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The Global War on the Jews - WSJ
The Editorial Board
This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews, and a Jewish community center under construction in the city of Nalchik was the target of an apparent attack.
Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on Oct. 18. Some Jews found Stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution. German politicians have been forceful in their denunciations, but apparently not forceful enough in their policing.
Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. They’re probably right to worry the state can’t protect them. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for “jihad” and chanted “from the river to the sea,” a demand for the erasure of Israel and by extension its citizens. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted “gas the Jews” after the Hamas attack.
Americans like to believe such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League last week reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The 312 incidents the ADL recorded include a car carrying individuals with Palestinian flags allegedly swerving toward a Jewish family and several alleged assaults by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.
These and too many other incidents to count put paid to the notion that one can distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism since Oct. 7. If protesters wanted to burn Israeli flags in a fit of wrong-headed pique about a two-state solution, that is one thing. Only anti-Jewish hate can explain how synagogues, children and airports are targets of this outrage.
Yet many Western intellectuals—and a growing number of politicians—insist on maintaining this false distinction. They’ve seen what Hamas has done to innocent Israeli civilians, and what pro-Hamas protesters have said and done in Western streets. They’d nonetheless forgive any violence by Hamas or Hezbollah against Jews as anticolonial defiance.
This is why Israel is fighting, and must fight, as hard as it is for its survival as a state. And why it’s inexcusable for any Western politician now to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. No leader who is demonstrably incapable of protecting Jews in his or her own country should try to prevent Israel from defending itself. This is how the West slips from “never again” into “nowhere is safe.”
This global war on Jews also clarifies what is at stake for Western societies in this fight. The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.
Before there was a Chancellor Hitler in 1933, there were roving bands of Brownshirts inflicting political and anti-Semitic violence on the streets of Germany. They too often went unchecked by police, prosecutors and politicians who didn’t understand the menace, sympathized with the offenders, or merely felt overwhelmed by the scale of the danger. Hitler gained power in part because the German state no longer could maintain its monopoly on violence in defense of democratic values.
Today’s threats to democracy are different, but one lesson is the same and is crystal-clear: A Western society that can’t or won’t muster the will to defend its Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens won’t be able to defend itself.
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The Death of Democrat Jewish Innocence
By Sally Zelikovsky
Jewish conservatives, while considered a bit of an oddity despite growing numbers, are commonly asked Why are so many Jews liberals?
From conservative luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and Dennis Prager to B-team influencers like me, Jewish conservatives have struggled to provide a satisfactory answer. Like any other group, we do not march in lockstep, certainly not when it comes to our religion and definitely not politically. Still, Jewish conservatives readily acknowledge that, like Black Americans, most of us tend to be liberal if not downright progressive and, regrettably, sometimes Marxist.
Books and articles have been written, and theories abound as to why this is, including, among others, the idea that Jews are liberal out of residual devotion to FDR and his pro-unionism; as pushback against the brutality they suffered under right-wing totalitarians like Hitler; and because, when Jews became secular, they replaced their religion with progressivism.
None of these quite hits the sweet spot, but they all resonate to some extent.
I long ago abandoned any hope of uncovering the definitive reason for this phenomenon but, in thinking about the strong reaction that many liberals and Jewish liberals had to the October 7th Hamas Pogrom, I had a revelation. Bear with me.
In Konstantin Kisin’s must-read article The Day the Delusions Died, he notes that some Americans woke up as liberals on October 7th and went to bed that night as conservatives.
In A Political Reawakening?, Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman explain that this change can be attributed to the “sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism” as well as “the sense of how thin the line is between civilization and barbarism. And how the West, which so many take for granted, is more vulnerable than we ever imagined.” According to Weiss, “[t]he contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.”
Liberals who went to bed conservatives sincerely believed they were making some grand gesture by supporting Israel’s right to exist while recognizing the plight of the Palestinians until the reality of October 7th exploded their worldview. They are scared sh**less and rethinking the politicians, party, and policies they’ve long supported.
Protesters might feverishly burn Israeli flags in Istanbul, but threatening Jewish students barricaded in a university library in New York City and announcing your exhilaration from your Cornell ivory tower does not win hearts and minds among American liberals suffering from an identity crisis due to what Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and author of Londonistan, has coined a “civilizational crisis.”
This all got me thinking about the “Jewish liberals” question.
American Jews collectively want to be the good guys with big hearts who are devoted to public service and champion the world’s underdogs. After all, who better than the Jews to understand what it feels like to be an underdog?
And, having made lemonade out of Diaspora lemons, we have a strong commitment to giving back.
