There is a peculiar modern achievement in making punishment track the truth-teller rather than the lie. Institutions manage it with surprising ease. They praise vigilance, invoke memory, speak of historical responsibility – and then, when someone speaks plainly about what they claim to oppose, candour becomes the offence. That is the logic behind the removal of Professor Joël Kotek from the Belgian delegation to the IHRA. He was not accused of distortion or incitement. He appears to have been penalised for naming antisemitism in the present tense.

It would be absurd if it were not so familiar. The IHRA exists to preserve memory, but memory is not a museum display with good lighting and no exits. It is meant to illuminate the present. When a scholar of genocide points to contemporary realities – public insults, threats, unease around Jewish schools, the way antisemitic language slips into “debate” – he is doing the job.

That, it seems, is the problem. Many organisations are comfortable with antisemitism as history: bounded, curated, finished. The dead are easier to honour than the living are to hear. A commemorative speech costs nothing. A candle asks nothing. A plaque does not answer back. But when memory speaks about present danger, it stops flattering and starts accusing. That is when institutional confidence falters.

The pattern is........

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