We politicians can be too quick to reach for superlatives. We sometimes proclaim ourselves “shocked” and “outraged” over tiny verbal slips by opponents. So when something truly staggering happens, our vocabulary can seem inadequate.

The revival of anti-Semitism in Britain’s Labour Party has left many commentators groping for words. It began when Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford, posted a Facebook image suggesting that Israel be “transported” to the United States. In an attempt to defend her, Labour’s former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, argued that hating Jews in Israel wasn’t the same as hating Jews in London, and that Adolf Hitler himself had been a Zionist “before he went mad.”