In the years, the months, even the weeks after 9/11, I noticed how an anti-Americanism seemed to pervade popular consciousness, an opinion that they had it coming and that the villain of the piece was George W Bush. In a sense, 9/11 brought down Tony Blair who, until then, was not generally perceived as a lackey of the Washington administration. The global flare up of anti Jewish discourse and action since the massacres of 7 October has reminded me of this unexpected phenomenon, the lionisation of those who carry out political murder.

As if to compensate consciences for the cruelty of approving the murders, critics of the USA and of Israel express themselves in terms of compassion for the beleaguered people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. In the UK and the USA, many thousands took to the streets early in 2003, to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Since 7/10, there are huge marches every other Saturday across he cities of Europe, the UK and the USA, against Israel, often stridently supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.

I do not recall Sadaam Hussein being admired, except by George Galloway; neither is the Ayatollah Khameini a role model for many, although there is certainly a degree of sympathy for the Islamic Republic of Iran in the anti Zionist clamour.

In the early 2000s, I worked in a bookshop which belonged to a well known chain of stores selling books, stationary and newspapers. By Christmas 2002, the shelves headed ‘Humour’ filled with new books satirizing the ‘special relationship’. One which I remember took the form of juvenile and misspelled letters purporting to be a correspondence between Bush and Blair, in which Tony was the acolyte of George, apparently a bigger, older boy.

Bush was known for his malapropisms and admitted ‘Sometimes I misspeak’. Small books of ‘Bushisms’ appeared, amusing verbal slip ups. ‘Misunderestimate’ was Bush’s own coinage, much mocked yet, compared to Donald Trump, Bush was indeed misunderestimated. Blair was less often the butt of jokes. His intellect and fluency meant he was portrayed by some as consciously evil, a Jaffar to Bush’s Sultan. His religiosity was held against him.

‘You don’t pray together?’ Paxman asked Blair, referring to the fact that Bush and Blair both identified as Christian believers, in the course of a hostile interview where Paxman emphasized the death of innocent civilians in Iraq. Blair, always a master of self control, was clearly irritated by the question, which he answered with a negative. What was behind the question? Was it that the western leaders used Christianity as a justification for wars against Muslim peoples; that they used it to indicate probity as a cover for warmongering; that they were crusaders? What put it into Paxman’s head to ask the question? It was likely already in popular discourse.

Any reproach against Blair and Bush has been magnified a thousandfold against Netanyahu since 7 October and he is often seen as encapsulating the people of Israel more than Bush was regarded as representing Americans, or Blair as representing British people. In the mix is the lightly somnolent virus of antisemitism, now fully awake and wanting breakfast. Opponents of Israel’s wars think they have not the slightest hostility to Jews but that Israel’s wars are monstrous and that Zionists the world over are the cause of all ills, even the vagaries of severe weather. The language born out of the Nuremberg trials, of war crimes and genocide, is applied to Israel so feverishly that, if one is not called a genocidal maniac, one feels the interlocutor is pulling their punches.

On the marches, they chant: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud; turn another ship around,’ ‘All Zionists are racists,’ ‘We don’t want no two state, we want 1948,’ ‘Khaybar,Khaybar ya Yahud,’ all chanted to – so to speak – the same tune.

Daily on X, formerly Twitter, I see people calling for the extermination of Jews while speaking compassionately of Palestinian suffering. The horror lies in the fact that they are not all the usual suspects, the neonazi right wing, but come also from the left and, still more disturbingly, the centre.

The question is this: if Israel had gone to war without the trigger of the 7 October pogroms, would the hatred be any greater? If America had made war on Iraq without the impetus of 9/11, would the vilification have been the same?

If Guy Fawkes had not been discovered in the cellars of Parliament and if King James and his government had been sent to kingdom come, would children still have said ‘Penny for the Guy’ and put Fawkes’s effigy on bonfires, almost to the present day?

A month after 9/11, I heard schoolboys chanting ‘Osama bin Laden’ on the streets of Edmonton in North London. They were expressing approval – of what? The glamour of terrorism? The win of wreaking havoc?

I could not say. I do not know.