Less than a week after the pogrom in Amsterdam, UN celebrity Jew-baiter Francesca Albanese was scheduled to speak in London. Albanese has embraced authoritarian anti-Semitism and become a hero to the worst people in politics. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a British organization, worked up plans to protest Albanese’s arrival.

But the protest never happened. The Telegraph explained why: Security officials picked up chatter on social media apps in which locals were very plainly making plans to attack the Jewish demonstrators. “Can’t wait to give the welcome they deserve,” said one resident, to which another—who had been using anti-Semitic lingo in the chat—responded: “Amsterdam-style.”

Thus the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was put in a position familiar to Jewish groups: take the risk or call it off.

There are two broad lessons here. The first is that while Jews nominally have the same rights as anyone, in practice that’s a joke. A popular defense of the pogromists has been that the Jews got what they deserved because some of the Maccabi fans sang provocative chants in response to taunting from the crowd as they walked to the subway.

According to this logic, after every march in which keffiyeh-clad protesters chant “from the river to the sea” and other such phrases, it would be normal for Americans to carry out mass organized violence against anyone from the general public seen wearing a checkered scarf.

This argument boils down to: “The Jews deserved it because one single time they behaved as we behave weekly and sometimes daily.”

Meanwhile, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has no record of chanting soccer taunts. May they peacefully protest? The answer, in this case, was no—because nobody actually cares what Jews say; they only care that Jews exist. So the Jews stayed home.

And as events in Chicago recently demonstrated, you can establish a tent city to block Jews from walking through campus, but if you are Jewish and you set up a two-man station on one street corner with a sign that says “ask me about Israel” you can expect to have your skull beaten in.

It turns out the free-speech rights we Westerners claim to hold near and dear are unevenly distributed after all. The enforcement is not through permits, but violence. That violence goes unprevented and unpunished by the authorities.

The second lesson is that the aggressive attempts to regulate social media have been trying to solve the wrong problem. While we hold congressional hearings over silly Facebook election memes, it is not that plain speech on these sites is fueling the violence but that the literal organizing of that violence is taking place on these sites.

A precursor to Amsterdam was last October’s attempted pogrom in Dagestan, in Russia’s North Caucasus. A Dagestani channel on Telegram that had been organizing other demonstrations rallied users to the airport on Oct. 29, 2023, with rumors of Jews fleeing Israel and coming to colonize Dagestan. A mob ravaged the airport hunting for these Jews.

In Amsterdam, the preplanned pogrom was organized using WhatsApp and Telegram, messaging apps that are far more useful to such mobs than, say, Twitter or Instagram.

Sometimes the messaging apps can be at the center of a storm in a less traditional manner. In Australia in February, for example, a massive campaign of threats and harassment against Jews was tipped off by leaked personal information from a WhatsApp group for Jewish creatives. (A New York Times reporter, according to an investigation, played a role in the leaking of that information.) When the enemies of the Jews use messaging apps, Jews get attacked. When the Jews use those apps… it’s still somehow the Jews who get attacked.

If you’re Jewish, your speech will always be regulated by other people’s violence. And the enlightened denizens of the free world find no fault in that system.