At the same time individuals from the Muslim communities in Europe who had spoken out publicly about any negative aspects of their culture, or had appeared to go against their community in any way, were increasingly the subject of physical intimidation and violence. From the Norwegian pop singer Deepika Thathaal, who was attacked onstage in Oslo for her ‘immodesty’, to the columnist and activist Nosheen Ilyas in Italy, minorities within the minority turned out to be perhaps the most threatened people of all. And all the time there was a slowly growing awareness that the newest incomers to Europe might not all look favourably on some of the oldest. Throughout the multicultural era it had been assumed that minorities would have their minority status in common with other minorities. The idea that they would bring any of their ancient animosities with them seemed to occur to almost no one in power. But as the numbers grew, this presumption began to crumble.

In 2003 a report into anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Centre was quietly shelved when it found that the upsurge in anti-Semitic activity in Europe was caused by a rise in attacks on Jews by young Muslims. Yet despite such attempts to cover over the facts, the facts kept on breaking out – often in the most brutal ways possible. In 2006 there was horror in France when a French Jew called Ilan Halimi was tortured to death over the course of three weeks by a gang of Muslims in Paris who called themselves ‘the barbarians’. His torturers believed they could get money out of Halimi and his family because ‘Jews have money’. In the years of mass migration attacks on Jews began to increase everywhere. According to the body that records attacks in France, the BNVCA (Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l’Antisémitisme), the number of recorded anti-Semitic attacks in France doubled between 2013 and 2014 alone, reaching 851 incidents in that year. Despite accounting for less than 1 per cent of the population, Jews were the victims in almost half of all recorded racist attacks in France: on Bastille Day 2014, worshipers at a synagogue in Paris were barricaded inside by immigrant protesters chanting, among other things, ‘Death to the Jews’; a Muslim gunman shot dead three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; another Muslim gunman shot dead four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014; another Muslim gunman killed four Jews at a kosher Hypercache in Paris in 2015; and yet another Muslim gunman killed a Jewish man on security duty at the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015. These, killings, among other attacks, caused the issue of Islamic anti-Semitism finally to get discussed.