The daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy had the gift of prophecy but was cursed by her ex, Apollo the sun god, so that her prophecies were never believed. In contemporary times, he would probably have resorted to revenge porn. Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy and was not taken in for a moment by the suberfuge of a large wooden horse full of Greeks. Who would be, you might ask, but we know the answer. Due to Apollo’s curse, nobody listened to her warnings and, if they listened, they didn’t believe.

It would take some grandiosity to identify myself with Cassandra as I know nothing of the future and what I do say is believed as much as what the next person says.

However, well-meaning persons do sometimes tell me that I’m courting madness by wading through pages of very displeasing social media which I then commit to digital memory and post on Twitter, always hoping that someone in a position to act will find a way of occluding the ever flowing river of … But there!

It seems to me that if I say it, the reader will not believe me.

Why would they believe that the Left, always in the vanguard of the fight against racism, is in the grip of an atavistic kind of antisemitism which we learned with surprise from reading history books, was an inspiration for the Hep Hep riots and the Tsarist pogroms & the Protocols legend and the developments we know about in the twentieth century? The madness of such notions as the Judensau beggars belief and gives rise to the thought that people in the Middle Ages were not just unenlightened but primitive, gullible and daft.

In my nightly visits to Facebook forums (drawn to them much, I suppose, like a libertine to a brothel) which have in common an intense appreciation of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a vigorous loathing for Keir Starmer, regarded as a puppet of Israel, I am accustomed to see very offensive material propounding the inhumanity/subhumanity/murderous sadism/ cunning mendacity of Zionists/Zionism/Israel/Israelis/the Israel Lobby/the ‘Chosenites’ and the Khazars. Antisemitism is the hatred which dare not speak its name. Only rarely do the members of the forums admit to disliking Jews and, when they, do, they are liable to be corrected (‘Say Zionists, not Jews’), except in the more extreme groups such as ‘Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies’ where anything goes.

‘Palestinians are semites,’ they insist, ‘so of course I’m not antisemitic. Jews aren’t semites. They are a Turkic people, the Khazars.’ Why the hostility to Turkic peoples anyway? Are they immune to the effects of racism? In point of fact, they are saying that Jews are impostors, being anything but Jews, and one is allowed to resent impostors.

Every night there are new memes and old, designed as evidence for all manner of falsehoods: that Martin Luther King, Voltaire, Shakespeare and Socrates sounded off against the Israeli settlements or that Palestine was a Utopian state run by Palestinian Arabs until Jews invaded suddenly in 1948 and took everything. The British Mandate and the Ottoman Empire seldom get a mention.

The charge which comes my way most often from hostile interlocuters is ‘You don’t know the difference between anti Zionism and antisemitism’ often accompanied by the demand that I show them one – ‘just one’ – instance of left-wing antisemitism.

I take that request seriously and often refer them to this blog, where I store some of the pages of rants, diatribes and meme studded rhetoric of which the comrades never seem to tire, no matter how many times they repeat the same assertions, obscenities and anathemas.

What worries the people who worry about me is that I don’t tire either. I make my screen shots, I save, I post, I blog.

Who will listen? There’s a bloody great horse outside the city gates. It was outside and they’ve brought it into the heart of the city but even now, it might not be too late.