‘safe houses’ established by Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, Giorgio Perlasca and other Righteous Gentiles.

Budapest has many Holocaust memorials and does not shy away from its fascist past.

A part of that is the incredibly moving shoe memorial by the Danube which commemorates the Jews who were shot into the river by the Arrow Cross after being forced to remove their clothes and shoes. But today, Budapest is a different place. Budapest is home to around 100,000 Jews who are able to openly be Jewish. There are many Israelis and there are a plethora of kosher eateries.

And then I think of good old England.

This is the England which 80 years ago fought against the Nazis, who didn’t hesitate to bomb the hell out of Germany, and who stood up for what is right. Today in England, Jews are being banned from a football game because of appeasement to Muslim fans. England is in serious danger of becoming judenrein. The powers that be keep on declaring that there is no place for antisemitism when there manifestly is a very big place for it. There is a petition to sack an Israeli professor. There are constant calls for boycotts by the Woke, propelled by venom whose hate has been allowed to metastasise due to government inaction. The NHS is infested with antisemitism, to such a degree that antisemitism training is about to become mandatory.

I cannot think of a greater contrast between Budapest, where a small pro-Palestinian rally was immediately shut down and England where rallies are increasingly loud and vicious and where a Jewish man was arrested for wearing a Magen David.

England … where two tier policing is standard.

I contemplate these two places and how the last two years have been nothing but heartache and betrayal for the Jewish community. From the obscenity of the October 7 pogrom to the embracing of it by the West, it has seemed that every day has been Groundhog Day. Stuck in the endless escalation of Jew hate, fuelled by feckless governments who care more about appeasing the Muslim vote, it seemed like the hostages would be stuck forever in the Hamas tunnels.

Now the living Jews are out and the remains of the murdered are slowly being returned by the Hamas barbarians.

But the Jew hate and libels continue.

The incitement and lies are unceasing. Educated people post calumnies on social media and think they are righteous. Rallies in Australia are violent cesspools, allowed to fester due to weak government and two-tier policing.

Hamas murders the Palestinians in the streets in Gaza and the anti-Israel mob is silent, just like all the influencers and the actors. There is no room for compassion for the returned hostages, let alone the dead ones, by the self-defined righteous, because, as appears to be their view, everything Jewish or Israeli or Zionist is inherently evil and must be destroyed, eliminated, exterminated.

And so I wonder, if the English or French or Australian Jews, Israelis or Zionists were to be lined up and shot into the river, would the Woke righteous say anything against? There might be a moment of regret, but, like their reaction to October 7, they would gaslight and deny and distort.

For that is their way.