The West has failed its Jewish communities
The golden age for Jews in the West is over. The West must snap out of its parasympathetic freeze before things get even uglier. Jews are always the first, but never the last.
There was a moment when resurgent global anti-Semitism could have been constrained. It was right after the October 7 attacks when baying street mobs were calling for Jewish blood before Israel had even responded militarily. Western leaders froze and missed it.
A key lesson from the aftermath of Nazism in Europe was that such movements must be stopped early, before they spread. This has been forgotten or abandoned. It has gotten so bad that synagogues have been set on fire, or attempted to be set on fire, in Tunisia, Germany, Canada, Armenia, the United States, Russia, Poland, and France.
To be sure, the rise in anti-Semitism was underway for some time. Research from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) shows that anti-Semitism was well up in 2023 even before the October 7 attacks unleashed a tsunami of hatred.
Western leaders’ responses have been anemic. They have condemned anti-Semitism but done nothing. Most annoying were condemnations of anti-Semitism along with “Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry blah blah blah”. Lumping them together makes it look like all minorities are equal victims of hate crimes, when it is usually Islamists committing hate crimes against Jews.
Many leaders have fueled the anti-Semitism for political gain. Politicians quickly realized that the votes, especially for left-leaning governments, were among the Islamists and their Far-Left allies. They rushed to make statements and adopt policies that legitimized Hamas’ despicable actions. Every ounce of support they offered emboldened the anti-Semites, telling them that their racist tactics were acceptable and effective.
In the US, home to six million Jews and the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, things are better than elsewhere, but are still worrying.
A quarter of US Jews report being targets of anti-Semitic attacks in the past year, according to a survey from the AJC. The survey showed two thirds of American Jews feel less secure than they did a year ago. Half of American Jews reported changing their behavior to avoid anti-Semitism.
Studies on people’s attitudes bear this out. About a quarter of Americans agree with at least six anti-Jewish tropes, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Fully 42 percent of Americans report having friends or family who dislike Jews, or find it socially acceptable for a close family member to support the Hamas terror group.
American Jews are facing problems they had heard about only from their grandparents. Jews who appear outwardly Jewish, wear a kippah, or have Jewish names, are frightened. They feel not enough is being done. Hate speech has been normalized, police have failed to protect Jewish students, and it took ages to disperse mobs calling for Intifada and genocide across US universities, often with faculty support.
President Joe Biden’s administration, increasingly pliant to the Democratic Party’s Leftist base, has not helped. His public criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - including his signing off on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for Netanyahu to resign - has fed the Palestinian lies that Israel is engaged in war crimes and wantonly killing civilians in Gaza.
This has fed the anti-Israel frenzy, and being anti-Israel is just anti-Semitism’s latest designer wear. It also shows the Biden Administration is weak and vulnerable to pressure. His willingness to sacrifice Israel’s security and the safety of American Jews to woo Muslim voters in swing states Michigan and Wisconsin has been cynical and morally repellent.
In Britain, which will be the first English-speaking country to fall, eleven anti-Semitic incidents are reported daily. That is the highest in 40 years and up 589 percent year-on-year, according to the Community Security Trust, part of The Henry Jackson Society think tank. In the week after the October 7 attacks, of which Jews were the victims, anti-Semitic incidents soared 919 percent.
London police have arrested lone Jewish protestors in front of Jihadist masses, as if removing the victim from the crime scene would make the crime disappear. Contrary to popular opinion, resolving this does not start with education. It starts with law enforcement.
Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Rushi Sunak has spoken out against anti-Semitism, but his policies have worsened it. His foreign secretary, the smarmy former Prime Minister David Cameron, has imposed sanctions against individual Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria. He has not imposed them on Hamas, which launched the October 7 pogrom, or the Palestinian Authority, which pays for the murder of Jews, or against Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Lebanon.
