Some put the blame for the new wave of anti-Semitism on the influx of Muslims during recent years—at least 200,000 Muslims now live in Norway. But the primary reason that Jews feel under attack appears to be their rejection by the Norwegian liberal elite, who have abandoned them to a vicious form of anti-Semitism thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. 

These so-called progressives collude with hardline anti-Israel activists. The country's tiny population of Jews is subject to the obsessive attention of the Norwegian elite, who blame them for the plight of the Palestinians.

Such hostility filters down to the young and translates into playground anti-Semitism. One recent survey found that 60 per cent of school-age children in Norway had heard the word "Jew" being used as a derogatory term.  They are not only hearing this from radical Muslims.

Breivik, like many extremists whose primary targets are Muslim migrants and asylum seekers, professed "support" for Israel in his "war" against Islam, but at the same time recorded some deeply anti-Semitic views in his "manifesto".

My research began with the Centre for Holocaust Studies (CHS), which has recently published a report on anti-Semitism in Norway. Tor Bach, a respected anti-racist campaigner and former editor of Monitor magazine, told me that recent studies showed "no rise in anti-Semitism". When I mentioned that some Jewish activists had suggested that the influx of Muslims from the Middle East was at least part of the reason for the apparent rise, he said that to suggest that there is an "ongoing Islamification of a country with 200,000 Muslims out of a population of five million is . . . simply ridiculous."