If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in Gaza. It was something altogether darker.

“Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night,” the newspaper reported, referring to the Tel Aviv club. “Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or ‘Jew Hunt.’”

Jew hunt: Grotesque as the phrase is, it can no longer surprise.

It is what the graffiti on a wall in an Oslo metro station promises: “Hitler started it. We finis[h]ed it.”

It is a wave of antisemitic hate crimes in Chicago, including “anti-Semitic flyers with rat-poison like pellets” found in Lincoln Park in April, a Jewish man shot while walking to his synagogue in West Rogers Park in October and two Jewish students at DePaul University assaulted by masked men last Wednesday.

It is a long succession of assaults — sometimes with sucker punches, other times with cars, more recently with an attempted child abduction — against Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

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