In the Anti-Defamation League’s new report on antisemitism, published less than a week after Hamas’ horrific attacks on Israeli civilians, the group naturally ties race-based attacks to Donald Trump. Not mentioned are the campus radicals who have chased and assaulted Jewish students, nor the “Squad” members of Congress who can’t bring themselves to condemn terrorism, nor the Ivy League administrations that won’t condemn actual violence.
It’s said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Lately, however, the masks have come off and the hypocrisy on the Democratic side no longer even pretends; terrorism and political violence are ignored and at times even praised, while calls for peace are really calls to allow Hamas to regroup and rearm.
Let’s start with the violence that has spread to our country. Last week, a 69-year-old Jewish man was murdered in an attack that the media insisted on calling “dueling protests.” The elderly man was struck in the head with a megaphone by a pro-Palestinian activist in what the Ventura Sheriff’s Office determined was clearly an “antisemitic crime.” He later died from his injury. No arrests have been made.
Ohio State University saw two violent attacks on Jewish students on one day; Jewish students at MIT have been blocked from attending class and threatened with assault; at Tufts University, Jewish students say they’re not safe as pro-Palestinian marchers chanted the genocidal mantra, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Those Tufts students have a point. U.S. college campuses, so committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, exclude Jews from that commitment.
“Young Jews have never felt more alone on American campuses as they have during these past two weeks,” writes Armin Rosen in Tablet magazine. “Classmates and soon-to-be-former friends have rallied in large numbers to celebrate the burning and torture of 1,400 Israelis. Professors have announced their glee at the redemptive spilling of settler blood. University administrators who treat every scratch of racist graffiti as a kind of communitywide soul-murder have discovered a newfound sense of nuance when faced with the 21st century’s worst butchery of Jews.”
Surely students facing discrimination, race-hate and violence can count on their administrators, can’t they?
“The nation’s army of campus DEI staff presumably exists for moments like this one, where an already unpopular minority group confronts an unanticipated surge of stress and potential danger,” notes Rosen. “Yet DEI offices haven’t even bothered with pro forma expressions of fake concern.”
At MIT, administrators gave protestors who blocked and threatened Jews a pass because they feared doing so might cause “visa issues” for those violent protestors. Instead, MIT President Sally Kornbluth has planned a “Day of Dialogue, which we would expect students involved in the protest and counterprotest to attend.”
While the Anti-Defamation League and the Biden administration continue with the impolite fiction that antisemitism is being driven by the right, the facts are clear. Those on the left are hypocritically driving the rise in antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks. Even some lifelong Democrats feel betrayed.
“But there is no more cozy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party; Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews,” playwright David Mamet wrote recently. “And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.”
Perhaps hypocrisy was laudable when it truly did pay tribute to virtue; now, though, the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party pays tribute only to terrorists.
The Honorable Robert Henneke is the Executive Director and General Counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.