Our Moment

Most political movements that become radicalized usually shrink in size. People leave as a group becomes more extreme. The exact opposite is happening now.

It’s important to understand that this anti-American and anti-Israel movement isn’t new. It didn’t just emerge spontaneously as a result of Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack.

This has been nurtured on our college campuses year after year after year by Students for Justice in Palestine and the radical “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) movement.

Now we’re seeing the bitter harvest of that hate. And the more radical they get, the greater their numbers become.

When they began saying, “Israel out of Gaza,” they had some supporters. When they chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for genocide, their numbers grew.

When they started burning Israeli and American flags, the crowds got bigger. Now they are threatening Jewish students, and their numbers are swelling.

And more and more people in responsible positions are either afraid, paralyzed, or publicly siding with them.

In its own way, it is an echo of what happens in any nation that first starts hating on the Jews. Anti-Semitism has always been a marker for even more horror coming later.

It starts with attacking synagogues and moves on to arresting Christian pastors. It starts with beating up a Jew and moves on to beating up anybody who has a Jewish friend. It starts with chants of “Death to the Jews” and moves on to chants of “Death to America.”

The anti-Semitic mobs at Columbia, Yale, New York University, and Berkeley will grow and grow. The people we’re seeing on the TV now are the ideological descendants of the people we see in the newsreels from 1930s Germany.

The people screaming calls for genocide at Columbia are the German students you’ve seen setting books on fire that were written by Jewish authors in the 1930s. By the way, they were joined in the burning of those books by their professors.

The people demanding disinvestment from anything related to Israel and boycotting Jewish businesses are the descendants of the fascists who attacked, looted, and burned Jewish stores during Kristallnacht.