Jews are in some agitation over what looks like a surge of global antisemitism and — perhaps even more confoundingly — support for the death-cult called Hamas. The shocking demonstrations at Columbia University – my once-beloved alma mater – took center stage this week: Jewish professors barred, “no-Zionist zones,” intimidation by violent-seeming masked persons, and shocking slogans glorifying death and destruction. As it spreads, the skittish might conclude we are reliving 1930s Germany, with Jew-hatred spiraling while the forces of civilization are routed.
Is this, though, the whole picture? Can it really be this bad? Is it just antisemitism? Might Israel also be to blame? Can we rule out a mass psychosis driven by undetected celestial events? With similar events also taking place in Europe and elsewhere, an accounting seems urgently to be in order.
First, though, please let me set the stage. Hamas is the enemy not only of Israel but of the Palestinians and of the democratic West, and it should be treated like a cross between ISIS and the Ku Klux Klan. Overt support for Hamas (as opposed to Gazans, of course) should be criminalized, and foreign students on visas who are guilty of it should be deported with extreme prejudice and never allowed to return.
Moreover, I have myself derided “progressives” who deploy selective, ignorant, and twisted narratives of decolonization against Israel. In TV interviews I have called them the “useful idiots” of jihad – a far stupider version of the originals, Western intellectuals sympathetic to the (incredibly) less vile Soviet Union. Someone should advise them of the myriad human rights catastrophes happening all over the world.
I have also bemoaned the indisputable revelation that antisemitism is not only alive and well but more currently widespread than had been recently thought.
At the same time, one might plausibly argue that much of what gets labelled antisemitism should be more accurately seen as opposition to the war (or perhaps to Israel itself), purposely brash and loud in order to discomfit Jews and move opinion. I might not always like it, but a proponent of free speech cannot bar it.
As the son of Holocaust survivors I’m not inclined to cheapen the term "antisemitism” by applying it to the ravings of every ignoramus. I also know from direct familiarity that many of the critics are mainly not supportive of the Israeli government’s actions, which include a very flawed war that has killed many thousands of innocents and appears to lack a strategy. A different story coming from Jerusalem could sway them.
To better understand how US support of and opposition to Israel is broken down, and since so much of the focus (and the largest Jewish diaspora) is in the United States, I offer a breakdown of Americans’ stance on the matter.
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