Anti-Semitism is entrenched in the United Kingdom’s political elite. The Labor Party, which will almost certainly come to power in a few weeks, is institutionally anti-Jewish. Its leader, Keir Starmer, may be trying to purge his party of anti-Semites, but that is like trying to remove fish the from the sea. Starmer has taken over from previous Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, a vile anti-Semite who built a party in his own image.
In France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations, anti-Semitism has surged. In the first quarter of this year, 366 anti-Semitic incidents were reported, up 300 percent on the same period in 2023. The French Education Ministry has reported that there have been 1450 anti-Semitic incidents at French schools since October 7. Jewish parents are sending their children to school without kippahs or Stars of David for fear they will be attacked.
French President Emmanuel Macron displayed a lack of leadership from the start. He failed to attend a 100,000-strong rally against anti-Semitism back in November in an act of gross moral abandonment. He had a chance to help stop it early and failed to take it.
Since then, hundreds of buildings have been marked with blue Stars of David in a sick move designed to replicate the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, the Nazis marked Jewish houses like this, marking them for boycotts, expulsion, and shipment to death camps across Europe. Anti-Semitism in France is so rampant that although French Jews number only 440,000, they are three times likelier to experience an anti-Semitic attack than Jews in America, which number about six million.
In race-obsessed Australia, the government has shown a similar lack of leadership. The country’s leaders froze as mobs in front of the iconic Sydney Opera House engaged in a frenzied and menacing chant that sounded for all the world like “gas the Jews”, but which audio experts insist was “where’s the Jews”. Police stood and watched.
The country’s media spent days discussing what they were chanting, as if these thugs would somehow be exonerated if only they had called for Jewish blood in an acceptable way.
One in five Australian Jews report having experienced anti-Semitism since October 7, according to polling of 7,600 Jewish Australian Jews by the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Melbourne’s Monash University and community organization JCA Sydney. This figure rises to a shocking two thirds among Jewish students at Australian universities, which are hotbeds Far Left radicalism.
Anthony Albanese, Australia’s pedestrian prime minister, made the obligatory condemnations, but neither he, nor state police, acted robustly enough. He should have said immediately that Australia would deport any non-citizens involved. Police should have broken the rally up, arrested those involved for inciting violence, and set a precedent of zero tolerance.
Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, a left-wing hack straight from Central Casting, made things worse by criticizing Israel based on provable Hamas lies, babbling about a two-state solution that most Israelis and Palestinians do not want, and rewarding terror with talk of recognizing a Palestinian state. This told the Jihadists clearly that their approach was working.
In Canada, which is barely still the West, the government lived down to the country’s anti-Semitic history. B’nai Canada, the country’s oldest Jewish human rights organization, reports that anti-Semitic incidents in Canada rose 109.1 percent in 2023, with most happening after October 7. In Toronto, home to Canada’s biggest Jewish population, attacks on Jews make up 56 percent of hate crimes, despite Jews being only four percent of the population.
The report does not capture 2024 statistics, but the list of attacks on the Jewish community reads like something out of Germany in the 1930s. A Toronto deli has been firebombed, synagogues set ablaze, shots have been fired at a Jewish school, Jewish-owned bookstores have been vandalized, as have Jewish businesses and homes.
Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response has been pathetic. In response to the above, he has managed to publish three whole tweets denouncing anti-Semitism. He has decided he needs the Muslim vote to stay in power. His policies cynically reflect this. In a craven surrender to Jihadism, he has tried to weaken Israel by banning military exports to the world’s only Jewish state in the middle of an existential war. This showed protestors that the government was weak and could be bullied.
Argentina, home to South America’s largest Jewish community, is the odd country in my list. The country’s new libertarian right-wing Argentina's President Javier Milei is hugely supportive of Israel and seems enamored of Judaism itself, being moved to tears at the Wailing Wall on a recent trip to the Holy Land. He plans to move Argentina’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
While Milei’s condemnation of Hamas and anti-Semitism has been magnificent, his strident support for Israel has many Argentinean Jews worrying that they will face a backlash. There have been bomb scares at the AMIA building, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that was bombed in 1994, killing 85 people and injuring 300. Security at synagogues has been strengthened, while children at well-known Jewish schools have been told not to wear their uniforms to avoid being attacked.
