"These are shameful times for Britain, for America and for the West, a point of no return from our accelerating descent into nihilism and depravity. The hate-fest on our streets since Hamas’s genocidal attacks on Israel, the cowardly appeasement of those who loathe democratic values, the victim-blaming, the scapegoating, and most terrifyingly of all, the open, proud, out-of-the-closet anti-Semitism: it is almost too much to bear.

Of all the sickening developments of recent days, the ugliest was the sight of heartless young people, caught on video, tearing down posters highlighting the plight of kidnapped Israeli children, laughing as they did so, in London’s Leicester Square and across the country. Do these vandals think that the kidnappings were justified, or do they want to deny their very existence, better to wallow in self-righteous loathing?

In north London, a Hitler moustache was painted on posters, this time of three-year-old twin girls abducted by Islamist extremist monsters. Hamas, a group explicitly inspired by Hitler’s ideology, kills Israelis, and yet it is Jews who are accused of being the real Nazis: nothing better captures the moral inversion of our times. Jews are always to blame, however much they are persecuted. These outrages follow the chilling story of the Tube driver who, carried away by the social contagion of our febrile times, thought it was perfectly normal to lead a carriage of protesters in an anti-Israel chant.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and we are paying the price for the growing moral emptiness at the heart of our society."