I walked into the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam and a boy stopped me cold. It is the first thing the place hits you with. There it is, a huge image. A boy on a dirt road, walking. On both sides of him, bodies. Not one. Not ten. Hundreds. Starved to the bone, dumped where they dropped, sinking into the mud. Bergen-Belsen. April 1945.

This is where antisemitism ends up. We Jews have a name for our part in this. The canary in the coal mine, the little bird that died first when the gas crept in, so the miners knew to run. When they come for us, we tell the world: you are next. We have said it for 80 years.

Antisemitism is not a wound cut into Jews. It is a rot that spreads through everyone who opens the door to it. And it does not sit quietly. The people who swallow it are three times more likely to reach for violence. Left. Right. Believe the lie and the fist is already half made.

This is how a free country dies. Not with a bang. Quietly. Say all this to non-Jews around you and some shrug. A Jewish problem, they think. Yours to carry.

So, tell them to watch who points at us. Once it was torches in the dark. Now the hate marches in broad daylight, down our own main streets, and it has learned to sing. “Globalise the intifada”. “From the river to the sea”.

“It will run out of Jews long before it runs out of hate.

Here is the part that should scare them more than any headline. This poison does not stay in the Jewish corner. The whole country drinks it. It teaches people to see a plot behind every problem, a traitor in everyone who disagrees, an enemy in anyone who steps out of line. It splits an easy-going country into them and us, and dares you to choose. The right to argue out loud, to think for yourself, to live beside people nothing like you, all of it rots. By the time the poison reaches your door, it has already changed what your country is.

Watch the movement and you will not need me to name it. It storms the lecture theatres and shuts the speaker down. It pins up lists of names. Enemies. Blood on their hands. It rips the poster of the stolen baby off the wall. It calls a massacre resistance and a murdered grandmother a settler. The worship of violence, of intimidation, of threats. There is an old word for all of that at once, and it is not progressive.

And it is not only the rabble in the street. It wears a suit now. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani branded the main pro-Israel lobby AIPAC “monsters” moving “dark money” to “turn us against one another”, the oldest slander going with one word swapped. At home, Greens senator David Shoebridge sat silent on a podcast while the host ranted that Zionists run paedophile and trafficking rings and have “hijacked” our government.

Now the part they always miss. We are the first target. We are never the last. This movement runs a purity test and you will fail it. The gay man who will not chant is smeared as a fraud. The woman who says Hamas raped Jewish women on October 7 is screamed down as a liar. The worker who asks why his union is chanting about a war on the far side of the planet is branded a fascist. The liberal who still believes in free speech becomes the enemy of the people. Incitement does not stay in its lane. A crowd that learns to cheer violence against one of us learns to cheer it against any of you.

And watch the words they reach for. War criminals. Baby killers. Genocidal. Hang those words on a whole people and you have not won an argument. You have lit the torch for a lynch mob. And a lynch mob never stops at the first name.

A country that marinates long enough in the idea that one kind of person is fair game will, sooner or later, watch a man pick up a gun.

The worldview never changes. Some people are not people and killing them is allowed. It takes Jews first. It does not take Jews only. It never has.

So do not fight this for us. We are not your warning bird. We are not your sad lesson from a sadder century. Fight it because the hate in our streets is already walking towards your door.

Towards your kids. Towards everything you told yourself was safe. Say antisemitism the way you would scream “fire” in a packed room, because that is what it is.

And here is the trap they have set for you. The word they hunt with is not “Jew”. It is “Zionist”. And a Zionist, to them, is anyone who thinks Israel has a right to exist. That is most Jews. It is millions of Christians. It may be your neighbour, your boss, the bloke at the footy who says a country should not be wiped off the map.

Watch how it already works. On a Melbourne flatmate page called Fairy Floss, with half a million members, the room ads read “no zios, zio free”, slipped between the love-hearts and the clean kitchen benches. No Jews. Not here. Not ever.

And do not tell yourself this stays small. The poison is already creeping into every corner of this country. The schools. The unions. The universities. Parts of the media. The arts. The town halls. The staff room. The group chat. Soon there is no quiet seat left anywhere. Refuse to march for the death of Israel. Refuse to chant for it. Stay silent when the howling pack wants its slogan and you are marked too, an enemy, a target, a name on the list. There is no such thing as neutral anymore. A New York cafe branded a Jewish congressman in its window: “we don’t serve genocide enablers”.

And hear this, you who think you are safe because you are not a Jew. You are not safe. You never were. This is not a movement. It is a machine and it was built to do one thing: destroy anyone who will not kneel. Silence you. Blacklist you. Cancel you. Take your job, your name, your good standing and burn them in the street while the crowd cheers.

And the next throats it reaches for are not only Jewish. They are yours. The decent soul who will not scream for a nation’s death. The friend who shared the wrong post. The second you stand beside the Jew, the Israeli, the Zionist, you put on his target, and they will hunt you for it without mercy and without end. No apology buys you back.

No record is clean enough to save you. A mob that has learned to destroy a human being for what he believes does not stop, does not tire, does not forgive. It will run out of Jews long before it runs out of hate. And on that day, it turns its burning eyes on you.

And here is the plainest test of a free country and ours is failing it.

When a whole people has to hide who they are just to stay safe, take off the Star of David, tuck the necklace with a map of Israel under the shirt, remove a kippah, go quiet about where they were born, that country is already sick. A nation that teaches its Jews to vanish has built the machine that will, one day, teach you to vanish too.

A democracy stops being a democracy the moment one group of its people is hounded without end. Discriminated against. Attacked. Harassed. Blacklisted. Shut out. Made to live in fear, every single day, for nothing but who they are. The flag still flies. The elections still run. But a country that does that to one people is not free. It is a democracy in name only and the name will not save it.

A democracy rests on one promise: you are judged for what you do, never for what you are, and no mob decides who belongs. Cut the Jew out of that promise and it dies for everyone. Today the word is “Zionist”. Tomorrow, it is whatever they decide you are. Too loud. Too moderate. Too free in the way you think.

A country where one word decides who keeps their job and who has to go into hiding is not run by laws. It is run by mobs. And a mob never keeps the same enemy for long. The shield they are tearing off the Jew right now, in the open, while you look away, is your shield too. Let it fall and the day they come for you, you will reach for that shield and find it gone. You let them rip it off us first. Now there is nothing left to save you.

American historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt left us the line to end on. If you love freedom and you hate tyranny, you can do no less than fight this hatred. There is no free country that survives letting it win. Their fight was always your fight. You were just never told.