This “feel goodism” political alignment between Jews and liberalism is deeply rooted in Jewish biblical teachings and tradition. We were “chosen” to spread the concept of one G-d and to follow His commandments and laws. We were supposed to heal and bring peace to the world (tikkun olam), spread the words of “love thy neighbor” and “do unto others,” be charitable (tzedakah), do good deeds (mitzvot), etc. One can see why many Jews find the liberal path consistent with their Jewish roots and upbringing.
(Whether it’s liberalism or conservativism that actually accomplishes these virtuous things is not the subject of this article.)
Furthermore, there is a modified Stockholm Syndrome at play here for many Jews who, after centuries of being told how dirty, cheap, conniving, greedy, and horrible they are, may have either come to believe that about themselves or cannot cope with the reality that others perceive them that way. They have chosen to do everything they can to change that perception as a kind of expiation for their guilt. They seek absolution by doing good, which is quintessentially Jewish: on our Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), we say that repentance, prayer, and charity temper the severity of G-d’s decree for our sins.
What better way to prove you are not any of those things than by living a life you believe others will view as epitomizing the exact opposite? You will be upright, magnanimous, altruistic, philanthropic, and wonderful.
Related are the scars Jews collectively bear from centuries of anti-Semitism and the underlying fear that, no matter what we do, we will always be perceived negatively. Despite our contributions and assimilation throughout Europe, we were reviled as an infestation so pernicious and alien that we had to be exterminated. Whether as slaves in Egypt, auto-da-fé victims in Spain for failing to renounce our Judaism, essentially imprisoned residents of shtetls throughout the Pale of Settlement, shunned and marginalized citizens of the USSR, or outcasts from schools and jobs throughout the Anglosphere … the consistent messaging has been that Jews are subhuman, lesser than, the Other.
For many, the solution was to embrace political parties, policies, and ideologies that reflected positively on them by demonstrating how good, caring, and involved they were, especially with people who were also of different ethnicities and races—including the Palestinians.
Then, out of the blue one day in October 2023, they were gob-smacked by Palestinian brutality and antipathy towards Jews and their joy in annihilating the Chosen People. American liberals were forced to acknowledge that the very politicians, policies, and institutions they have supported have undermined not only Israeli safety but, now, their own, as they witness Jews threatened on university campuses and in major cities throughout the world; are barricaded by protesters in university libraries; and are being targeted with hate crimes in their neighborhoods—up 1,350% in London and 400% in the US.
They cannot help but wonder what awaits Jews everywhere as Hamas’s Reign of Terror is brazenly feted by a crazed, irrational mob.
As Kisin comments (with my modifications in brackets): the “events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion [held by Liberals, in general, and Jewish Liberals, in particular,] that wokeness [born of liberalism] is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities.”
Liberals who went to bed on October 7th as conservatives understand that (a) if you believe that the Palestinians got a raw deal in 1948 when Israel was established, or after the 1967 war when Israel regained the West Bank and Gaza, or after the failed Oslo Accords in 1993, and (b) if this viewpoint trumps the horrors of the October 7th Pogrom such that you aren’t revolted, and (c) if you were exhilarated by the executions, beheadings, immolation, and kidnappings such that you lack any remorse for the victims, then you are every bit as psychopathic as this Hamas murderer, who used the phone of one of his victims to call his “proud” parents and boast:
“I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!”
The father replied: ‘Oh my son, God bless you!’
“I swear, ten with my own hands. I killed ten with my own hands. Mom, your son is a hero! Kill, kill, kill!”
For Judeo-Christian brains, this is otherworldly. We don’t think like this. We derive no pleasure from killing. It’s just not part of our ethos. We only kill out of absolute necessity and are guided by principles of necessity, proportionality, and justifiable self-defense, among others. We mourn the death tolls we cause to such an extent our soldiers routinely suffer from PTSD.
Israelis have long understood that to survive, they must think like Arabs and Muslims but, in recent years, they forgot that. No one need forget now, though, because we have pro-Palestinian supporters like this guy at a London protest with 100,000 attendees to remind us:
The difference between us [the Muslims] and them [the Jews]
Is that for them, they think life begins
For us, we believe that death begins!
We believe that life begins at death.
We don’t care about death.
We love death.
Takbir! Allahu Akbar!
This is the poetry of Islam—a death cult that rejoices in killing Jews who, they readily admit, have the chutzpah to embrace life.
If you aren’t already gob-smacked, this should do it.
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What we are witnessing on campuses of supposed elite schools is the consequence of hiring sub-standard professors simply because of heir ethnicity and color. When all else fails lower your standards. This is no less true of sub-standard hiring's in a variety of professions. This is another reason why AI is such a threat. AI does not care about color, it is totally objective based on former patterns. etc.
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I have been listening to various congressional testimonies regarding domestic anti-Semitism. The Sec, of State is a weak Jew as is the head administrator who has done nothing to protect our borders. The State Department is full of anti-Israel personnel. Blinken and Mayorkas are both Jewish but seem not to have a Jewish heart.
