For the plain fact is that most of the migrants who have come (and continue to come) to Europe hail from Muslim-majority countries that long ago expelled their once-vibrant Jewish populations, where anti-Semitism figures prominently in state propaganda, and where belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is widespread. To take just one obvious incongruity between Germany and the migrants it is accepting: Holocaust denial, a crime punishable by prison in Germany, is pervasive across the Muslim and Arab Middle East. Of course, it would be wrong to presume that every Syrian refugee holds the anti-Semitic attitudes of the country’s former defense minister, who published a book repeating the ancient blood libel about Jews killing gentile children to bake matzos for Passover. But it is equally misguided to deny that many have been profoundly influenced by the anti-Semitic environments in which they were raised.

So concerned were they not to appear indifferent to the sufferings of foreign Muslims, however, that many Germans welcomed them without properly considering the impact this move might have on their Jewish fellow citizens. It was only after he left office last year that former president Joachim Gauck admitted he is “terrified of multiculturalism,” adding: “I find it shameful … when anti-Semitism among people from Arab states is ignored or declared intelligible with reference to Israeli policies. Or if criticism of Islam is immediately suspected of growing out of racism and hatred of Muslims.” Similarly, Merkel waited until this February to publicly refer to “no-go areas,” high-crime, largely Muslim immigrant neighborhoods across Europe wherein state authorities fear to tread, and the very existence of which have long been furiously denied by liberals as an Islamophobic invention. “There are such areas and one has to call them by their name and do something about them,” Merkel said.

A month after Merkel decided to open her country’s borders to over 1 million mostly Muslim migrants in 2015, Germany’s four main intelligence agencies contributed to a little-noticed report warning, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding.” The intelligence services were pessimistic as to Germany’s ability to assimilate so many newcomers, whose presence, they feared, would only exacerbate pre-existing social tensions.

A different report released last year by the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee found “widespread anti-Semitism” among the 68 Syrian and Iraqi refugees the researchers surveyed. “What do we know about Jews? Sure, a religion, but they falsified it,” Bader, a 33-year-old from Damascus, told the researchers. “We know this. They have a book like ours and they have prophets and we recognize their prophets and everything, but they have faked the book that was revealed by God. … The Koran states also that it is not the same book.” Partly as a result of these sorts of attitudes, the former chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany Charlotte Knoblauch said that “Jewish life is only possible in public under police protection and the strictest security precautions.”

Merkel made a similar statement on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day. “It is inconceivable and shameful that no Jewish institution can exist without police protection, whether it is a school, a kindergarten or a synagogue,” she lamented. Her comments were lent a particularly ominous resonance by a protest the previous month at which several thousand people of mainly Muslim and migrant background denounced the United States’s decision to relocate its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. A mere 100 yards from Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, demonstrators burned Israeli flags and shouted anti-Semitic slogans.