Robert Besser is a news editor who has worked in television and newspapers in theUnited States, Asia and the Middle East.
The sheer will to survive of today’s Jewish people has out-maneuvered the worldwide left, as they seek the deaths of Israel and the Jewish people.
Partnering with the woke left in their 21st century anti-Jewish crusade are the Moslems, the universities, the Christian churches, the Europeans, the United Nations, the human rights businesses, the news media and entertainment industry.
Notably, 21st century antisemites have been doing what all Jew-haters have done since Alexandria, Egypt in 38 CE. And that is to make up blood libels against the Jews, which are impossible to prove but also impossible to refute and become a justification in their efforts to exterminate the Jews.
And, simply put, anti-Jewish blood libels work very well because non-Jews want to believe them. But tragically, the age-old conclusion to the shouting of blood libels continues to be the deaths of Jews.
Earlier blood libels created in Europe included that the Jews killed the Christian lord, that Jews poisoned wells in European villages, that Jews caused the 14th century Black Plague, that Jews oppressed Christians by loaning money, that Jews used the blood of Christian boys to bake matzah, that Jews preyed on young Christian women, that Jews secretly controlled Christian communities, and on and on.
And because nothing in our world ever changes, today’s university professors have assumed the role of the European priests screaming from their pulpits about Jews, the international media has become the traditional church that disseminates anti-Jewish venom, and as always, our enemies can count on easily recruiting mobs who run through the streets hunting for Jews.
As opposed to 16th century Christian Europe, today’s blood libels against the Jews include charges of starvation, colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
The difficulty of combatting ancient blood libels leveled at the Jews was that these lies were embedded in the teachings of Christianity. Similarly, today’s blood libels are wound into the fabric of the left wing woke religion.
There is no better proof of the illegitimacy of the left’s libels than the need for professors, media talking heads and students to scream down anyone who does not bow to their woke deities.
US Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska wrote on Dec 1, 2023 in the Wall Street Journal about his encounter with Jew-hating university savages who had desecrated the main reading room in Harvard’s Weidner Library by hanging pro-terror banners from the walls.
Sullivan reports being confronted in the library by two Harvard students, one from Saudi Arabia and one from Judea-Samaria. Harvard should be congratulated for recruiting these Arab students as part of their diversity policies, since they clearly brought to campus the third-world ignorance and intolerance for which their home countries are well-known.
Says Sullivan, “One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas, given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7."
“Their tone immediately changed. “You’re a murderer,” one said. “You support
genocide,” said the other.
“Excuse me, what did you say?” I asked in disbelief.
“They repeated their outrageous charges. I tried to debate them, noting the Israel Defense Forces don’t target civilians, and that the only group attempting to carry outgenocide is Hamas. But civil debate with these women was pointless. As I was leaving Widener Library, they pulled out their iPhones and continued taunting: 'Do yousupport genocide? Do you support genocide?' The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee posted some of this exchange on Instagram.”
And what must always follow the public screaming of these blood libels? The deaths of Jews, of course.
Moslems killed Jews in France, including Sarah Halimi in 2017, Ilan Halimi in 2006, and Yonatan Sandler and three children at their Jewish day school in Toulouse in 2012.
Employees of Israel’s Washington DC embassy, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were killed in 2025 by a Chicago leftist yelling “Free Palestine.”
And this past June 1 in Boulder, Colorado, an 82-year-old Jewish woman died after a Moslem set 12 American Jews on fire.
Of course, the non-Jewish world does not change, from Alexandria to today’s Europe. But the Jewish world has changed in ways no one could have dreamed of.
A question Jews asked throughout the 2,000 year diaspora has been, where is it safe for the Jews? Where can the Jews flee from the dangers that follow the blood libels?
And unbelievably, in the diaspora the always-fatal Jewish response to blood libels has been that we must find ways to sit with anti-semites and educate them about the Jews.
Does that mean that in Europe Jewish leaders had gone to the Vatican and tried to convince church officials that we did not kill their lord?
