RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-poisons-america-israel-jews-domestic-politics-violence-6a83136b?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

As students and, worse, professors, at elite universities across the U.S. exulted at the news of mass murder and torture of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists, Jewish students were warned to take precautions on campus. Across the U.S., anti-Semitic incidents including vandalism, harassment and assault are up roughly 400% since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.

That is a problem, and not only for American Jews. The beliefs that have made the U.S. a uniquely hospitable home for Jewish citizens are essential to national cohesion and strength. If we lose faith in what was once proudly called the American Way, there is little chance that society can summon the energy and unity to withstand attacks from our enemies abroad.

While doing research for my recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People,” I was struck by the deep connection between America’s relative (and I stress relative) immunity to the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and American faith in democracy and pluralism.

From the Middle Ages to the present day, violent anti-Semitism has flourished best among those who reject liberal ideas. Medieval Christian zealots trying to build a seamlessly Christian Europe, nationalists striving for “pure” societies in which a particular ethnic group establishes its own culture and institutions without the “alien” influences of ethnic and religious minorities, Islamists who want a pure Islamic state—none of these projected utopias have room for proud and free Jews.

The U.S. stands on a different foundation. For America to work, many different religious and ethnic identities must coexist under a common commitment to constitutional politics and the rule of law. That happens to be the kind of society in which Jews can flourish, and the America we live in today owes much to the energy, creativity and patriotism of its Jewish citizens.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-jews-pogroms-russia-u-s-europe-germany-anti-semitism-1a74109c?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.

The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel. And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people.

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.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/10/29/david-mamet-jews-should-stop-supporting-democrats-sending-children-to-antisemitic-colleges/

Renowned playwright David Mamet appeared this week on the Fox News Channel and urged fellow Jews to cease their support of Democrat lawmakers and reconsider sending their children to what he described as “antisemitic” colleges in response to rising anti-Israel sentiments on American campuses following Hamas’s shocking terror attack on the Jewish state.

BILL HEMMER: You spend a lot of time in New York and you’ve written a lot about the Jewish experience in New York is so unique. You recently wrote a piece titled “How the Democrats Betrayed the Jews.” What do you mean by that?

DAVID MAMET: I’m a conservative. I used to have a lot of liberal friends, but I don’t know where they are. Maybe they lost my number. I have a lot of conservative friends who are not Jewish, and at certain points, they all get this look on there face and I know what’s going to come next. They ask the question: I thought Jews were smart, why do they go with the liberals?

And the answer is that we Jews aren’t smart, we’re actually stupid. We’re great at self-reliance because we never had anyone to rely on. But when it comes to getting into a group, with the exception of the state of Israel, we say, “I don’t want to be identified. Leave me alone.”

[…]

What I suggested in the article is, Thanksgiving’s coming up, when your kids come home from college, don’t send them back. Stop funding antisemitic hatred and calling it, “Oh, it’s a good place to meet people.” Because for a Jew to send his or her son or daughter to these elite institutions because they’re going to make connections is the same thing as putting their daughter in a brothel because they’re going to meet powerful men there. It doesn’t make sense and we’re going to have to assert ourselves.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-can-happen-here/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Earlier today, Charlie Cooke wrote eloquently about how Jews have been horrifyingly (and yet, alas, to us conservatives, entirely predictably) abandoned by their woke former brethren on the left even as they are now being directly persecuted on college campuses across America. In that piece, he centered the singular and wildly alarming protest/public-intimidation session that took place yesterday at Cooper Union, a college in New York City. Zach Kessel has now provided a fuller account of the latest reporting on the disgrace. Read both pieces, for I fear this story — and the school’s craven and wickedly bloodless response — represents a real escalation of danger for Jewish students nationwide. The radicals are getting bolder, and they are getting away with it. It is right to worry about where this all ends — or begins, for that matter.

The short version is that a pro-Palestinian demonstration (one composed primarily of students and instructors, though Lord knows who might be capable of worming their way into the inattentive heart of such a crowd) supposed to take place outside the urban campus of Cooper Union “somehow” veered onto campus. The chanting protesters then marched farther onward into the main building and proceeded to barricade the library once word spread that there were Jews — honest-to-goodness, in-the-flesh, kippah-wearing Jews! — available conveniently right there on the premises to bully, threaten, and terrify.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20096/blood-libel-israel-gaza-hospital

This conflict is not about occupation or settlements. The chants of anti-Israel protesters, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — all of Israel — must be free of Jews.

The truth does not matter to bigots.

A document from the end of the 15th century features an illustration of a bearded Jew extracting the blood of a Christian child. The adjoining text explains that Jewish law requires that Passover matzoh be baked with the blood of Christian children.

Such documents were widely circulated through Europe during the Easter season and led to frequent pogroms — murder, rape, and destruction — against Jewish children, women and men in revenge for allegedly killing Christian children for their blood to make matzoh.

There was never any actual evidence of such cannibalism. In fact, Jewish law explicitly prohibits the consumption of any blood or its use in cooking.

The total lack of evidence, however, did not matter to those who were taught and believed what has come to be known as the “blood libel.” Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many believed that this falsehood was “true.”

This blood libel persisted throughout Europe into the early 20th century. Jews were put on trial and executed for supposedly killing Christian children for their blood.

Other libels against Jews formed the basis for classic antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi lies that dehumanized Jews to an extent that made the Holocaust possible. Following the murder of 6 million innocent Jews, including babies, the world said, “Never again” and antisemitism abated in many parts of the world.

Now it is back with a vengeance, accompanied by blood libels and other systematic lies about the Jewish people and their nation state, Israel.

It is against this sordid historical background that the current blood libel — that Israel targeted a Gaza hospital deliberately causing the death of 500 Muslim children, women and men — can best be understood and assessed.

There is absolutely no evidence that Israel struck the hospital, whether deliberately or accidentally. Evidence from videos, photographs and telephone intercepts have proved to intelligence agencies worldwide that a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel from near the hospital, almost certainly by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and that one of the rockets malfunctioned mid-flight, landing not directly on the hospital but in its outdoor parking lot, and that the explosion killed far fewer than 500 people.

The claim of 500 people killed came, within minutes of the PIJ rocket strike, from the “Gaza Ministry of Health” – in other words from Hamas. They lie. No facts or numbers are ever verifiable. Moreover, Hamas claims that no rocket parts survived – another self-serving lie. Yet, their blood libel is widely believed by Israel’s enemies – perhaps because they want to believe it. It is too good a story to be ruined by the facts. As the journalist Becket Adams wrote in National Review:

“The Media Will Never Forgive Israel for Not Bombing That Hospital…. Reporters and pundits mishandled the Gaza hospital story because they wanted so badly for it to be true.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:

“As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket ‘than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.'”

The “Muslim street” has been indoctrinated by its leaders to believe anything negative about Jews or Israel. And the Arab media generally reports Hamas lies and exaggerations — such as the claim that 500 civilians were killed at the hospital — as unvarnished truth.