A Response to Antisemitism
A young Jewish child in Jerusalem. Credit: Levi Meir Clancy
How can decent people respond to cries for the massacre of Jews and destruction of Israel following the brutal, sadistic, and methodical slaughter of over 1,200 Jewish people in cold blood on October 7?
This event appears to have given the Hamas terrorists and tens of thousands of their supporters the license to expose their genocidal intentions. Not only do they celebrate the rampage as a great victory, but they also promise a repeat of the massacre “over and over again.” Such open advocacy for barbarism is shocking and horrifying.
These terrorists came across the border into Israel with a plan to murder, maim, and mutilate, and that is what they did. They called their families on their smartphones to brag that they had murdered Jews. Some used their victims’ own phones to upload footage of their torture and murder to their social media sites so their families could watch in horror. And the videos provide evidence that they did all of this with glee.
What was the world’s response? The streets of our capital cities were not filled with protestors demanding that the hostages taken by Hamas be immediately released. Instead, a moral and spiritual catastrophe was on full display throughout the West when people poured into the streets to celebrate the slaughter of Israelis before the bodies of the victims had even been identified.
The United Nations did not immediately convene to issue a resolution deploring the beheading of Israelis or the kidnapping of over 200 people, including Americans. Instead, people rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and Toronto and Sydney, where protestors chanted “gas the Jews.”
France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, saw a surge in antisemitism with 819 incidents in the three weeks after October 7 – more than the entire past year. The United Kingdom’s Jewish community saw antisemitic incidents rise by 324% in the days following the Hamas massacre compared to the same period the previous year. Three hundred thousand people in London marched in solidarity with a terrorist group, many wearing the headgear of Hamas and threatening the open annihilation of Jews.
The Netherlands recorded a jump of 800% in antisemitic incidents since October 7. China has seen an explosion of antisemitic content on the internet, including praise for Hitler and comparing Jews to Nazis.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic attacks in the United States in the days following October 7 surged 388% compared to the same period in 2022. As demonstrators expressed support for Hamas and violence against Jews, BLM Chicago posted the paraglider – a symbol of mass death – as a symbol of freedom. A pro-Palestinian protestor in Los Angeles killed a 69-year-old Jewish man waving an Israeli flag, although NBC’s initial headline claimed only that “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California.” The same crowd that has tried to convince us that words are violence are now insisting that actual violence is a justified necessity.
Antisemitism is often justified by asserting that Israel is a product of white colonial imperialism that oppresses people of color, therefore it must be “decolonized.” The narrative reads that if the West is powerful, white, and exploits people, then it must follow that the West is powerful because it is white and exploits people. Under this theory, antisemitism is directly linked with anti-whiteness. One flyer distributed at the University of Chicago read “Ending White Privilege Starts With Ending Jewish Privilege.” The moral calculus is that Israelis and Jews are powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and considered as people of color, so they are good. The fact that a wide majority of Jews in Israel are people of color, hailing from North Africa and the Middle East, is apparently of no importance.
There has never in world history been any group so consistently hated, enslaved, attacked, and demeaned as the Jews, while at the same time accomplished, respected, revered, and needed. And there has never been such a people who, though scattered and landless for centuries, maintained their identity as a people and after two millennia were restored to the same geographic location where their identity as a people was first created – the opposite of colonialism.
Hate for Israel and the Jewish people on elite U.S. university campuses is at an all-time high. At Cornell University, where Professor Russell Rickford called the massacre “energizing” and “exhilarating,” Jews received on-line threats of violence, including calling on students to follow a Jewish person home and “slit their throats.”
Students at NYU chanting “death to Jews” held posters that read “keep the world clean” with drawings of Stars of David in garbage cans. At New York City’s Cooper Union, Jewish students threatened by anti-Israel protesters were forced to lock themselves in a school library. At George Washington University, a pro-Hamas message, “Glory to our martyrs” was projected onto the Gelman Library building. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter of Jews “awesome.” At Princeton, students chanted “globalize the intifada.”
Jewish students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology feared for their lives after pro-Hamas protesters blocked entrances to a central building, calling for ethnic cleansing. A Jewish student said he was fearful of sitting in class with “classmates and teachers who were just calling for my death – as the university did nothing.” MIT acknowledged not suspending these violent students for fear that they would be deported.
Young people are chanting slogans of death and tearing down the photographs of women and children being held hostage – and they are doing it with pleasure.
And University presidents who leapt at the chance to issue condemnations of George Floyd’s killing or Putin’s war on Ukraine have mostly offered silence or implied some kind of equivalence between innocent victims and jihadists by cautioning students to think of “both sides.” We don’t need “context” to know that tying children to their parents and burning them alive is evil. The disparity between the way these elitists treat injustice, suffering, and pain when it belongs to any other marginalized group, as opposed to when the victims are Jews, has been exposed.
The double standard is a defining feature of antisemitism. Israel is singled out for harsh criticism while glaring human rights abuses in other nations are ignored. Universities find moral clarity in statements about every other tragedy imaginable, but struggle to conjure up a few sentences to condemn the horrific acts of Hamas. Their professors cheer on terrorists as “exhilarating” and pen letters “recontextualizing” Jewish rape and torture as “exercising a right.”
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. But when antisemitism moves from the fringe into the public square, it is no longer about Jews. When educated people respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism, it is an early warning system that society itself is breaking down. Israel is a mirror for the West and for the United States. The current antisemitic movement is linked to hatred for our own country and its meritocratic promise. That’s why pro-Hamas protesters are tearing down American flags.
We may not be ripping down posters of kidnapped victims or celebrating murderers, but our silence has allowed those people to monopolize our public squares. We cannot sit as passive observers any longer, allowing these actions to go unchallenged. The past weeks have shown us what happens when we stay quiet and let others dictate the standards of the institutions we inhabit. Taking a stand makes it harder to enter certain rooms. But who occupies those rooms? The moral arbiters of our society with ethical codes riddled with hypocrisy, jargon-filled excuses for antisemitic hate, and hollow phrases about empathy and justice delivered in the same breaths as the rationalization of murder and torture.
I don’t want to contort myself to be in those rooms anymore. Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where freedom of speech, thought, and faith are protected, Jews tend to be protected as well. But the right ideas don’t just win on their own, they need a voice. It is time for decent people to defend the values that have made this country the freest and most tolerant society in the world without hesitation or apology. We are the last line of defense.