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A Watershed Moment for Jews
By Robert Weissberg
What dominates the mass media is often fleeting importance for the enduring political landscape. Nevertheless, some events can harbinger momentous changes despite their initial ordinary nature. A particularly telling example was the initial shift of small number of White Southern Democrats into the Republican Party in 1964, a little-noticed event that foretold the shift of nearly all Southern Whites into the GOP. Such shifts are tectonic insofar as they may eventually fundamentally change the political landscape.
We may now be experiencing a tectonic shift of major magnitude, namely the exodus of Jews from liberalism. The triggering event is the Hamas savagery on Oct 7th in Israel and, of equal importance, the support of many Americans for this barbarism. These two events are a double wakeup call for many American Jews -- who could imagine anybody celebrating the beheading of babies, nor thousands of Americans, often at elite universities, denouncing Israel as an apartheid, genocidal colonial regime?
Anti-Semitism per se is not the issue. Such hostility is part of American life but, thankfully, it usually involve isolated incidents such as defacing synagogues or assaulting Jews dressed in Hasidic garb. The very worst is shootings Jews at prayer, typically by mentally ill loners.
The recent events are fundamentally different in both scope and fury, and, of the utmost significance, they stir long-forgotten dark memories about Jewish life. Millions of American Jews familiar with their troubled history have long insisted “It can’t happen here.” Almost overnight, at least for many, this has become, “It is unlikely to happen here.” This creeping doubt might seem only a slight linguistic shift, but the very idea of a possibility, however remote, has deep, inescapable emotional consequences. Jewish students at Cornell have now received death threats solely due to their religion. Such incidents set off reactions long buried in the mind’s deepest recesses, and nearly every Jew in America has tales to tell. My mother just barely escaped Poland in 1938, but most of her family did not. This dark “baggage” is commonplace.
One highly-publicized response to events has been the threats of billionaire Jews such as Ronald Lauder and Leslie Wexner to stop funding their alma maters over campus anti-Semitism. Thousands of other Jews have also undoubtedly closed their checkbooks in disgust. But, as I have argued elsewhere, the anti-Israel vitriol will not cease. Billions in donations will be raised elsewhere, and no school can end the hatred of Jews. Nevertheless, these rich Jews are sending a message whose deeper unease is far more consequential than a closed checkbook; eyes are opening.
Less visible in this tectonic shift is a shocker -- Jews are buying guns. Lots. A recent NBC news story had the headline "'Not Safe Anywhere Now:' American Jews Are Flocking to Gun Training Classes.” Now Jews in cities with large Jewish populations were suddenly inundating gun stores and shooting ranges, all saying, “I never believed I would do this.” The gun-enthusiast website Reload told of a Jewish gun training organization that recently received about 638 calls on its hotline about joining over a five-day period while for the entire past years, the figure was 950. Nor is packing heat limited to cities with large Jewish populations. In West Texas, an area hardly at risk from Hamas, Jews are suddenly arming themselves and practicing their marksmanship.
A recent conversation with a Jewish doctor adds depth to this transformation. The subject of Jews and gun ownership surfaced almost haphazardly, and he told me that he, like other liberals, had always been anti-gun. Now, everything is different -- he currently owns four, including a shotgun (“you can’t miss”) and he and his wife are willing to use them to protect the family. He resides in an affluent suburb and explained that when BLM took to the streets, reality shifted. Recent Hamas barbarism only confirmed his decision. He also told me that he had just attended a dinner of fellow liberal Jews, all of whom were anti-gun, and now half owned guns and regularly practice shooting.
Those unfamiliar with the political views of Jews may not fully grasp the shift. Guns were not previously on the agenda to combat anti-Semitism. The first line of defense always prioritized educating Americans about the Holocaust, improving society to eliminate what bred hate, and being good, generous members of the community. Jewish organizations famously gave dinners to honor Christians who worked for improved inter-faith relationships. Jews donated millions to help blacks and helped found the NAACP.. If anything, Jews saw guns as threat to civil society. Now, buying a gun is not just adding one more item to defending against anti-Semitism; it is an admission that the “old way of thinking” no longer applies. And many Jews will do the once unthinkable: admit this new reality in public.
How will this play out? Conceivably, not much if Hamas is crushed and the campuses return to normal. But, like the first Southern Whites voting for the GOP, the tectonic plates may be shifting. This is particularly likely as the number of orthodox Jews, who are overwhelmingly politically conservative replace liberal secular Jews who tend to have small families or are childless altogether. Just look at Israel, where the ultra-religious are now major political players thanks to their high birth-rate.
