Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Jews celebrating Hanukkah were just slaughtered by Muslim gunmen on an Australian beach, in an imitation of the October 7 massacres.
An inert Europe is canceling Christmas celebrations out of fear of threats of violence from Muslim minorities. In the West, when an Islamist shoots a Jew, politicians often offer two bizarre remedies: gun control or a task force to tackle Islamophobia.
Yet, our political class rarely offers data on the overwhelming preponderance of targeting Jews rather than Muslims, much less the vast disparity in Jewish-on-Muslim versus Muslim-on-Jewish violence.
To catalog all the recent violence against Jews in the Western world would fill a book.
We know the causes. Anemic Western leaders—politicians, college presidents, media grandees, and celebrities—fear Muslim terrorism, growing Muslim voters, and their own growing anti-Semitic campus constituencies.
So, they never call out anti-Semitic violence other than with nauseating nothings like, “Such violence has no place here.” Or “We condemn such violence in the utmost terms.” Or “This is not who we are.”
The prime minister of Australia—a country that produced some of the most heroic soldiers of World War I and II and still is a bulwark of the West in the Pacific—goes through a series of linguistic contortions daily to avoid identifying the threat to Jews and how to stop it. He talks as if guns were animate and murdered Jews without the aid of radical Islamic killers.
So nothing much follows in the West, and Jews are becoming the hunted. The attacks will increase because there is no foreseeable force to combat them.
Just a few years ago, it used to be that anti-Semitism was mostly on the left and repugnantly identifiable and condemnable by most.
In 2009, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright grew angry against his former favorite parishioner, then newly elected President Barack Obama, and scoffed in anger, “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.”
Many leftist icons used to voice blatant anti-Semitism, such as Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), or Louis Farrakhan (“your gutter religion”).
Do we remember the utterances of once White House press corps liberal icon Helen Thomas (“Jews should get the hell out of Palestine. They should go home to Poland, Germany, America, and everywhere else.”)?
Their left-wing legacy is now amplified by Rep. Ilhan Omar (“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby”). The so-called Squad, New York Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani, the “The Democratic Socialists of America,” and the legions of campus protestors never disown the slogan “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea”—a call to destroy the current state of Israel and everyone in it—because they either all believe in it or assume their clueless followers have no idea what it means.
Again, when the elite say, “River to the sea,” does that mean they will erase all the Jews in Israel but spare its two-million-Arab citizenry, about the only Arabs in the entire Middle East who vote in free and fair elections and enjoy constitutional rights?
Of course, no left-wing Westerner visiting the Middle East would wish to publicly express his free speech, atheism, or pro-gay/trans support either on the West Bank or in Gaza.
The combination of providing DEI exemptions to biased minority activists, the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic indoctrination in universities, and no-borders immigration has turned the Democrat Party into the natural home of those who dislike Israel in particular and feel free to demonize Jews in general.
Indeed, most polls show that 60 percent of Democrats favor the Palestinians over the Israelis. Translated, that means they prefer a terrorist autocracy over a Western liberal constitutional government.
The right used to be a unified corrective to left-wing anti-Semitism. It still polls nearly 70 percent in favor of Israel. For a while longer, it is far more likely to condemn anti-Semitic violence than the left.
But recently, its own base, in varying degrees, has come full circle and joined the left in its distaste for Israel and Jews in general.
The new anti-Israel right despises Israel and the U.S. support of it, either in terms that are commercial (there are more Arabs, with more money and oil), cowardly (trashing Jews does not earn terrorist reprisals; rebuking Muslims can), political (Jews more often vote Democratic), or simply anti-Semitic (cabals of Jews control Wall Street, Hollywood, the media, etc., etc.).
Once-fringe anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes are now welcomed to air their views openly, but mostly the conspiracy venom is of the more insidious sort, like “I’m just throwing this out there…” or “Here is something to consider…”
In the last few weeks, we have been told—without any evidence—by right-wing influencers that the Jews may well have had a hand in killing Charlie Kirk, in bombing an Iranian nuclear facility, in pressuring the Maduro kleptocracy, and in the 9/11 slaughter.
One hallmark of the new right-wing furor against Jews and Israel is the strange symbiosis they employ. Formerly edgy podcasters become vicarious hosts of virulent anti-Semites. The partnerships are a way of not directly owning up to their toxicity but just “putting it out there.”
Candace Owens initially championed Kanye West (“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up, I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”).
Then she graduated to expressing her own old anti-Semitic tropes: “There is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism. … All Americans should want answers because this appears to be something that is quite sinister.”
