We’ve got an anti-Semitism problem in this country.
And it is most definitely not confined to Trump country — nor is it even mostly contained in Trump country, although it does exist there.
Nor is it confined to our college campuses — even if it is particularly odious and strong there.
It’s also not just in the media — although the media’s streak of Jew hatred is pretty much a reflection of what we see in our Ivy League schools.
Anti-Semitism is increasingly being heard in the halls of our own government, where hundreds of federal employees have signed — anonymously, of course — various petitions supporting Hamas’ efforts to eliminate Israel.
It’s even manifesting itself in Congress, where elected representatives are repeating the despicable chant of “From the river to the sea” - an overt call to remove Jews from the Middle East, a cry for genocide.
The truth is, we have an anti-Semitism problem all across our nation.
Synagogues are being vandalized, Jewish college students are being harassed, a Jewish protestor at a pro-Israel rally was killed.
Sadly, the likelihood of the FBI doing much of anything to investigate anti-Semitic threats, or even actual violence, isn’t particularly high.
At a time when the FBI is more politicized, more openly partisan, that at any point since J. Edgar Hoover was investigating President Nixon’s political opponents, all we have to do is look at what happened after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year: As more than 100 Catholic churches, schools and shrines across the country were vandalized, it turned out the FBI was worried that potential terrorists were ... inside the churches worshipping.
You can’t make this stuff up.
While the FBI was finally admitting to Congress (only after internal documents had come to light) that it had assigned agents and resources to investigate American citizens for the suspicious activity of attending Catholic Mass celebrated in Latin, it was also announcing that it was not taking a look at the anti-Jewish protests, because those folks were simply exercising their constitutionally protected rights.
When we have synagogues being vandalized, and Jewish citizens being attacked on American streets, might not it make a little sense to look into the associations of people chanting “Kill the Jews” at large, organized rallies?
With the current administration’s political party in an open civil war between the traditional base that recognizes anti-Semitism as one of the worst moral scourges of Western civilization, and young, frankly ignorant upstarts who oppose any kind of support for Israel, our government’s ability to address the growing threats against American Jews is largely paralyzed.
And, to be honest, with the takeover of much of the federal bureaucracy by wokesters who view the world through a distorted prism that sees terrorists as oppressed victims, any investigation of anti-Jewish violence is just as likely to turn on the Jewish community itself — much as we saw with the anti-Catholic violence last year.
The inability of large swaths of our educated — or at least credentialed — class to differentiate between the intentional targeting of civilians by terrorists because of their religion and the unavoidable death of civilians when terrorists hide behind their own population represents a moral crisis in the West.
In Nazi Germany, of course, the Jews were attacked as “outsiders” — non-European foreigners from the Middle East who couldn’t be trusted to be loyal German citizens, even though many Jewish families had fled their ancestral homeland generations earlier.
Today, the Arab über nationalists seeking to destroy Israel try to portray the Jews — inhabitants of the Middle East for more than three millennia — as, no surprise, “outsiders,” non-locals “colonizing” former Arab lands.
The level of historical ignorance necessary to parrot such racist nonsense is a sad indictment of the caliber of “education” being ladled out at our supposed institutions of higher learning.
In fact, modern-day Israel was, much like its northern neighbor Lebanon, a polyglot society until the Ottoman Empire’s ethnic cleansing during World War I. While the Armenians call this period the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrians the Assyrian Genocide, and the Greeks the Greek Genocide, all three groups were targeted for not being Muslim and were either killed or forcibly expelled from the Ottoman Empire, including what is today Israel.
These communities had existed peacefully along the Mediterranean from modern-day Turkey to Egypt for more than 2,000 years. Some 4 million were killed, millions other deported, with ethnic Arabs from the south offered their farms, their shops, their homes — and so Israel and Lebanon became, just over a century ago, overwhelmingly, homogenously Arab.
You might call that colonization.
(The Nasser government of Egypt finished the Turks’ ethnic cleansing during the early 1950s, deporting the remaining historic Greek communities.)
During all this time, Jews continued to live in their historic homeland, much of this time constituting a majority of Jerusalem’s population.
So the portrayal of Israel as a “settler, colonial” nation is nothing more than a vile, racist libel — a lie used to justify hatred of and violence toward Jews.
We likely need some kind of Americanized denazification, much as was imposed on Germany following World War II.
Surely, espousing racist anti-Semitic tropes should disqualify one from holding public office. Congress, at least, holds the constitutional authority to deny a seat to any member found to be unfit.
Universities that tolerate anti-Semitism should lose access to all federal funding — student loans, research grants, GI Bill tuition, etc. Professors who make racist, historically ignorant statements should lose their tenure; law students who do so should be denied entrance to the bar upon graduation. Medical students who express antipathy toward Jews should not be allowed to practice medicine.
Given the First Amendment, there is probably not much that can be done by regulation in terms of barring anti-Semites from the New York Times or PBS — but consistent, public pressure should be brought to bear. Advertisers and donors should make their opposition known (not that advertisers have shown much stomach for standing up to left-wing online mobs of late).
And just as when the German American Bund marched in support of Hitler in the streets of the United States in the 1930s, so should protestors demanding the destruction of Israel and death to Jews be identified and tracked. Wearing masks at protests should be banned — you want to chant racist crap, then own it. Only cowards wear masks at a protest anyway — see the KKK for an example.
The last time anti-Semitism was allowed to run rampant, it led to the greatest loss of life in history.
After we thought we had stamped it out, we said “Never again.”
Only never is now.
It’s time to stamp this racist garbage out for good.
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...and these young woksters, ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.