The Spreading Stain
On the American Left's embrace of oganized antisemitism
“Intifada is in the streets.”
I wrote those words in May 23 for this article on the assassination in Washington DC of two young employees of the Israeli Embassy by a pro-Palestinian terrorist. Perhaps some who read them rolled their eyes. Melodrama! Hyperbole!
No. It’s just the truth.
But not everyone can see the truth. You might think that it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the motives of a man who yelled “Free Palestine” and excoriated Zionism while hurling firebombs at a crowd of Jews gathered to protest the kidnapping, torture and murder of Jews by Hamas. But gosh darn it, the chief of police of Boulder, Colorado, where that very thing happened last Sunday, wasn’t so sure. And former FBI apparatchik Andrew McCabe—remember him?—opined on CNN that the FBI, which has classified the attack as an act of terrorism, is guilty of “a rush to judgement.”
Though no one was killed in the Boulder terrorist attack, at least twelve people were injured, some with burns. One is an elderly Holocaust survivor. And if the FBI is rushing to judgement, it’s because this one’s a no-brainer. The fire bomber is an Egyptian national who entered the country on a temporary non-immigrant visa but never left. But instead of tracking him down and deporting him, the Biden Administration granted his belated application for a work visa, good through 2026. And wouldn’t you know it, Mohamed Sabry Soliman turned out to be an Islamofascist terrorist who was out to kill as many Jews as he possibly could.
While we’re at it, here’s another no-brainer: the pro-Palestinian, “anti-Zionist” activists who’ve been reenacting Kristallnacht on American university campuses and the streets of our cities for almost two years now are not peaceful protesters. They’re monsters of evil. They openly advocate and support what the terrorists are doing: the murder of Jews.
The firebombing of Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the murders in Washington DC, the attack in Boulder—all of this sends a thrill up the legs of these garbage human beings. They would thrill to see the same or worse happen to Jews across America. They would weep tears of joy to see the State of Israel destroyed in an orgy of rape, torture, and mass murder. They would cheer to witness whole families of Israeli Jews being slaughtered—the children first, before the eyes of their parents. They would revel in genocide, from the river to the sea.
Central to the protest strategy of these “anti-Zionist” activists is systematic harassment, intimidation, and violence directed against Jews and Jewish institutions. On university campuses, the objective is to make normal student life impossible for Jews, for instance by creating no-go zones excluding them, or by targeting Jewish institutions on campus. Apologists for all this invoke the First Amendment: The activists are simply exercising their right of free speech! The rights of Jewish students, however, are accorded a much lower priority, insofar as they’re considered at all.
Hyperbole? Hysteria?
No. It’s just the truth. We’ve already seen these monsters of evil celebrating the bloody preview of genocide staged by Hamas on October 7, 2023. And they want more. They’ve made their position perfectly clear: Kill all Jews. Their signage, their chants, their rhetoric, all express support for Hamas terrorism and genocide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free (of Jews)!” “Globalize the Intifada!” “Smash Zionism!” “By any means necessary!”
And let it not be forgotten that these monsters hate America as much as they hate Jews and Israel. A feature of their protests is the defacement of memorials on and off campus, such as this atrocity, perpetrated last year in New York City.
When he was president, Barack Obama was fond of declaring “That’s not who we are” when confronted with opposition to his policies. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I borrow that line, even though he personally was no friend of the Jews. What’s been happening across America since 10/7/2023 is not who we are. Or so I wish I could believe. But today, it quite obviously is part of who we are.
The Marxist-Leninist Liberation Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of this country’s major progressive groups, reacted to the DC terrorist killings by signing on to this statement: “Free Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.” That’s Elias Rodriguez, the DC assassin. In my May 23 article, I described his bloody deed:
The victims of this terrorist attack were Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, a young couple who’d been planning to travel to Jerusalem, where their engagement would be formalized. Their killer, Elias Rodriguez, is a member of The Party of Socialism and Liberation, a radical leftist group. Both victims were shot several times, Milgrim as she tried to crawl to safety after taking a bullet in the back. “Free, free Palestine!” Rodriguez shouted as police took him into custody.
