The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is upon us.
Several thousand innocent civilian victims were murdered in three separate events in three locations. Those who remember that day won’t ever forget it.
The al Qaeda Muslim faction, which organized and carried it out, is now largely gone — dead or incarcerated. The details are well known.
While there were some anti-Muslim incidents in the United States immediately after that, Muslim students weren’t boycotted or harassed on Ivy League campuses or forcibly excluded from campus public areas. They weren’t personally blamed or reviled for what the al Qaeda gangsters did. There was a lot of public discussion about “not scapegoating” individuals in the U.S. for the sins of others. This applied not just to the elite but to all public and private institutions.
Aside from a few regrettable individual attacks on American Muslims, there was and has been no acceptance of the idea of “collective guilt” over the 9/11 attacks.
But when it came to the Jews, all such bets were off. In the wake of the massive attack of Oct. 7, 2023, on Israelis — murder, rape, and kidnapping — there was no widespread call for punishing Muslims or Arabs in the U.S. over this atrocity. The Israeli military launched immediate rescue attempts and pursued the Hamas terrorist fighters who had fled to Gaza. They hid in tunnels and hideouts in buildings full of civilian noncombatants. These evil men used Gazan non-combatants located in public hospitals and schools as shields.
This “hiding among civilians” is itself a recognized war crime, as are kidnapping, rape, and torture.
As a consequence, ugly images of half-standing buildings being blown apart were regular American media fodder. Many Gaza civilians were also killed or wounded in the crossfire. Stories of those civilian casualties were widely publicized by Arab media around the world.
Gaza City resembled World War II footage of Dresden or Berlin in April 1945. But even the Nazis did not hide behind German women and children, as did Hamas. But the latter, a defeated army, refused to surrender, and instead hid among the civilian population until the hiding places were all but destroyed. The carnage of Gaza, and the large number of subsequent fatalities, then, was the responsibility of Hamas, not the IDF.
Yet for unexplained reasons, a sizeable “socialist” faction of the Democratic Party, along with their many quiet allies in mostly elite East Coast American universities, sat on their hands as violent small groups of anti-Jewish protesters blockaded Ivy League universities. Students, workers, and faculty who were identified as Jewish, self-identified, by clothing or even names, were denied entry. In some cases, they were beaten up by rioters and pro-Hamas masked antifa-style thugs.
Entire academic departments were shut down, and school administrators told Jews to stay home. American Jews were being targeted and told to fend for themselves.
Among the self-professed academic elite leaders, there were no calls for quashing the notion of collective guilt. No firm and angry institutional action to punish rioters and attackers ever ensued. This was in the context of acts of a foreign government to protect their citizens who were murdered, taken hostage, many of whom never returned to their homes.
Criticism of violence against American Jews went unvoiced. Instead, victims were told to stay away and disguise any trace of their religion in public. These disgraceful acts took place at self-proclaimed bastions of liberal enlightenment.
The post 9/11 “hands off” policy of public tolerance for Muslims became a post Oct. 7 academic blind eye policy of “hands on” Jews who happened to be in the “wrong campus quadrangle.”
Why this bizarre and incomprehensible double standard?
These monstrous attacks on Jews only subsided when President Donald Trump threatened to cut federal funding to the offending institutions, and demanded a Justice Department investigation of this unthinkable violation of civil rights.
If 9/11 taught us anything valuable, other than keeping our guard up against terrorism, it is that scapegoating and persecuting people for their religious beliefs is wrong. A few Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan organized and enabled murderous terrorism in the U.S. Subsequently, they were punished. Fifteen of the 19 Arabs responsible for U.S. civilian deaths on this date that will forever live in infamy were from Saudi Arabia. Two were citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. Were U.S. citizens with familial backgrounds in any of these four countries subjected to one millionth of the abuse suffered by U.S. Jews, who are not even citizens of Israel? To ask this is to answer it. Of course not.
Whatever you think of Hamas, American Jews are not accountable for the retaliation of the Israeli State against Hamas terrorists hiding in Gazan basements or tunnels amongst civilians. The Russian Red Army killed tens of thousands of Berliners in their successful effort to kill the Nazi rats located underneath the Reichstag in 1945. No one ever proposed punishing Americans of Russian background for those deaths. No one even blamed the USSR, our ally in the war to end all wars.
Occasionally, isolated Muslim terrorist attacks against Jews continue in Europe and America. The attackers are usually quickly stopped, killed, or punished. Academic institutions do not scapegoat all Muslim students for those acts.
Why the double standard with Jews?
It is shocking that this is promulgated and endorsed by the supposed elite academic leadership. None has yet apologized for this? Why not?
A right-wing populist U.S. president has taken firm action in word and deed to stop this. Yet leftist Democrat socialist icon Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — Jewish himself — stays quiet. For the American left in the Democratic Party, Jews are the only acceptable minority left to demonize. Since Israel is the Jewish State, American Jews must be held responsible for whatever they do as well.
The “Jewish Standard” is much different from the “Muslim Standard.” The Ivy League has led the way on this.
We are, indeed, in a new Bizarro World of identity politics.
OSAMA BIN LADEN IS WINNING FROM THE GRAVE
Antisemitism is the only reasonable explanation for the recent political success of the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Janeese Lewis George, Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Abdul el Sayed, Donavan McKinney, Angie Nixon, Chris Rabb, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
Want to hear something even more bizarre than the double standard? Jews have supported the electoral campaigns of many of these fervent enemies of Israel.
Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Mike Holmes is a retired Houston-area CPA. During his career, he traveled worldwide in the oil and gas business, including most of the Middle East. He has known edited and published work related to the the economics field and libertarian movement.