Tucker Carlson hosted critics of the U.S. effort against Hitler in World War II and Israel-behind-it conspiracists before escalating to inviting Nick Fuentes on in a mostly friendly manner—which might be attributed to his interview format, except he has attacked fellow conservatives far more than has odious Fuentes.
But now Carlson himself too throws out story-line hints about just maybe Jews’ involvement in Charlie Kirk’s death, or a sort of/kind of Jewish effort behind 9/11, or perhaps it was those Jews eating humus, not the Roman prefect of Judea who ordered Jesus killed for supposed sedition—a common fate of any provincial residents who even appeared to defy the absolute authority of the Roman imperial state. Carlson strangely categorized Israel as an “insignificant” country. But is not Israel a democratic Western outpost in a sea of Middle East autocracy, the most technically advanced and scientifically sophisticated nation for its size in the world, and the ancient home of the Judeo-Christian tradition?
Somehow, many on the right forgot who funds the virulently anti-American mouthpiece Al-Jazeera, or where the 9/11 murderers came from, or who has killed Americans in Syria, Lebanon, and on the Red Sea, and or whom the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and theocratic Iran have vowed to destroy. And as for October 7 and what followed, Israel waited in vain for nearly three weeks for Hamas to give up the 3,000 terrorists who murdered 1,219 Jews, wounded 3,400, and took 254 hostages before mounting a full invasion of Gaza.
Where does it all end?
Either there will be an 11th-hour Western intolerance of anti-Semitism, a limit of student visas and immigration from the illiberal nations of the Middle East, a return to melting pot assimilation, an end to DEI tribalism, and a reform of the weaponized university curricula, or we will see more images of gunmen shooting Jews as if they were mere animals.
Thank you, Mr. Reisner. You clearly have it all figured out, at least from your viewpoint. Enjoy the holidays.
Dear Mr. Jenkins
You need to learn how to read, disavow yourself of the fiction that because you think you write genteel, ‘polite’ content that it is devoid of the profane or that rhetoric you wrongly accuse others of, as a substitute for and being bereft of an argument trying to defend or hide your indefensible bigotry.
Go right ahead and ‘re-evaluate’ Israel, lose military superiority and also become the blind moronic fools the CIA is without Israeli input. Russian, Swedish or Japanese fighters can be upgraded by Israel for much cheaper initial ticket prices and without all the strings and interference attached.
US ME policy has been a complete failure. What will happen when the US has to lubricate its trade with Araby without the use of Jewish blood to do so? That will be a welcome change, convergent with the end of the Jewish tenure in the US and other failing Western countries. When Hitler came to power he kicked out 20 Jewish Nobel prize winners. How did that work out for Germany, again?
Dear Mr. Getz,
Thank you for your brief summary of the Koran. Interestingly, a similar Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde effect occurs in the Bible in reverse order. In the Old Testament (nearly 80% of Bible), Yahweh is portrayed as a wrathful & vengeful God, while in the New Testament, Christ is a loving & peaceful God. It seems that Christians, as pacifists, make themselves vulnerable to militant Islamists & others that would take advantage of their goodwill – and that posture has to change, as in the two swords of Christ.
Dear Dr. Hanson,
I just wanted to thank you for your noble stance against antisemitism all over the political map. Brave voices like yours are needed now more than ever.
Mr. Schwartz,
Spare me the psychobabble. There’s no self-hatred or vitriol, only dislike of parasitic people, those that contribute little and take advantage of others. You seem to be a very angry person.
Bondi Beach, Christchurch, Port Arthur, Dunblane, 9/11 and many more were false flags. 7th October was when the Israelis killed their own Jews by helicopter and tank.
Please save us from the Muslims did it nonsense.
It seems to me as an Israeli that the world today is filled with cowards and irresponsible people (nations). It all depends on whether people wake up from diverting blame or suffer the consequences of the post WW2 world they squandered while learning nothing.
Much easier to blame the Jews on their awful policies and never look at where the anti western propaganda is coming from (Qatar and leftists organizations). instead focus on the supposed killers of Jesus in an attempt to separate Christianity from Judaism as if the new testament didn’t just take the Jewish bible verbatim and called it chapter 1.
I spoke with some of those (totally not paid actors) commentators online, for them Christianity have nothing to do with Judaism and Christians believe in another God.
