Way back in the Early Paleolithic Days of Nov. 13, 2023, but five weeks or so after the horrific Hamas invasion of Southern Israel, Charles Fain Lehman wrote at City Journal:
“After the October 7 terrorist attack, many American Jews have stomached two shocks: the shock of Hamas’s brutality, and the shock of their putative political allies’ support for the brutes. Liberal Jews are not only horrified by campus chants of ’there is only one solution: Intifada, revolution.’ They are also surprised.”
Surprised? Really? What planet do these “liberals” actually live on?
Planet Liberal, I suppose. I have some idea what that’s like. I lived there myself until approximately the mid-1990s and can attest that orb is made almost entirely of sand—so you can stick your head in it and avoid knowing what’s actually happening in the real world. The corollary is you don’t have to have your wonderful, often remunerative, life disrupted in any way.
Meanwhile, antisemitism has been growing in America pretty much non-stop for the last 30 or 40 years. Much of it was on the right years ago, but recently, and for quite a while actually, it has been predominantly on the left.
This too is bewildering to the so-called liberals and progressives who are more comfortable in an increasingly distant past, when the right were the bad guys. They act and vote as if things had not changed. And yet they have to an extraordinary extent.
Just yesterday (April 10), we learned that bags with antisemitic flyers accompanied by what looks like poison, possibly rat poison, are being found all over Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It’s apparently the second time this has happened.
A couple of days before some character not in Tehran but in Michigan was leading his followers in boisterous chants of “Death to America! Death to Israel!”
It was a dominant story on (some parts) of cable television, but nothing much happened.
I could go on—myriad such incidents have been happening recently with more than 3,000 antisemitic acts (up 361 percent) being reported since Oct. 7—but this is for an article, not a book.
