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. At Brown University, two students were killed and nine wounded by an allegedly Muslim shooter.
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.