The Israeli Defence Force isn’t famous for humorous public statements. But it clearly couldn’t resist a touché moment after the BBC repeated the Hamas lie that Israel on 17 October conducted an airstrike on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.  ‘The BBC claims to be impartial and independent,’ it tweeted, ‘But we were unable to verify those claims’.

In contrast to the BBC, and as in the rest of the West, Britain’s political leadership has said all the right things since the horrors which Hamas inflicted on Israel. Prime Minister Sunak has visited Israel to underline solidarity, has called Hamas ‘evil’ and the 7 October massacres a ‘pogrom’.

If the policies and views of the British political establishment reflected Sunak’s language, his hapless government might at least be able to expect the Jewish vote at the next election. But while Britain’s Jews deeply mistrust Labour, they don’t have much more confidence in the Tories.

During Tony Blair’s government, the distinguished journalist and author Melanie Phillips wrote Londonistan, a searing account of Britain’s capitulation to radical Islam. Thirteen years of ‘Conservative’ government since have changed nothing. Highlighting this, the Sunday Times has revealed that a senior Hamas official, Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, who ran part of its terrorist operations and who arrived in the UK illegally on a false passport, was, astonishingly, given citizenship. The current Tory government proscribed Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organisation in 2021 and any Hamas member can be sentenced to 14 years in prison. Yet the Tories have let Sawalha, a senior figure in an organisation described by Prime Minister Sunak as ‘evil’, live freely in London continuing Hamas’s work.

Britain’s appeasement of radical Islam more broadly continues to run deep. The BBC’s anti-Israel bias since 7 October has been flagrant and consistent. It refuses, indefensibly, to refer to Hamas members as ‘terrorists’, even though Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by most civilised countries and the BBC has used the term freely for members of other terrorist Islamist groups. It claims ridiculously to take this position because it doesn’t want to take sides. In reality it’s probably because it doesn’t want to aggrieve fashionable London anti-Israel opinion. The BBC has also shown its bias in ignoring stories that might continue to cast Hamas in a negative light, such as reports that after the Israelis advised civilians to evacuate north Gaza, Hamas tried to block their escape routes.

Even more seriously, after the 17 October Al Ahri hospital explosion, the BBC quickly accepted, essentially at face value – and on the basis of zero evidence – Hamas claims that the hospital had been targeted by the Israelis. The headline was ‘Hundreds killed in Israeli strike on Israeli hospital – Palestinian officials’. One of the BBC’s correspondents in the region lent credence to the Hamas claim by commenting live on air that it was ‘hard to see what else this could be’. The bias and irresponsibility inflamed Islamist extremism around the globe. Meanwhile, seven members of staff in the BBC’s Arabic service were caught posting incendiary anti-Israel and pro-Hamas messages on social media. Any Conservative government worthy of the name would sack the BBC’s Director-General and demand his replacement purge all those reporting on Israel.

As to the British police, they remain as ever hard of hearing when it comes to government directives to deal uncompromisingly with Islamist extremism. Britain’s well-intentioned but largely ineffective Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said the police will be going after those who incite and celebrate terrorism. There has been only a handful of arrests. Police contempt for Braverman is astonishing. She reminded police that the chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’ is an anti-Semitic call for the destruction of Israel, to which the Met responded essentially that she could go jump: arrests were unlikely as the chant had been heard ‘frequently at demonstrations for many years’. Calls for ‘jihad’ were also OK. The strong impression the police give is that they find Britain’s Islamists too numerous and scary and will find excuses to leave them alone. Much easier to detain the occasional Israel supporter carrying an Israeli flag or displaying images of abducted hostages – ‘for their own safety’.

European police forces tried a bit harder.  France and Germany banned pro-Palestinian rallies, seeing them as ruses for Hamas extremism. Sixty-five German police were injured trying to stop one and Hamas supporters have been arrested. But the rallies in France have resumed, despite Macron’s ban. Governments across Europe promise prosecutions and expulsions, but decisive action looks unlikely.

Europe like Britain gives the impression of being overwhelmed by the growing numbers of Islamist extremists in its midst.  Henry Kissinger on a visit to Germany – where a synagogue has been fire-bombed and Jews have been warned against entering certain neighbourhoods wearing kippahs – has said that Berlin made a ‘grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion’.

Kissinger was referring to Angela Merkel’s decision to throw open Germany’s doors to over a million Third World migrants in 2015-16.

But Western Europe’s Muslim population has been expanding rapidly for many years. Their number was 25 million (5 per cent of the population) at the last count in 2016, up from 19.5 million (3.8 per cent) just six years earlier in 2010. Pew Research expects the number to rise to between 11 and 14 per cent by 2050, with Muslim populations up to 20 per cent in most of north-western Europe, with Sweden up to 30 per cent. There’s little evidence to support the optimists’ view that this rapidly growing minority will assimilate into Western ways. There’s no doubt that Europe has imported, and continues to import, large numbers of people who are openly anti-Semitic.

If, because Europe lacks the will to stop free-for-all immigration and much of it changes fundamentally, there is a small silver lining. That is that the EU’s newly free easterners took one look at their western neighbours’ experiences with mass migration and enthusiasm for racial diversity and decided it wasn’t for them. So if you want to visit Europe without the excitement of hysterical pro-Hamas rallies, try Budapest, Prague or Warsaw – as increasing numbers of Israelis do these days.