The murder in Denmark of a Jewish man outside a synagogue is just the latest in a long series of acts of violence and murder directed at Jews in Europe over the last few decades. Only last month in Paris Jews were targeted and four were murdered at the Hyper Cacher Jewish super­mar­ket.

The Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has condemned the attack on Jews as an attack on democracy. The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, last month expressed concern at the growing numbers of Jews emig­rat­ing from France as they flee antisemitic violence. Even the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, expressed concern that Jews, no longer feeling safe in Britain, are preparing to leave. Other countries in Europe are also facing growing antisemitic violence and are having dif­fi­culty pro­tect­ing their Jewish citizens against har­ass­ment, assault, bombings and murder.

In Belgium, the Jewish Museum in Brussels was attacked and four people murdered in May 2014. In 2013, the last remaining Jewish school in Brussels instruc­ted its students to remove their kippot (Jewish religious head covering) on their way to and from school, and only wear it safely within the confines of the fortress-like school building, due to the threat of physical attack.

In Holland, in late 2010, Frits Bolkestein, a prominent Dutch politi­cian, advised Jews to leave Holland as it is no longer safe for Jews to live there. Earlier that year, the police in Holland had insti­tuted a system of décoy police, where Dutch policeman dressed up as Orthodox Jews and walked the streets, in a bid to arrest or deter those who would assault Jews.

In Denmark in 2009, a school refused to enrol Jewish students as it could not protect them from har­ass­ment and assault. Other Danish school prin­cipals supported the move. In Norway, a survey by the Oslo Muni­cip­al­ity in 2011 found that 33% of Jewish students in the town were phys­ic­ally threatened or abused by other high school teens at least two to three times a month. The groups that suffered the next highest amount of bullying were Buddhists at 10%, “Others” at 7%, and Muslims at 5%.

In Sweden, the Mayor of Malmo, where many Swedish Jews live, blamed the Jews them­selves for assaults on Jews and fire­bomb­ings of syn­agogues. Last year, a planned city walk by Jews and non-Jews to protest antisemitism in Sweden had to be cancelled due to security threats and the inability of police to ensure their safety.

France has exper­i­enced the most egregious acts of antisemitic violence in Europe since WWII. In 2006, a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, of North African back­ground was kidnapped and tortured for three weeks for being a Jew. He died of his injuries. His attackers were French Muslims, also of North African back­ground. In Toulouse in 2012, a rabbi and three Jewish children, aged under nine, were shot dead at a Jewish school by Mohammed Merah, a French Muslim of North African back­ground. Jews comprise only 1% of the French pop­u­la­tion, yet 50% of racist attacks in France are against Jews.

Christian Europe has a millennia long history of oppress­ing, per­se­cut­ing and murdering Jews, whether in the name of a super­ses­sion­ist religion, secular enlight­en­ment, nation­al­ism, or a racist ideology. The cul­min­a­tion of this history of per­se­cu­tion was the Holocaust in which the whole Jewish pop­u­la­tion of Europe and all lands under Nazism were targeted and marked for death. Six million Jewish men, women, children and babes were hunted down and murdered in the forests of eastern Europe and in the ghettoes and death camps through delib­er­ate star­va­tion, exhaus­tion, bullets and gas.

Seventy years after the Holocaust, the antisemitic virus has re-emerged from the extreme margins of society to which it had been banished after the Holocaust. Not only is antisemitism out in the open, it is brazenly public and proud. The main dif­fer­ence between 1930s antisemitism and the 21^st century strain is that in the 1930s it was gov­ern­ments and politi­cians which incited the hatred and per­pet­rated the murder. Today, the per­pet­rat­ors are a com­bin­a­tion of the far Right, the anti-Zionist Left, and major segments of Europe’s Muslim pop­u­la­tion.

A study in Europe in 2013 found that “26% of Jews have suffered from antisemitic har­ass­ment at least once in the past year, 34% exper­i­enced such har­ass­ment in the past five years, 5% reported that their property was inten­tion­ally van­dal­ized because they are Jewish, about 7% were phys­ic­ally hurt or threatened in the past five years.” These figures do not include the acts of violence and vandalism of syn­agogues and other Jewish communal insti­tu­tions.

Despite the focus on Islamo­pho­bia by the media and in political discourse over the last fifteen years, the reality is that attacks against Muslims are sig­ni­fic­antly less frequent than attacks against Jews. The evidence produced through studies by anti-hate organ­iz­a­tions, police reports on hate crimes, and monitors of internet hate, show that the major targets of abuse and violence in Europe are Jews.

In the USA, the FBI collects and analyses hate crime stat­ist­ics across the nation, with cat­egor­ies including Race, Religion, Sexual Ori­ent­a­tion, Ethnicity/National Origin, and Dis­ab­il­ity. These stat­ist­ics con­sist­ently show that it is blacks, Jews, homo­sexu­al men, and Hispanics who are the over­whelm­ing victims of hate crime. In the Religion category, Jews are the largest category of victims of hate crime.

