Antisemites are very angry. They are so convinced that they are on the so-called “right side of history” that they must be given a pass for hate, for violence, even for murder.
Last week, in Newton, Massachusetts, a man became so enraged at the sight of people supporting Israel that he ran across the street and tackled another man 15 years his elder, not a Jew but an Iraq veteran who supports the right of Jews to live, to the ground. Even after being pulled off of his victim, he continued to attack the pro-Israel demonstrator until his intended victim drew his gun and shot the attacker.
As the saying goes, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
It turns out there are consequences to physically attacking other people, one of which is the risk that they might actually defend themselves and put you in the hospital. Make no mistake, Caleb Gannon is no victim. All he had to do to avoid having a bullet in his gut was not be a violent brute, but he chose to be a violent brute and paid the price. He is fortunate that his intended victim is more civilized than he is and did not think twice about providing medical assistance to someone who tried to bash his head in.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, is very angry at the Los Angeles City Council for responding to the pogrom staged outside a local synagogue in June by barring protesters from coming within eight feet of the institution outside of which they are protesting. According to CAIR, Jews have no civil rights, certainly not the right to freedom of worship or freedom not to be assaulted at their places of worship. They want to play stupid games for free and for all the consequences to be paid by their Jewish victims.
This belief that violence should be consequence-free if directed at Jews or “Zionists” has been fed by officials like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who outrageously refused to charge the majority of the anti-Israel protesters who illegally took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall and held an innocent janitor against his will last Spring.
It has been fed by universities that refuse to take action against genocidal hatred against Jews, like Cornell, which couldn’t be bothered to discipline Russell Rickford after he called the October 7 massacre “exhilarating” and who is back teaching at the school as if he didn’t sing the praises of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Most outrageously, this belief that violence against Jews should be met with cheers and not so much as mild criticism has been fed by the President and Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden stated that the worst people in America “have a point,” and Harris said that people motivated by nothing but hatred “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be.”
Why shouldn’t Caleb Gannon tackle and beat a man he disagrees with about Israel if the President agrees he “has a point?” Why shouldn’t Islamists and Nazis attack Jews outside synagogues and create pogroms if the Democratic presidential nominee says their hate makes them role models?
The belief that violence against Jews should be consequence-free is the core belief of the global anti-Zionist movement. The goal is the return to the days when Jews could be attacked, beaten, raped, and murdered in the cruelest ways imaginable with the government either looking the other way or actively supporting and encouraging the violence.
This is why Israel’s attempts to defend the lives of its children always receive more condemnation than the murderous and genocidal actions of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is perhaps the most honest official in this regard, as she has openly claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense, but the belief that Hamas and Hezbollah have the right to murder Jews with total impunity is widespread throughout the UN and the so-called “progressive” world.
Hamas committed an act of genocide, a massacre of historic proportions and unfathomable evil and barbarity. And it did so against a state with a superior military to its own forces. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Of course it was going to be hit hard in response. Of course Israel was going to do whatever it could to prevent such a massacre from being repeated. No sane nation would engage in a simple tit for tat and return to the status quo ante after such atrocities. The prize Hamas received was the decimation of its leadership, the destruction of its military infrastructure, and the deaths of half of its fighting force in addition to all those terrorists who have been wounded or captured during the war.
If Hamas had not played the stupid game of trying to wipe out the Jewish people, there would be no war and no destruction in Gaza.
If Hamas had agreed to any of the ceasefires the Biden Administration has attempted to force on Israel, the war would have ended and it would have remained in power in Gaza.
But it continues to play the stupid game in the hopes its genocidal supporters and cowardly world leaders will deliver something other than a stupid prize.
Hezbollah, not content to let Hamas have all the Jew-killing fun, has been attacking Israel nonstop for the last 11 months, ever since the October 7 massacre. It has fired more than 8,000 rockets and drones at Israel, causing tens of thousands of Israelis to be displaced from their homes in the north for nearly a year. In the worst attack, 12 innocent children were massacred when a Hezbollah rocket struck a playground where they were playing soccer.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah became the latest player to experience the life lesson - play stupid games, win stupid prizes – when hundreds, of not thousands, of pagers it distributed to its terrorist operatives exploded simultaneously throughout Lebanon. The pagers, which were meant to protect Hezbollah from Israeli surveillance and intelligence, became the source of its greatest humiliation ever. Never has a terrorist organization been made into such a laughingstock as Hezbollah was when thousands of its operatives had their pants explode.
Already, there are outcries that the pager explosions were another genocide and that it was a crime, coming from those who think the genocide of Jews should be consequence-free. But Hezbollah has only itself to blame. Like Hamas, it invited destruction by attacking a stronger military power, by displacing tens of thousands from their homes, murdering children, and creating an intolerable situation where Israel would have no choice but to act against it. If Hezbollah had stayed out of the war, if it had not attempted to get a piece of the Jew-killing action, its terrorists would not have been emasculated.
Lebanon and Gaza have both won the stupid prize by playing the stupid game of hate. Both Gaza's territory and the Lebanese country could have been paradises, with bustling economies, a strong tourist sector, and a high standard of living for their residents. Instead, they both fell under the sway of terrorist organizations, Iranian proxies more concerned with serving the Ayatollah and forging a global caliphate in the blood of infidels than the well-being of the people of Gaza and Lebanon. The result was economic collapse, political corruption, and the wasting of generations on nothing but death.
From the streets of Newton and Los Angeles to the tunnels underneath Rafah and the Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut, antisemites are finally facing a reality where the rules of the popular 2,000-year-old game of ‘kill the Jew’ have changed. Thanks to the success of Zionism, there are now places where attacking Jews has consequences.
‘Kill the Jew’ is a stupid game that results in very stupid prizes. Just ask those Hezbollah terrorists who suddenly had large holes in their pants.