Anti-Semitism has shifted: It now comes largely from pro-Islamic individuals and groups
The recent Islamic-influenced anti-Semitic outbreak on college campuses in the U.S. has frightened large numbers of Jewish students and their families
A reader of my column this past week rightly pointed out that the biggest anti-Semitic threat facing Jews today comes not from white supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups (see last week’s column) but from those who have drunk the Islamic concocted Kool-Aid, which proclaims that Jews are the aggressors in the Middle East and that Israel should not exist.
I alluded to this in a column last October. It is time for a deeper dive.
For decades, anti-Semitism in America has been promulgated primarily by the far right, which has included the Ku Klux Klan and other like-minded groups that hate Jews because they are Jews.
Anti-Semitism goes back to the Middle Ages, but it shifted into high gear about 2,000 years ago when the Catholic Church decreed and began teaching that the Jews killed Christ. The Catholic Church did not revise its position, absolve Jews of deicide, and withdraw the offensive and erroneous language from its scriptures until 1964.
Today’s anti-Semitism, however, has shifted. It now comes mostly from the opposite direction, the far left instead of the far right. One recent study showed that 95 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in America are being committed by people who object to Israel’s policies in the Middle East and its alleged mistreatment of Islamic peoples, not by supporters of extremist right-wing organizations.
It is a concept that has been bubbling up on college campuses for a generation or more and reached a boiling point with Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Jewish communities in Israel near the Gaza border. More than 1,200 Jews died in Israel and 250 were taken hostage. Among the hostages, 30 have died and 100 remain in captivity. The remaining 120 have been released in exchange for Hamas fighters or supporters held by Israel.
The increased anti-Semitism became visible in the U.S. almost immediately after the Israel-Hamas war started. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) received 832 confirmed reports of assault, vandalism, and harassment during the first month following the October 7 attack. That is an average of 28 anti-Semitic actions every day, a four-fold increase over the number of cases reported in the same period a year earlier.
It should be noted that the increased incidence of anti-Semitism began almost three weeks before Israel began its responsive attack on Hamas in Gaza. So the process worked like this: Hamas attacked Israel with an assault in which the horror inflicted, particularly on women, children, and babies was beyond anything I am willing to describe in print. Immediately, the pro-Islamic forces of the world responded with anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in America.
An aside: The ADL appears to have lumped all anti-Semitism together in this report – incidents originating both from the left and the right. Given that the two kinds of anti-Semitic activities are coming from two entirely different groups with different motivations, it would be helpful if the ADL began distinguishing between the two types of anti-Semitism and counting them separately, even if some of the incidents would fall into the unknown category.
Many who have fallen under Islamic influence are accusing Israel of genocide. The accusation seems to become louder and stronger every week. The reality is that Israel has killed an unfortunate number of non-Hamas Palestinian residents of Gaza as it has tried to target the relatively small Hamas organization within a crowded country of more than 2 million Palestinian civilians.
The left conveniently forgets to mention that most of these deaths have resulted from the fact that Hamas has based its operations in facilities connected to hospitals, schools, churches, and other public buildings, making it difficult, perhaps impossible, to exclusively target the Hamas organization from the air.
This reality, however, does not matter to those who have taken up the cry, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” a call that implies genocide going in the other direction, against Jews, just like always.
Franklin Foer, writing in the current edition of The Atlantic, said the events of October 7 and the days following made it “painfully clear that there are critics of Israel who don’t believe in peaceful coexistence. A far larger swath of the left than I imagined seemed to want to see the disappearance of the state of Israel.”
A study of 13 European countries in 2018 by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights showed that 89 percent of respondents believe that anti-Semitism has increased in their country over the past 5 years, and 85 percent consider this to be the biggest social or political problem in their country.
The most telling finding, however, was that the No. 1 anti-Semitic statement that respondents have personally heard or seen is that “Israelis behave like Nazis toward Palestine.”
Yes, that is what people on the left are saying, and that is what they believe. It could be suggested, however, that if Israel had treated the Palestinians of Gaza like the Nazis treated the Jews of Europe, the death total in Gaza by now would be well over a half million and growing by the thousands every day. The Nazis killed Jews at the rate of more than 100,000 a month – in the 1940s.
The Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 30,000 Palestinians have died with 10,000 more missing under the rubble, which would bring the likely death total to 40,000 of the 2 million Palestinians who had been living in Gaza at the start of the war.
The Times of Israel has reported that according to the IDF, 12,000 of these deaths have been Hamas fighters.
The net number of non-Hamas Palestinian deaths thus would be about 28,000. That works out to a death rate of about 5,600 a month at a time when war weaponry is far more sophisticated than it was 85 years ago. If a well-armed aggressor wanted to commit genocide today, the process could be completed in a very short time.
The Gaza Health Ministry also has reported that 10,000 of the deaths in Gaza, a little more than one-third of the total, have been minors. The report does not include the fact that about half of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza is comprised of minors. Further, the IDF notes that Hamas has many fighters who are minors at 16 or 17 years of age.
The recent anti-Semitic outburst from the left has been troubling for Jewish college students and their families in the U.S. Public high schools, too, have been targeted in frightening ways.
The House of Representatives conducted a hearing last week to hear college students tell their frightening stories.
From CNN news reports, Talia Khan, graduate student president at MIT, said her campus has been “overrun with toxic anti-Semitism” and “terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews.”
Eden Yadegar, a junior at Columbia University in New York City, described a recent attack on Jewish students by pro-Islamic students wielding sticks. “We have been attacked by angry mobs and we have been threatened to ‘Keep fucking running,’” she said.
In a written statement provided to the committee, Yadegar, who is president of the Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter at Columbia, said she asked University officials about safety concerns for an upcoming SSI event and was told, “Should you move forward [with the event], there will likely be individual and student group accountability.” What does that even mean? Was the person speaking for the university threatening to discipline the SSI members for holding an event?
Hannah Beth Schachter, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said a Jewish student was spit on and called a “dirty Jew” at an on-campus protest.
Also, videos posted on social media showed protesters disrupting an event by banging on auditorium glass doors and shattering them at the UC Berkeley location where IDF soldiers were scheduled to speak, CNN reported.
Elsewhere in the city, at Berkeley High School, an art teacher projected “resistance art” on a large screen. The artwork depicted a fist punching through a Star of David on a map of Israel, the Los Angeles Times reported. A mother of one of the high school students said her son’s classroom was filled with signs prompting a “walkout against genocide” and showing the daily death toll among Palestinians.
Amid all of this, there are conflicting realities. On the one hand, I wish there were a way to prevent the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza who are not a part of the Hamas fighting machine. I think Israel needs to work significantly harder to avoid such deaths. On the other, I cannot support any resolution of the current situation that does not assure that Hamas cannot conduct a future attack. Hamas leaders, after all, have been clear, both in the Hamas charter and in post-October 7 statements: It will attack again.
Outstanding… this was written with such thoughtfulness and a lot of research.
Good people must have honest conversations about Islamic and left wing antisemitism.
Thank you for writing this… will share with my colleagues.
Thank you Mr. Garson. Great illumination of several horrible realities.