In 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia was host to the “Unite the Right” rally. Extremists from across America came together, screaming that ‘Jews will not replace us’, marching with blazing torches. The mob included Confederates, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, white nationalists, self-styled Christian “Crusaders”, anti-government militias and more. As protests and counter-protests escalated, fights erupted and a car even plowed into the counter-protesting crowd.
The United States seemed to panic. The jackboot was at their door. People posted recognition guides to decrypt alt-right symbols and slang, established neighborhood watches, and gave moving speeches about unity and empathy. The press raged, incredulous that such a mass display of antisemitism and racist vitriol could even happen in modern America.
Move forward to Berkeley, California, in 2024. Mobs cheer for the death of Jews and glorification of terrorists. A Jewish student event is besieged, windows on the avenue shattered and then doors smashed open. Fights erupt when protesters declaring Jewish students ‘murderers’ attack them. Worse has happened across the United States and even in Canada. Faces wrapped in scarves, perhaps for anonymity but more likely to imitate their terrorist idols, radicalized students have attacked, harassed and vandalized Jewish students and Jewish campus institutions.
Was the press shocked? Did people spread awareness online of what words like ‘intifada’ mean? (There are two kinds of pro-Palestinian protester: the ones who do know, and the ones who don’t, and of the two, the latter is worse.) Hardly. The mob violence was more often written off with a recycled, trite “apology” from whoever was serving as the face of the protests, and said to be simply uppity students.
How is it that people are blind to this? Do they assume Islamists will be satisfied with Jewish blood and leave them alone? Do they think that the seeds of extremism even now germinating on American soil are, as their representatives bluster, merely anti-Zionist, not antisemitic? (A phrase coined by the Soviets to shield their own persecution of Jews.) Or could it be that the leftists so appalled by the fascists on parade in Charlottesville don’t have a problem with the advocates of Muslim theocratic tyranny over at the very least the entire Middle East, because they are the ones advocating it?
There should be no attempt at trying to balance or reason with either of these murderous extremists. They share more in common than they think, and their foremost similarity is their desire to murder Jews, for being racist or race-mixers, parasites on society or society-controlling moguls, unacceptably faithful or faithless heretics. This is no surprise at all from the historical viewpoint. Jews were massacred as readily in the Islamic empire as in the Christian ones, by the liberated workers’ brotherhood of the Soviet Union as by the dictatorship of the Third Reich. There is a right wing and a left wing, and clearly, the bird they are both attached to wants nothing more than dead Jews
The rise in extremism is a sign of cultural ennui. People feel the lack of meaning in their lives. How could they not, when religion has been cut away, national identity dissolved, and social media blurs everything into a long, noisy smear. Radicals offer them some false but all-encompassing Great Quest, whether it be ‘free Palestine and kill every Jew’, or ‘purify a white, Christian America and kill every Jew’.
Extremism spreads like fire, which is to say, no matter where it is coming from, you don’t want it in your house. But the firefighters aren’t coming to extinguish this blaze, and if you ask them they will probably say, “well, your house deserved it, being made of flammable materials.”
Two cities had demonstrations of proudly home-grown American antisemitism. Two cities had chants for the death of Jews. At one, America was startled, and at the other, there was mild indignation. The difference should tell you everything you need to know about how much of a friend America is to the Jews.