Israel at War—Anti-Semitism and the Left

In my last post in the "Israel at War" series, I wrote:

... it became painfully apparent with the rabid, campus anti-Semitism that so-easily took hold with 24 hours of the Hamas atrocities on October 7th. Originating solely from the hard left, students and their leftist faculty mentors were screaming threatening anti-Semitic tropes in a menacing display that would have made a neo-Nazi smile.

The left is anti-Semitic and has been for many years. It's sadly amusing to note that many Jews who have enthusiastically supported leftist ideology were gobsmacked by overt displays of Jew-hatred from once-revered institutions like Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Columbia.

But what is the underlying catalyst that has turned university students, who no more that a year ago, needed a safe space to recover when someone used an improper pronoun, into rabid and menacing anti-Semites?

Historian Victor Davis Hansen describes a long list of anti-Semitic incidents and attacks that have occurred in the U.S. over the past two months. He described one this way:

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

The propaganda media downplayed the incident and quickly moved on to claims that the Israelis were "indiscriminately" killing the "innocent, suffering palestinians," quoting unverified and likely false casualty numbers  (e.g., the outrageous claim that 70 percent of the 15,000+ [unverified] deaths in Gaza are women and children).

Because the propaganda media is anti-Israel and left-wing, it avoids any investigation that might make the palestinians and/or the Left look bad. Hansen does not have that restriction:

For the last 40 years, while Western leftists have naively supported Palestinian terrorists, their governments have appeased terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern governments for very practical reasons. The old subtext to such mollification was that 500-million irate Arab Muslims, and a Middle East with 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves, in realist terms, simply argued against the interests of 10 million Israelis.

But now there are two new, venomous elements in the matrix.

One is that the racist DEI industry assumes that all intersectional nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy. Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the supposed victimizers—in this case American Jews, who are declared culpable whites.

So the oppressed, according to the DEI bible, cannot be anti-Semitic, though many certainly are. And they apparently cannot be held accountable for their hatred or frequent violence.

Secondly, in the last two decades there has been an epidemic of immigration into Western nations from the Middle East. In often-divided democracies like ours, politicians seek to appease as many pressure groups as possible, whether citizen voters or merely resident demonstrators, to acquire and maintain power.

Such pro-Hamas demonstrators, rah-rahing from a free, prosperous, and secure West, expect no rebuke for their obvious hypocrisy in cheering on an autocratic, dictatorial Hamas that has wrecked the economy of Gaza, shoots dissidents, and allows no free expression. And Middle Eastern guests and immigrants are never reminded that their very demonstrations are predicated on not being physically present in their homelands, where they might be shot for what they say and do freely in the West.

We are on a trajectory similar to that of 1930s Germany.

As regular readers of this blog know, I believe there is yet another reason. Because the left controls 95 percent of all major sources of communication, they have normalized insanity. And when a group embraces insane thinking, the more it is emboldened to adopt ever-more insane ideas. Hence, we have a group at Columbia University that will be celebrating Hamas on the two-month Anniversary of October 7th.