And here’s the full statement to which the DSA subscribed, as posted on X:
And there you have it: Killing American Jews in the name of “anti-Zionism” is righteous. That’s now part of who and what we are.
Not incidentally, the US House of Representatives’ most prominent antisemite and Hamas supporter, the odious Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The American Left, including the progressive base of the Democratic Party, has become deeply infected with this ideological virus of bloody-minded hatred. And to wave the facts away with pious blather about the First Amendment won’t do. This is indeed a civil rights issue, concerning the right of our fellow citizens who happen to be Jews to live in America in safety and peace. Imagine for a moment that the campus disorders we’ve witnessed were being perpetrated by white supremacist activists, targeting black and Hispanic students. Would that be tolerated for a nanosecond? Would any progressive, anywhere, defend the First Amendment rights of the racists?
Don’t make me laugh.
But this is also a national security issue. As I noted in my May 23 article, “America, in its unwisdom, carelessness and good nature, opened its gates to the enemy.” There are hundreds if not thousands of foreigners, resident here on student visas, who are active supporters of Islamofascist terrorism. They are as anti-American as they are antisemitic. They receive support and take directions from foreign terrorist groups and governments. They’ve made a shambles of the campuses of many of America’s elite universities—sadly to say, in most cases with the connivance of university administrations and faculties. The Secretary of State has the authority to kick them out, and he should.
Antisemitic campus activists who are American citizens do enjoy full First Amendment rights, of course. They, like the home-grown bigots of the radical Right, are free to spew forth their hymn of hate. That’s the price demanded for a general enjoyment of civil liberties. But though the hate speech of these monsters has to be tolerated, the actions flowing from it do not. And anti-Zionism, which is nothing but antisemitism and fascism, deserves no respect. On the contrary, it deserves to be excoriated and condemned. The lies it embodies need to be refuted. The malign ideology that underlies it needs to be exposed.
One way of doing this is to remind ourselves of the great and noble participation of Jews in our national epic, outsized in relation to their percentage of the population. I tried to do so in this article, published on Substack in 2022. I wrote:
Examples of Jewish contributions to American life abound. Hyman G. Rickover was a Polish Jew whose family emigrated to America in 1906 when he was six. A brilliant high-school student, he was able to obtain an appointment to the United States Naval Academy in 1918, embarking upon what was to become the most consequential peacetime military career in American history. Rickover served for fifty-four years, rising to the rank of four-star admiral as director of the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program and “father of the nuclear Navy.” American Jews have also figured prominently in this country’s intellectual and cultural life, as the names Irving Berlin, Barbara Tuchman, Susan Sontag, Neil Simon, Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Philip Roth, Jodi Picoult and many others attest.
But in the eyes of the anti-Zionists, the Jews are nothing but a cancerous tumor on the society of any country in which they reside.
Progressives tout their commitment to the defense of “our democracy.” But given their unwillingness to confront this major threat to American democracy—given their embrace of it in many cases—how can they be taken seriously? Antisemitism is the ur-prejudice, the most ancient manifestation of organized racist hatred, and those progressives who haven’t succumbed to it yet are standing on the sidelines, doing nothing, pretending to see nothing, saying nothing, while its stain spreads across America. What a disgrace.
We shouldn't forget the fellow travelers of the left-wing antisemitic bigots; the New York Times, CNN and too many mainstream media outlets. They've knowingly amplified the message of the bigots. They've done so because they've been infiltrated by graduates of journalism schools and other programs at elite universities where the hatred of Jews and their homelands (mostly Israel and the United States) is gestated.
My German relatives are outraged at the behavior of Israel towards the Palestinians.
They honestly believe that the Israelis are Nazis and the Palestinians are "more sinned against than sinning". They want Israel to return to the pre-1948 borders.
I sometimes remind them that the Germans of Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) have at least as good a claim to their historical homeland.
Germans pooh pooh that suggestion saying that Germany was the aggressor and deserved to pay a price for its defeat.
And there in a nutshell is one of the consequences of not knowing history.
But I suspect that if they knew the facts, Germans would still find a reason to blame the Jews.