But in the case of resurgent anti-Semitism, as with a whole set of new or revived problems, the journey to acknowledging what was happening was slow and almost wilfully sluggish. In Germany in 2013 a new political party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was formed. Once the party’s anti-immigration stance became clear, the German media and political class were intent on proving that the party was anti-Semitic. Yet in 2014 it was not AfD supporters but mainly immigrant protesters who gathered on the streets of German cities including Frankfurt, Dortmund and Essen to chant ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas’ and ‘Jewish shit’. It was not an AfD politician but a Muslim Imam in the Neukölln area of Berlin who stood in the mosque in 2014 and urged God to ‘Destroy the Zionist Jews. Kill every last one of them.’14

In each country there had been people who had tried to issue warnings. Some like Hirsi Ali were people who had been brought up as Muslims but left the religion. Others had been born as Muslims and were intent on remaining in the religion and pushing a liberal reformist agenda from within. Other warnings were issued by non-Muslim Europeans who insisted on their right to speak about their continent.

Few did so with greater passion than the famous Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci. The only Western journalist ever to have got an interview with Rushdie’s persecutor in Iran, Fallaci was in her seventies at the turn of the millennium. In younger days her celebrated interviews with Khomeini as well as Colonel Gaddafi, the Shah of Iran, Henry Kissinger and others had made her perhaps the world’s most feared interviewer.15 These encounters up close with power, as well as her travels around the world’s war zones, had given her a deadly rage about many things – and a rage against Islam was among them.

The daughter of anti-fascists, she had grown up in Mussolini’s Italy. Through her father Fallaci became involved in anti-fascist activities and at the end of her life she would recall the errands she would run as a girl – hiding hand grenades in lettuces to take them to the opposition headquarters, gun-running and posting partisan materials.16 Her country and her home city – Florence – were occupied from 1943 to 1944 by the Nazis, and though she was only in her teens at the time, Fallaci, like her family, fought to get her city and country back. When she talked of fascism she talked with the benefit of experience.