The Left’s Dangerous Indifference to Antisemitism

America in 2023 is looking more and more like Germany just before Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. With antisemitism growing rapidly, too many in our political leadership, culture, and society ignore or minimize the danger of this toxic hatred with indifference, excuses, and denials.

We must not allow the cancer of antisemitism to spread in America as it did in Europe 90 years ago. This requires holding antisemites responsible for their words and deeds, including expelling high school and college students, firing employees, and filing hate crime charges when possible, against people who engage in Jew-hatred. History shows us Antisemitism is like a spark in dry grass—unanswered it becomes a conflagration.

The Nazis in 1930s and 40s Germany proudly boasted of their hatred of Jews. But the 21^st century antisemites — many of them young people on the left — deny they are what they are. Instead, to avoid what the reality of their bigotry really means, they cloak their Jew-hatred as political opposition to the state of Israel.

Absurdly, many antisemites even claim that Hamas terrorists who murdered about 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages in Israel on Oct. 7 — and have fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state since then — don’t hate Jews and are really virtuous freedom fighters.  

Even if you believe this nonsense, how do you explain antisemitism crossing the Atlantic to infect America?

After all, Jews in the U.S. aren’t responsible for actions by the Israeli government any more than Muslim Americans were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Many protests since Oct. 7 labeled as being “pro-Palestinian” have in fact been displays of vicious anti-Jewish hatred. And alarmingly, police, government and school officials have often played down the seriousness of these actions.

For example, about 400 students at a New York City high school where about 30 percent of students are Muslim “rampaged through the halls … for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally — forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office as the teen mob tried to push its way into her classroom,” the New York Post reported Tuesday. The teacher, not coincidentally, is Jewish.

While New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks said it was “completely unacceptable” that students had targeted the teacher for supporting Israel and “expressing her Jewish identity,” he called for understanding for the students who terrified her because they “feel a kindred spirit with the folks of the Palestinian community.”

Huh?

Imagine if 400 white students had rampaged through the same high school threating a Black teacher who had attended a “racial justice” rally following the horrific 2020 murder of George Floyd (a Black man) by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Does anyone think the school’s chancellor would have called for understanding of the white students because they felt a kindred spirit with the folks of the police community?

Most of us believe racism against people of color is terrible and should be condemned. But the same should be true of antisemitism and other forms of hatred. Condemning one but not the others is not just hypocritical, it exposes the left’s crusade for recognition and punishment of hate crimes as nothing more than a political ploy to be implemented only when it suits the left’s preferred narratives.

There are many other recent incidents of antisemitism masquerading as opposition to Israeli policies. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League reported a nearly 400 percent increase in antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in the U.S. between Oct. 7 and 23 compared with the same period last year. There are likely more anti-Jewish incidents than the 312 reported.

In a deadly incident, a 69-year-old pro-Israel demonstrator near Los Angeles was assaulted by a pro-Palestinian protester at a November 5^th demonstration. Paul Kessler died after hitting his head when he fell backwards onto the pavement during the assault. Police arrested Loay Amaji, a 50-year-old computer science professor at a community college, and the district attorney charged him with involuntary manslaughter and battery.

In another antisemitic incident, 11 Jewish students at Cooper Union College in New York City had to be locked in the school library on Oct. 25 to protect them from dozens pro-Palestinian protesters pounding on the building’s doors and windows as they chanted “Free Palestine.” Terrifying students at a college in New York City is not going to “free Palestine,” but it will frighten Jews. And that’s the point.

Outside, as the mob brayed at the Jewish students through windows, a librarian suggested they move to a safer location in the building. Many considered that a suggestion to hide. In the end, no one was arrested, and in a classic display of indifference and minimizing, the NYPD Chief of Patrol stated, “There was no direct threats, there was no damage, and there was no danger to any students in that school,” reported Forward. In other words, nothing to see here!

And in yet another example of antisemitism, a Cornell University student was arrested in October and charged with making violent threats after allegedly urging people online to kill Jews and saying he would “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig Jews.”

In a bizarre display of denial and literally blaming the victims, Hamas supporters speaking at an Oakland, California City Council meeting Monday night actually claimed that the atrocities of Oct. 7 in Israel were carried out by the Israel Defense Forces — not Hamas. The council then rejected a condemnation of Hamas for the attack by a 6-2 vote.   

Like the Nazis under Hitler, modern antisemites hate Jews simply because they are Jews, with envy playing a significant role. Ultimately, antisemites have always used contrivances to justify their hatred since biblical times, falsely blaming Jews for conduct that sparked their persecution.

Now Jews (not just Israelis) are being blamed for the thousands of deaths in the Gaza Strip in the Israel-Hamas war. But the real blame falls on the terrorist group Hamas, which commits shocking atrocities, war crimes, kidnaps innocent civilians, and uses their own civilians as human shields, and also refuses to give up the commitment in its charter to wiping Israel off the map and killing Jews. They are so pathological and blood-thirsty, that less than 3 weeks after the massacre, a Hamas official stated on television that they will attack Israel again and again in a repeat of their atrocities of October 7^th.

What these knuckle-dragging savages rely upon is the indifference of normally decent people. In a prescient warning, Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who wrote about the worst period of antisemitism in history, told us in 1999 why we cannot ignore antisemitism whenever and wherever it arises: “Indifference elicits no response,” Wiesel said at a White House ceremony. “Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.”