Uncertainties aside, the likely outcome will be Jews moving rightwards. Almost certainly Jews will lose their enthusiasm for open borders given that millions of new arrivals will likely be Muslims. Jews can see what has happened in Europe as large numbers of Muslims enter European countries -- anti-Jewish violence increases. They can also see this at home as Muslim immigrants gain an electoral foothold in Minnesota and Michigan (see “the Squad )”
Many Jews will also now look askance at the feel-good multiculturalism that dominates American education from kindergarten to the universities that they once favored. If it worked as advertised to quell hate at its source, why do all the young people call for the abolishing Israel? A new, more accurate view is that preaching the “we are all brothers” gospel is camouflaged cultural Marxism that celebrates “the oppressed” while Jews, being White and affluent, are the oppressor and must be eliminated by “decolonization.” Jews thrive in western civilization; their enemies hate it, and much of contemporary education, top to bottom, hates western civilization.
Third, Jews may become uneasy about the long-term Black-Jewish alliance built around a shared liberal agenda. Anti-Semitism has long had a presence among blacks, and the recent BLM celebration of Hamas confirms the worst fears of many Jews. Perhaps it is time to put some distance in that relationship.
More generally, recent events may bring the end of knee-jerk liberalism among Jews. The shift away from the Left that began in Israel decades ago may have finally arrived in the U.S. This exodus is particularly likely as the Democratic Party increasingly embraces defunding the police, ending cash bail, hostility to meritocracy, celebrating every sexual proclivity imaginable, a contempt for traditional morality and all else anathema to most Jews. When today’s American Jews look at Israel, they see that, in the final analysis, endless talk and good intentions are insufficient; better to have a gun and know how to use it. And Jews are good learners.
Image: Bird Eye
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Israel Deploying Special Weapon To Deal With Hamas Inside Tunnels: Report
By Ryan Saavedra
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will reportedly deploy a new weapon to trap and seal off Hamas terrorists inside the hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that they hide in underneath Gaza.
The Telegraph reported the IDF will use “sponge bombs” to fight the terrorist group responsible for massacring 1,400 Israelis and wounding 5,300+ in an unprecedented terror attack earlier this month.
Sponge bombs, which Israel has reportedly been using in training exercises over the last two years, are chemical bombs that when detonated rapidly expands into a foam that quickly hardens.
The sponge bombs would allow Israel to prevent Hamas from ambushing them as they move through Gaza since they will be able to seal off entire sections of tunnel.
“Contained in a plastic container, the specialist devices have a metal partition separating two liquids,” the report said. “Once this barrier is extracted, the compounds mix as the soldier positions the ‘bomb’ or throws it further ahead.”
IDF engineering specialists are able to detect where the tunnels are located via “ground and aerial sensors, ground penetrating radar and special drilling systems,” the report said.
Sponge bombs are reportedly hazardous to work with as some soldiers have been blinded by mishandling the liquid mixture.
Underground warfare more closely resembles fighting underwater than fighting inside a building, according to John Spencer, a former US major who chairs urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
“Nothing that is used on the surface works in the same way or with the same efficiency underground,” he said. “Specialized equipment is needed to see, to breathe, to navigate, to map the space, to communicate and to deploy lethal means.”
Related: Israel Pounds Iranian-Backed Terrorist Targets Inside Gaza, Lebanon, Syria
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The Pro-Hitler Freelancer Fiasco Isn't the NYT's Only Issue
By Matt Vespa
If you thought The New York Times hiring a pro-Nazi freelancer was bad enough, think again. The saga concerning the publication’s dabbling in scandal regarding their hires has another chapter. This time, we have some folks masquerading as experts on Mideast studies; the two examples found by a former New York Times editorial writer expose the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy.
The paper has printed editorials by these individuals, along with apparent glowing profiles, trying to cast a particular narrative. It didn’t take long to expose them as individuals who celebrated the murder of Jews on October 7. One of them even made fun of the developing story that Hamas terrorists murdered an Israeli baby in the oven:
While Clearing Out Hamas Defensive Positions, the IDF Made a Gruesome Discovery
And with that, you can see how The New York Times could hire pro-Hitler staffers.
Bari Weiss was driven from the Times due to the anti-Semitic elements within its newsroom. As we’ve seen from the demonstrations nationwide on college campuses and in cities, there are a lot of anti-Semites now openly calling for genocide against Israel. Those ripping up the posters of kidnapped Israeli men, women, and children have been another unsettling and disturbing act by pro-terrorist elements in this country and abroad.
Can we please put to bed the myth of the moderate Muslim? They’ve never existed.
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I guess Biden and his pathetic Secretary of Defense will do nothing to respond to attacks on American troops until one or more are killed. Apparently "don't" ain't strong enough. Even 3 "dont's" aren't working either. Maybe a baker's dozen of "dont's" are needed.
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