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.
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