Or how about in 1970s America? Our barely-Jewish leaders in Chicago sat down with the millionaire race hustler Jesse Jackson after he slandered all Jews, charging them with exploiting black people in Jewish-owned grocery stores and as apartment landlords.
Sitting with Jackson, pathetic Reform Jewish “spiritual leaders” and other equally ignorant Jews were sure they could prove to Jackson the truth about Jews if they could only talk with him. They told Jackson that he cannot blame an entire people for the actions of a few.
They thought they could educate Jackson, since they were sure that he thought rationally, as we Jews did.
Of course, they could not penetrate what passed as Jackson’s brain…..and Jackson, having been crowned by the media as king of the American blacks, went on spewing antisemitism for the remainder of his years.
And let’s not forget how only recently the Reform Jewish ministers invited the black race entrepreneur and Jew-hater Al Sharpton to be honored by their Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in 2019.
By making nice with Sharpton, who single handedly killed two during the Washington Heights pogrom he instigated in 1991, the rarely-Jewish Reform ministers thought they could talk rationally with a Jew-hater, in the hopes of accomplishing what? To win Sharpton over to becoming a friend of the Jews?
By the way, in 1995 Sharpton railed against a Jewish store operating in a black neighborhood. Some of his followers acted on his incitement by shooting up the store, then setting it on fire, killing seven.
Well, if Jews cannot practice their obsessive talking and reasoning with those who spread blood libels, what is to be done to combat these non-Jews? In truth, very little.
Still, for the first time in 2,000 years there is one place where Jewish families can be safe from the eternal blood libels.
And that is in Israel.
Of course, every Jew knows that life is not perfect in Israel. It has many problems. But as someone who has lived here, on and off since 1972, and often observes Israel with the clarity of a stranger, I can promise that life in Israel, decade after decade, always improves.
The progress I have witnessed in every field in Israel---the economy, health care, high tech, housing, roads, transportation, and consumer goods, has been stunning.
Perhaps the most miraculous event I have witnessed in Israel has been the coming together of Jews from throughout the world to forge a single people.
And this constant march forward points to the promise of an even higher quality of life for the Jews in Israel 50 and 100 years from now.
Each of our family histories tell us what the correct answer to Jew-hatred is. For each of us is only alive today because someone in our earlier generations saw that their Jewish world was collapsing and fled.
Of course, those Jews who sought a safer future survived. While those who “hoped” things would somehow improve with the non-Jews were exterminated.
Even today, a different type of extermination is occurring before our eyes in the diaspora as the Jews kill themselves by turning their backs on traditional Judaism. The alternative Judaisms, the Reform and Conservatives, have morphed into leftist non-entities which have the intellectual sophistication of the mentally challenged.
In today’s diaspora the words “Jewish education” are a non-existent embarrassment and, as the final chapter in our long diaspora, Jewish young adults have overwhelmingly stopped marrying, and those who do are having very few children. By every measure, diaspora Jewish life is rapidly coming to an end.
And just in case diaspora Jews are not listening, the heavens have sent the eternal Jew-haters to scream the message that it is time for the Jews to return to Israel.
“גענוג” “Ganug!” “Enough!” This was the Yiddish word those in my grandmother’s generation proclaimed as they saved themselves from their collapsing European Jewish life.
And so it is today.
Jews outside of Israel: Don’t waste your precious community resources combatting the disintegration of the diaspora. This is a ridiculous waste of energy, fighting something that was pre-ordained thousands of years ago.
For the Jews of the diaspora can no more defeat the blood libels of today than we could turn back the blood libels of Europe in the 1600s or Alexandria, Egypt of 38 CE.
It needs to be said often and loudly that the Jews are certainly not needed in the diaspora, but are sincerely needed to rebuild the Jewish people in Israel.
Diaspora Jews, bring all of your resources to Israel - your accumulated wealth, which includes your educations, life experiences, finances, professional experiences, love of your families and belief in the Jewish people.
At last, leave far, far behind the world of the non-Jews and their eternal hate, violence, anti-semitism and 2,000 year-old blood libels.
And critically, let us remember what our wise grandparents said:
“גענוג” “Ganug!” “Enough!”