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES
It is important to understand how the West got so lost and abandoned its values and basic sense of right and wrong. Francis Fukuyama’s famous book The End of History is often quoted for him saying that the West’s defeat of communism in the Cold War meant that liberal democracy was the political endgame. That, however, is not how he ended the book. He ended with a bleak hypothesis that without an alternative system to contrast its merits and superiorities, and to sharpen its advantages, a deformed liberalism would emerge.
That looks like where we are at. The West has become so self-absorbed and so liberal that it accepts anything, including the unacceptable. That is the deformity. Nazis are demanding free speech, Jihadists are calling for genocide, and Woke Leftists are pushing a Marxist agenda. It is a panoply of dark forces. The barbarians are through the gates, inside the parliaments, the universities, the media, and many other institutions.
It is not too late to turn things around. The West must begin by stopping doing stupid things. It must not allow its own values and paradigms - free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship - to be weaponized against it.
Freedom of speech has always been conceptually difficult. There are usually some restrictions, such as defamation and inciting violence. Some countries include hate speech and racial vilification in those restrictions, but governments have been too cowardly to enforce the law for fear of losing votes. It is as if Jewish victims do not matter.
Jihadists and their deranged Far Left allies, neither of which supports free speech when it comes to things they do not like, such as criticism of Islam or mis-gendering, defend their calls for the genocide of Jews under the banner of free expression.
Many Western governments looked stunned. They act as though these extremists have checkmated them with some brilliant argument. They have not. It is simple. Allowing people to agitate publicly for genocide is a stupid thing for a society to do.
Likewise, freedom of assembly. The extremists have claimed this right somehow extends to them being allowed to take over private property, university campuses, and to disrupt the lives of everyone else. These people can group, but allowing them to be so disruptive, especially when inciting violence, is just stupid.
Freedom of worship is also a fundamental right, but that does not mean that people can harm others in the practice of their beliefs. People may believe in a Caliphate, but trying to impose one is sedition. Again, it is outright moronic to give Jihadists the run of the land.
The West has so little self-confidence that it believes that arresting genocide-chanting Jihadists and communists will cause liberalism to collapse. This is backwards. Liberalism will collapse if extremists are allowed to hijack Western states.
Apologists will say that these protestors are only a minority. That is true, but it takes nothing like majority support to hijack a state. Only 7-10 percent of Germans were Nazi party members. About one in three Germans voted for the Nazis in the 1933 elections. Islamists hijacked Iran and turned it into an Islamic Republic in 1979 by taking over the organs of state, not by winning a popular vote.
Jews are rightly scared. Everyone else should be, too.
Excellent article. Spot on. The West is finished. The Jews need to organize self-defence militias and send their children to Israel.
The cancerous spread of anti-Semitism has been allowed to thrive for far too long, slowly poisoning our society. The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, the Right, and the Jews is a clarion call for immediate action - not just from the Jewish community, but from all Americans. We must open our eyes and confront this growing threat head-on before it consumes us.
But what makes this form of anti-Semitism so insidious is that it comes not from its usual source but from within our own ranks. According to Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg—a political scientist, the toxic identity politics and venomous hatred towards Israel that pervades the political Left is the most dangerous manifestation of anti-Semitism in our modern world.
Despite enduring centuries of persecution, Jews have persevered and thrived, driven by their strong emphasis on education and achievement. Yet, this success has also bred resentment and envy among those who seek to harm them. This despicable brand of anti-Semitism has resulted in countless acts of violence and continues to pose a real threat today.
And yet, our leaders in the Western world offer nothing but empty condemnations while turning a blind eye to the reality that Jews are disproportionately targeted by radical Islamists with intent to harm. It is enraging to see such denials and dismissals of this urgent issue while Jews continue to suffer in silence. We must act now before it's too late.