Unfortunately, most Westerners cannot comprehend how the two faces of Islam (i.e., the religious pacifist and religious subjugator faces) often referred to as the duality of Islam can coexist in the same religious corpus in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 English novella, “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde”. After the episode of ‘the cranes (or Satanic Verses’), the Quaraysh drove Muhammad and his 100+ followers out of Mecca toward Yathrib (now known as Medina). But, during his pre-Jihad stay in Mecca, Muhammad’s nascent faith was not a belligerent religion. In fact, it was basically an evolving religion of peace promulgated by Muhammad, who considered himself to be ‘the second Moses’. The first one-third of the Koran mostly contains ‘lovey-dovey’, flowery poetic speech that reflects Muhammad’s Pre-Jihad religion. And the people whom we call ‘the good Muslims’ adhere to those initial passages in the Koran and view themselves as (Dr. Jekyll-like) ‘good Muslims’. Unfortunately, most Westerners who have read the Koran have never read farther than those initial pages in the Koran. That is, they have not read the 2nd half of the Koran, in which the ‘cult of Muhammad’ arose and began to be called Islam. That Medina-based cult of Muhammad is the ‘Mister Hyde’ of the Islamic faith. Members of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood are modern-day representatives of the ‘cult of Muhammad’. They are the ‘Bad Muslims’ who adhere to the tenets of Koran’s 2nd half.
The anger, vitriol and frightening misinformation expressed by @Craig Jenkins are indicative of the problems we have to overcome in fighting the world’s second oldest profession. We cannot allow those who practice it to feel good about expressing to the world their abject hate for themselves as manifested in their hatred of Jews. It should be classified as a DSM diagnosis.
Dear Mr. Reisiner,
I don’t know where you reside, but you need to tone down the rhetoric, the profanity in particular.
You make some good points about a.) U.S. military presence in the Middle East & elsewhere and b.) the self-enrichment by government people here before our very eyes. One solution might be for other countries to pay for our military presence as the world’s policeman (to include a premium for loss of life & wounded), because most Americans are tired of it. Nor can we afford to sustain these levels of spending, be it military or direct aid. See Robert Vanbuhler’s comment regarding Ukraine.
Since the U.S. is energy independent, maybe the Europeans & Mideast oil-producing countries should pony up the funds to keep the oil flowing in that part of the world.
As well, the corruption in Washington, D.C. with the awarding of government contracts involving lobbyists & conflicts of interest, plus insider-trading, is something we as a nation have to finally address. Rooting out waste, fraud & abuse in government spending is an ongoing concern of the American people, and your point is well taken in this respect.
Lastly, many thanks to Scot Feil for pointing out the documentary, “The History of Jews,” which I will surely watch and to Jim Reynolds for his interesting comments about the potential hollowing out of conservative movement.
Best wishes to everyone!
John Reisner should qualify for an Angry Reader mention.
Australia elected an Islamo-Marxist government in 2022. After October 7, 2023 Jew-hatred has erupted and spread and the Canberra regime has refused to take action to stamp it out — while giving immigration visas to thousands of Gazans.. Since the Bondi Beach pogrom it has rejected all appeals to change its attitude.
No one, including the inestimable VDH, ever says what needs doing to quell the burgeoning anti-Semitism in the world. It’s obvious though virtually all are too blind to see it. Or advocate for it. The muslims literally and figuratively, get away with murder. The West does zero, zip, nada. So why shouldn’t the muslims think they are God’s chosen people? They murder, maim, steal and more. And the stupid West continues to invite them in! God, what effing morons most of the West are! Ever notice how it’s the middle aged and elderly muslims who pontificate how much they love death? The West should open its blinded eyes that we are in a war with many millions of murdering scum. And we should finally begin to fight back. Literally.
All this anti-semitism and anti-Ukraine on the right is designed to fracture the Right. It comes straight from Moscow. Guys- if you’re antisemitic or anti-Ukraine, you’re being played by the KGB Russians who want you dead.
@Craig Jenkins
You’re a loser. Just why should Jews assimilate? Because you don’t like pluralism, religious freedom, individualism or simply because you are an insecure totalitarian degenerate? Another example of the sham that is Western pluralism and democracy. Yeah, ‘re-evaluate’ your relationship with Israel, because you will do so much better with Qatari and Saudi subversion, infiltration and oh yes, their scientific input into everything from medicine to military hardware.
Another example of selling the rope with which you will be hanged. You American hypocritical sh*ts should GFY’s. You are presiding over the lawless failure of your country as you are being robbed blind by your ‘elected’ parasites. But go ahead and ‘re-evaluate’ yourselves to death and re-align with let’s see, Eurabia; because you get so much more from the $100b/yr you send to Germany, Sth. Korea and Japan with 130k troops and the $b’s you send to Egypt and Jordan and get what back? Body bags. Dear Craig. GFY.