For the ten years from 2004 to 2013 (the latest year available) anti-Jewish hate crimes con­sti­tuted between 60% and 70% of all hate crimes in the Religion category in the US. In com­par­is­on, anti-Muslim hate crimes con­sti­tuted between 7 – 14%, anti-“other religion” (pre­sum­ably Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs etc) con­sti­tuted between 7 – 13%, anti-Catholic con­sti­tuted 3 – 5%, anti-Prot­est­ant con­sti­tuted 2 – 4%, and anti-atheist con­sti­tuted less than 1%. Jews comprise only 2% of the American pop­u­la­tion, yet 60 – 70% of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews.

In Britain, the Scottish gov­ern­ment compiles extensive reports on hate crimes from police records. Hate crime stat­ist­ics in the Religion category shows high levels of attacks on Catholics (57 – 58%) and Prot­est­ants (36 – 40%), and much lower levels against Muslims (2 – 2%) and Jews (1 – 2%) over the 2011 and 2012 periods. However, these overall per­cent­ages, in the 2012 stat­ist­ics for example, translate into quite a different picture when the pop­u­la­tion numbers of each religious category in Scotland is taken into account.

These figures show that there is one anti-Jewish hate incident for every 461 Jews, one anti-Muslim hate incident per 2,240 Muslims, one per 1,579 Catholics, and one for every 6,080 Prot­est­ants. Thus, Jews are subject to a much higher rate of attack. Jews are several times more likely than Muslims to suffer hate incidents, and are twenty times more likely than Chris­ti­ans to suffer hate incidents.

The Inter­na­tion­al Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH) conducts a country by country review and report on racist and religious bigotry on the European internet. According to INACH’s studies, prior to 2002, antisemitism had been the largest single type of hate on the European internet. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, there was an increase in anti-Muslim content; but there was a much larger increase in anti-Jewish content. From 2002, antisemitism became the absolute largest category of hate on the European internet. Incidents of anti-Jewish hate out­weighed the combined aggregate of every other form of hate.

INACH’s study showed that up until the second half of 2000 virtually all antisemitism reported online was from ‘classical’ sources of anti­semites and/or racists (eg neo-Nazis). By 2002, most antisemitism and Holocaust denial no longer came from ‘classic’ anti­semites but from Muslim and left-wing web forums.

Having been pre­dom­in­antly either bystand­ers or per­pet­rat­ors during the Nazi attempt to murder every Jew in Europe, Europeans are again in a situation where their Jewish citizens are on the edge of another great abyss. The question remains: How will they respond this time? Will they acquire the backbone to defend and protect their Jewish citizens against murderous anti-Jewish ideo­lo­gies? Or will they take the easy, but self-destruct­ive, route and excuse the anti­semites, appease the murderous ideology at work in Europe and elsewhere, and watch silently as the Jews are driven from Europe’s shores over the coming decade?

The watchword is Toulouse. When three French soldiers (two of North African back­ground and one of Caribbean back­ground) and four Jews (three of them young children) were murdered in March 2012, the French people came out in their thousands to protest the murders. A massive anti-racist banner read: “In France, we kill Blacks, Jews, and Arabs”. However, when the murderer was found to be Mohammed Merah, a French Muslim of North African back­ground, the protests and anti-racism banners dis­ap­peared. While ever the murderer was believed to be an indi­gen­ous French person, of Right-wing racist politics, the masses of France were eager to protest against murderous racism in France. However, once the murderer was iden­ti­fied as a Muslim jihadist, the protest­ing masses melted away unable or unwilling to condemn murder when committed by a Muslim jihadist.

In a perverse response to Merah’s murders, there was an expo­nen­tial increase in physical assaults on French Jews, with several being hos­pit­al­ized. Bashings with iron bars and other assaults were per­pet­rated against Jews. The initial shock and horror of the murder of little Jewish children were trans­formed into a mania by Islamist extrem­ists to emulate Merah, to give him hero status and to glorify his murderous deeds.

After this latest murder in Copen­ha­gen, and the murders in Paris only last month, it remains to be seen whether Europe makes a decision to defend and protect its Jewish citizens. Many Jews fear that European gov­ern­ments will instead cave in to threats and appease­ment and watch their Jews pack their bags and leave.

It is in this context that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called on Europe’s Jews to immigrate en masse to Israel. To many, Netanyahu’s call appears pre­sump­tu­ous and insulting. Viewed object­ively, however, no one should be surprised by it. The first duty of gov­ern­ments is to protect their citizens – all their citizens, regard­less of race, religion or culture. This is espe­cially so in Europe, with its blood-soaked history of racial and religious per­se­cu­tion, espe­cially of Jews. Until European gov­ern­ments demon­strate that they have an effective antidote to the growing wave of anti-Jewish hatred and violence in their countries, Netanyahu’s call is likely to be responded to by an ever-increas­ing number of European Jews.