https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-is-a-national-security-threat
Here’s a partial summary of what it was like to be Jewish in America this past month.
In Los Angeles, an elderly Jewish man was struck on the head by a pro-Hamas protester and later died of his wounds. In New Orleans, a Jewish student who tried to stop a classmate from burning an Israeli flag was attacked and had his nose broken. In Manhattan, a Jewish woman was assaulted and sustained injuries to her face and neck after she confronted two passersby tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli citizens. The list goes on.
How should we think about these attacks?
We could see them as further proof of our political culture’s descent into incivility and rage. We could note that they’ve been made possible, at least in part, by a movement to defang our police and turn our largest cities into ungovernable danger zones. We could say that the $4.7 billion in Qatari cash that poured into American universities between 2001 and 2021 might have helped transform our formerly fine institutions of higher learning into breeding grounds for feverish, bigoted ideology.
Each of the above is true as far as it goes. Ultimately, anti-Semitism animated these attacks. And anti-Semitism is not only a threat to Jews but also to America’s national security.
Look only at spreadsheets, and the statement seems absurd. The number of American Jews murdered in domestic terror attacks is blissfully low, and the perpetrators, for the most part, are white supremacists, not ISIS enthusiasts. But take a deeper dive, and a more troubling picture emerges. Because if the past ten years—to say nothing of the past 2,000—taught us anything, it’s that what begins with the Jews soon metastasizes, and that agitation about events unfurling thousands of miles away has a nasty way of bubbling over and spilling into American backyards.
Consider Tashfeen Malik, who, together with her husband, killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California in 2015. Or Mohamed Barry, who, a year later, slashed four diners at an Ohio restaurant with a machete. Or Omar Mateen, who in 2016 killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Or Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose explosive devices claimed three lives and wounded 281 people at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Or Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who, on Halloween 2017, rented a truck in New Jersey, drove it to lower Manhattan, and used it to mow down pedestrians in Hudson River Park, killing eight.
