On Tuesday night, Tzipi Hotevely, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, came to the London School of Economics (LSE) to speak with students. A protest took place outside during the event, which devolved into an attack on the ambassador, who had to be evacuated. The editors of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle respond:

On November 9, 1938, the Nazis instigated a pogrom in Germany which became known as Kristallnacht. Eighty-three years later to the day, . . . Tzipi Hotovely was forced out of the LSE by violent racists on the hunt for a Jew to attack. Social-media posts make their aim very clear, with one . . . calling for her car window to be smashed. “Let’s f—in’ frighten her,” it continued. “Let’s make her shake.”

Footage of last night’s scenes has now been widely circulated. They shame the LSE. But they also shame our nation, because although the scale and extent of the violence last night may have been greater than usual, it is only a matter of scale. On campuses across the UK, Israeli spokespeople are always subject to attack when they appear. But the crucial point is [that] it is not just official Israeli spokespeople who are targeted—it is Jews, and Jewish students.

The anti-Jewish racism is even institutionalized, with organized hate-fests such as the so-called “Israel Apartheid Week,” which provides an annual umbrella for some of the most open and virulent anti-Semitism. . . . Eighty-three years after Kristallnacht, the ambassador of the world’s only Jewish state was attacked by a hate-filled mob on the streets of London. History is alive.

In September, Cypriot police narrowly foiled a plot by an Iranian agent to murder five Jewish businessman. This was but one of roughly a dozen similar operations that Tehran has conducted in Europe since 2015—on both Israeli or Jewish and American targets—which have left three dead. Matthew Karnitschnig traces the use of assassination as a strategic tool to the very beginning of the Islamic Republic, and explains its appeal:

In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds. That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa.

Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: they won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors, and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin, and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.

While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program and renewing business ties.