How many times? It’s a question that recurs on a toxic loop with breaking news of yet another outrage against the Jewish community in this country. How many times do antisemitic attacks have to happen before performative politicians – those who clutch their hearts and denounce such hatred – actually take action? How many times do all those do-gooding, hard-left commentators (who ironically believe themselves to be on the side of social justice) need to be told that, if they spread baseless comments about Israel, their lies pour jet fuel on antisemitism?

Above all, how many times will decent people – whom I still believe to be the majority in this country – need to hear of attacks against Jewish people in the UK before they speak out and demand something is done? Because here we are yet again. With the horrifying news that two Jewish men have been seriously injured after being stabbed in Golders Green, north London.

According to eyewitnesses, a man with a knife was seen running down the high street attempting to stab Jewish people. That he managed to strike two is horrific enough. That the toll could have been so much greater is almost too terrible to imagine.

This is a busy street I know well, and in the heart of the UK’s largest Jewish community: mothers pushing prams, young children skipping to and from school, people on their way to work or browsing the many shops – kosher or otherwise – that line this busy thoroughfare. The potential for carnage was incalculable.

Earlier this week in the Express, I wrote of how spiralling antisemitism is forcing Jewish people out of this country. And of the fact that if the Jews all leave, Britain will be known as a country that allowed a minority to be driven from its shores.

Yet inevitably, alongside the many – many – people who weren’t Jewish and yet so gracefully offered support and expressions of shame at what the UK is becoming, there were those who crawled from the sewer to offer the usual expressions of Jew-hatred.

Despite the arson attacks, the microaggressions, the killings at the Heaton Park synagogue, which has been linked to my family for decades, and where I was married, they couldn't contain their bile.

What will it take for the UK to recognise that its Jewish community is being ruthlessly targeted by Islamist extremists, whose thirst for blood is matched will not be satiated by Jewish people alone?

It was revealed this week that Iran’s embassy in London has allegedly urged Britain-based Iranians to sign up for a “martyrdom programme”.

A message in Persian reads: “Let us all, to a man, give our bodies to be slain, for it is better than giving our country to the enemy.”

And so, repeating again and again, how many times do we have to warn about what the UK is becoming? It seems however many times, it's still never enough.