Last week we sat at a lunch restaurant down by the harbour in Skagen. High season, thirty degrees, full tables, children and draught beer and fried plaice - Denmark when it is most itself.
A young couple sat down at the table next to us. Mid-twenties, from a medium-sized Danish town, he a tradesman, she friendly and articulate. We fell into conversation, as one does, while waiting for food - where are you from, what do you do - and the conversation slid, as conversations do in this time, into the culture war, which especially occupied him. Islam, Christianity, the EU, political life. A completely ordinary conversation between completely ordinary Danes over lunch.
And then he says it. Calmly, out of the blue, as if noting something about the weather:
"If you ask me, we should obviously keep an eye on Islam - but the real threat is the Jews."
Krisztina was about to stand up. I got a hand on her leg under the table and sent her that look which between partners who have been together for decades means - wait.
Not because the sentence didn't deserve an answer - but because I wanted to know how deep the well was before I said anything. So I asked, as neutrally as I could -
"Okay. Yes, some people think that. Are there many around you who believe it?"
"Yes, basically all my friends."
Krisztina tried again, through history - "But you know the history. They have been persecuted always - and during the war Hitler killed six million of them..."
She didn't finish the sentence.
"Well they deserved it. They brought it on themselves."
The sun shone. The plaice arrived.
I looked at Krisztina, and we understood each other without words - not here, not now.
We had driven to Skagen for the day's sake and each other's, and there were families with children at every other table. One must know when a conversation is a conversation - and when it is merely an occasion. So we ate our food in peace, wished them a good day and went out into the sun.
But we took the sentence with us.
And it still lies on the table between us.
A decent, normal, friendly young couple - and that sentence, which Europe has spent eighty years promising each other never to hear again, served over lunch, as casually as noting the food lacked salt.
What I want to tell you today is that this sentence was not lightning from a clear sky. I had expected to hear it out in the open this year. Because it is not a single wayward young man in Skagen. It is the surface of something that has grown larger than most notice, beneath us, while we looked away - and I can document it - as many others here on the platform can - because I, or we, have stood in it all year.
Throughout this year I have written a series of exhaustive texts and hundreds of long comments about Jews. About their three thousand year history, from Abraham through the exiles to the rebirth of the state of Israel. About their traditions, their scriptures, their way of carrying memory through centuries. About all that the Western world stands on without knowing it - that Man bears God's image, that law stands above the king, that conscience cannot be owned, that every child should be able to read - foundations that are all Hebraic, carried out to us through a Jewish saviour and his Jewish apostles. I have written about the causes of persecution, its patterns and its costumes through a thousand years. About the grammar of Jew-hatred - the one that cannot imagine a human being who freely believes something, or a people who want something themselves. And about why it is crucial that the world stands up for and in front of this people - not because they are worth more than others, but because the attack on them has always been the first act in the attack on Man as such.
Let me show you what has happened since. Every time. Not for my sake - but because you need to see it with your own eyes.
The comment fields have been filled. Not just with disagreement - disagreement is of course welcome, and the sharpest objection that brings facts to the table is the best guest. No, they have been filled with something else.
I have been consistently, again and again, asked who is paying me - Netanyahu, Mossad, "the Zionist federation," hasbara offices, the hidden hand. I have been called paid shill, hasbara agent, Zionist pig - and worse things, which should not be repeated here. The accusation of the bought voice is the oldest in the archive - the Jew and his servants never speak freely, they always serve something hidden. It was that story that made the Jew "the foreign hand" in every country's inner life - and thus the obvious scapegoat whenever something went wrong. When plague came, when harvest failed, when war was lost - find the hidden hand. The well-poisoning accusations during the Black Death wiped out hundreds of Jewish communities in Europe - people burned alive for a conspiracy that never existed.
I have been told that the Jews killed Jesus. The deicide charge - the one that for a thousand years made Easter the year's most dangerous time for Europe's Jews, because the Good Friday sermon became Saturday's riots. It drove the Crusades' massacres at the Rhine in 1096, where entire congregations chose death over forced baptism. It was so deadly that even the Catholic Church in 1965 had to formally bury it. In my comment field it lives in fine health.
I have repeatedly been instructed that "they own all the media" - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion dropped into countless subclauses. A forgery, fabricated by the Tsar's secret police around 1900, documented as fake in courtrooms and history books a hundred years ago - and yet still operational. It is history's most murderous document measured by consequence - it circulated in Hitler's inner circle, and it is cited by name in Hamas' charter - the same document that with a hadith in article 7 makes the killing of Jews as such, not Israelis, but Jews, wherever they are found, a part of the coming of Judgment Day itself. The forgery from the Tsar's police ended as a footnote in an extermination programme that is still in force. Six million people were murdered with that story as intellectual alibi. And now it stands in Danish comment threads, written by people who think they have discovered something.
I have been instructed that Israel is not the Jews' own longing, but the great powers' "bridgehead" - because a people cannot want something themselves, can they. It is the same figure, merely scaled up - as the individual Jew may not have a free voice, the people may not have their own will. Two thousand years of prayer - "next year in Jerusalem" - recoded into others' chess game. The story was systematised as Soviet propaganda during the Cold War and now lives on in both political extremes - one of the places where the horseshoe's ends touch.
The blood libel from 1144 - rabbis and children's blood - has appeared in Danish, in my comment field, in 2026. It is the accusation with the longest blood trail of them all - from Norwich it spread across all of Europe and for centuries sent innocents to the stake and entire quarters to their graves, Easter after Easter, city after city. It was always fabrication. It worked every time.
And my wife has moreover been called mistress, escort, whore and worse - because when arguments run out, Hatred goes after Woman. That too is in the manuscript, and it is old.
And this is not my comment field alone.
Ask anyone who writes publicly about Jews in this country or anywhere in Europe in this time. The pattern is the same, every time, under every post - if you write that Jews are human beings, an entire chorus deploys to explain why they are not. They organise themselves. They find each other in groups and threads. They become more, and they become louder, and they have stopped whispering.
So now I ask - not rhetorically, but actually -
How should the rest of the country relate to this?
Should we just watch while people gather around the right to spread thousand-year-old conspiratorial nonsense about a small people who have lived among us for four hundred years and given this country doctors, artists, merchants and scientists?
Should the rest of us do nothing?
Is no one planning to say something?
The priests who every Sunday preach over a Jewish book about a Jewish saviour - do they say something?
The politicians who lay wreaths at memorials in October and speak of "never again" - do they see that it is now something is happening again, with small steps, in comment threads and closed groups and now marching in completely open streets?
The neighbours, colleagues, the decent ones - all of you who know better and say nothing because it is uncomfortable, and because "it will probably pass"?
It does not pass. That is what history teaches us, every single time - it does not pass by itself. It grows in silence. Silence is not neutral - it is the soil it grows in.
Our grandparents rescued the Jews across the Sound in October '43 and gave this country one of the most beautiful chapters in its history. They did not do it because it was comfortable. They broke the law - and they did it solely because their Conscience told them what was true.
They did it because they knew what a Human Being is.
The question is no longer whether Darkness is gathering in this time.
Anyone who dares to look can see that.
The question is whether we are our grandparents' grandchildren - or merely their cowering heirs.
❤️🔥🪽
Think☀️