BTW Mr. Hanson. The fact that Arabs in Israel have freedoms is not a metric that validates Israeli democracy. That is a distortion that needs to be remedied. ‘Israeli’ Arabs are a parasitic 5th column, have nearly 10 times the conviction rate of the majority population being less than 20% of it, are incarcerated for terror wherein 25% are holders of Israeli citizenship or PR status and have less than 5000 serving in the IDF out of their 1.8 million population. They are blot on Israel.
It ends when Israel completes the mission and obliterates all the Ham’s Ass. Israel needs to FINISH THE JOB. NOW!!!!
Jaroslav: Not everything written on line has to be in support of Ukraine. There are other things of importance in the world, not to diminish the plight of Ukraine. Rag on your European neighbors for their limp support. The US has done much for Ukraine and continues to do so. What do you want us to do, besides bankrupting our country for yours, drop a nuke on Moscow? Show a little gratitude. We don’t see much of that, only whining for more money. Time for the EU to pony up.
Australia has been ‘governed’ since 2022 by an unapologetically Islamo-Marxist regime that after October 7, 2023 refused, despite many warnings and appeals, to stamp out intensifying Jew-hatred — while happily giving immigration visas to thousands of Gazans. It will not change its obscene views. Meanwhile, the ‘conservative’ parliamentary Opposition is as effective as the British Tories.
To Mr. Craig Jenkins,
Responding to your advocacy of “assimilation.” I recommend you view the documentary, The History of the Jews, hosted by Simon Schama (2013). Toward the end of the series, the host discusses the impact of the Enlightenment on the Jewish people. With the emphasis on common humanity, rationality, etc., the Enlightenment was embraced by the Jews as the intellectual underpinning for assimilation. They began to disperse out of their isolated enclaves and became “German, Polish, Russians,” who happened to be Jewish, rather than the other way around. That ended with the Dreyfuss affair in France and Emile Zola’s “J’Accuse” and Theodor Herzl. Herzl understood that the attempt to protect Jews by their assimilation into (especially western) societies was a failure. The only way for Jews to be protected was to have their own nation — with territory, government, borders, and military.
Go back twenty years and remember the people who warned us what the Islamic encroachment meant, but who were abused, belittled and sneered at.
Perhaps it might be time to offer them apologies?
I spent 16 years in Catholic schools, including 4 years at one of the very best liberal arts colleges in America, St. Anselm, Manchester, NH. I served 8 years as a Naval Aviator. I spent 17 years in corporate real estate, the last ten managing assets across the United States. I have now been self-employed for 34 years. Nor once in all that time had the issue of Anti-Semitism come up. Not once. The Jews are not the problem. It is the people who are innately antisemitic because of their upbringing or their Marxist bent. If they continue down this track, we are all on our way to the Road To Serfdom. We need to go back to the simple freedoms and respect shown by all at the time the Declaration of Independence was drafted.
My second comment is more direct: Don’t invite into your country people who want to kill you.
What we’re seeing on the right now is a real structural split, not just a series of personality clashes. MAGA has effectively divided into two branches: a bounded populism and an unbounded one. The bounded side—figures like Shapiro, Knowles, Walsh, Erika and the TPUSA leadership, among others—believes a movement needs lines, standards, and self-discipline to remain viable. The unbounded side—Carlson, Kelly, Owens, Bannon, and a growing online ecosystem—treats boundaries themselves as corruption and views transgression as a virtue.
How (or whether) those two instincts can coexist is the key question going forward. Victor is clearly on the bounded side: skeptical, populist in critique, but anchored in history, moral limits, and civilizational realism. Without some mechanism to enforce edges, movements don’t just radicalize—they hollow out.
Anthony Albanese should tune into the Landman where there is some truth to the television drama. Tommy Norris explains to his attorney why Texas has a low crime rate…”Everybody in Texas knows that the other guy is packing a gun, that’s why everybody waves to everybody else”.
“Satan” means “the Accuser”. It is a satanic work to whisper into the minds of the nations that the Jews should be hated.
Anti-Semitism is a hot topic for sure, but, as Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, once said, Jews will continue to be attacked as “The Chosen People” until they assimilate. (Pasternak himself was a Jew who converted to Christianity later in life.) Even though many early religions declared themselves the chosen people, the idea quite simply alienates others.
People also seem to resent Jewish expertise in the area of finance and the accumulation of wealth, but they forget that Jews were denied property rights in Europe. They became the tax collectors for monarchs – a nasty job – which led to lending & the banking houses of Europe by extension to the Americas.
Some might argue that Jews worship geld more than Yahweh, that Wall St. engages in destructive financial engineering, that education & major media are predominated by liberal Jewish interests and that the Israel Lobby has bought off our politicians.
And yet, Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East, the only true democracy in the region. We share intelligence to some extent and have nuclear weapons there trained on Russia & China.
Israel might engage in parasitic behavior, but it’s a country of 12 million people surrounded by 550 million Muslims and constantly fighting for its survival. Until recently, our neocon foreign policy had us fighting with nearly everyone, like Israel does for specific reasons. We simply have to weigh the pros & cons of our relationship with Israel in a realistic manner.
Jewish immigrants to Israel over the past couple of decades who still have strong family ties in America or elsewhere wonder why their Jewish relatives and friends don’t move to Israel. The answer is they live well, the American dream and they’re just not scared either of Islam or its useful idiots on the Left. What catastrophic event will make them move? What will it take? This pattern has been repeated for centuries. Jews call it Blood Libels. They always say Jews killed somebody. In times of prosperity or poverty, they say Jews killed somebody. That’s their excuse for violence. When Israel declared itself a state in 1948 about 800,000 Jews were forced out of Middle Eastern Muslim countries. Before that it was Germany, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Spain. It seems like it’s inevitable. Only now there’s a place to flee to.
Cooper brought a new audience to history. All was well until he covered WW2 and Tucker over sold him. Fuentes and Owens are performance artists, fueled by push back. Yes, Tucker talks around the subject. He’ll do hours on Christian persecution but no mention of who might be burning churches and terrorizing European streets. He opposed war with Iran and the enormous push back brought us here. Divided. The camera phone war in Gaza worked and now, “resolved”, hate is back on the boil.
How timely, I just heard that the Australian government is initiating a big new gun buyback program, and this in the face of another slaughter of unarmed citizens. Here in Texas, we don’t all need to carry firearms but the fact that some are likely to, gives the murderers something to think about. Our good friends the Aussies should not fall for this latest governmental initiative. I hope its not too late for them to get a grip on their countries direction.
To compare this editorial concerning the violence against Jews and the Russian violence against Ukrainians is ludicrous. VDH wrote an article about Jews and the current environment. VDH has written about Ukraine but perhaps it did not meet your expectations or you just missed it.
What a wonderful comment by Victor Hanson. And at this time of the year when we celebrate the greatest Jew of all, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Thank you, Victor, for your courage in this article and in many others.
Has God given up on the Jews? Is it time they should be disposed of? Not if you read the Bible. In the Bible the gentiles (I’m one of them) are the goyim, or the nations, i.e. everyone else in the world, after you count God’s chosen people, God’s nation, Israel. “Israel” is of course the name God gave to Jacob the Patriarch of the 12 tribes of “Israel”, i.e. his 12 sons. All of this is recounted by the Prophets in the Bible.
The Jews are not special because of anything they originated. They are special because God chose one person out of the whole world through whom to reveal Himself: Abraham. Charles Feinberg, (https://www.gty.org/articles/A274/the-day-i-missed-the-point), Professor at Talbot Seminary, Head of Jewish Ministries at the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles, described to a Jewish man how the Jews had suffered much over the years but were in fact the Chosen People of God. He responded, “I wish God would choose someone else once in awhile.” So because they are the Chosen people of God through whom God is bringing salvation into the world they are the target of the world’s darkness. To be a friend of the Jews is to be a friend of God. To target Jews is to be a friend of the Darkness. God will defeat the Darkness. It’s sure
Yes, Dr Hanson, it’s good that you are speaking out, but how about a few words about the ongoing genocide of Ukrainians, an issue you’ve been studiously avoiding. It’s time you commented on Trump’s morally obscene treatment of Ukraine.
The ‘hatred of the month club’ are the Jews/Christians. Next month it will be the Italians! Month after that, the Irish. Month after that, the Scotts!! Will it ever end? Why can’t we all just get along? Evil begets evil. Hope you are doing well post procedure Victor. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, Sami, Jack and your families. Keep the faith, pray and hope for a miracle.
The 21st century Islamic conquests may well be much more successful than those of the 8th century. There are many more people in the world who see very little of what is in front of them.
The Brown University sooter was not a muslim.
This is all the truth. Thank you for speaking out.