We should be worried by the measurable rise in antisemitism
Quin Hillyer
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With the Anti-Defamation League reporting on March 23 that last year showed the highest number ever, by far, of recorded antisemitic incidents in the United States, it is obvious, but still important, to say how awful a trend this is.
Antisemitic harassment, bomb threats, and physical assaults all rose significantly.
REVISIONISM AND ANTI-JEWISH RHETORIC
What bears special comment is this line from the ADL press release: “Significantly, the report found a doubling in activity by organized white supremacist groups, who were responsible for 852 antisemitic propaganda distribution incidents last year — an increase from the 422 propaganda incidents attributed to white supremacist groups in 2021.”
Because today’s Left absurdly pretends to see racism behind every tree and under every rock, conservatives sometimes discount the rise in, and dangers of, true white nationalism/supremacism, much less understand it. There always has been a large overlap between white supremacism and neo-Nazism, the latter of which, of course, is virulently hateful toward Jews.
Indeed, at a March 20 event in New Orleans for the book Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right by Brian Fairbanks, panelist Lawrence Powell gave an important and entirely accurate reminder. Powell is a history professor at Tulane who was a co-founder of the internationally acclaimed Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which did yeoman’s work against the infamous former Klan leader Duke when Duke enjoyed a three-year run of political success (1989-91).
“People need to understand,” Powell said, “that even as much as Duke hates black people, he is far more motivated by hatred of Jews. That’s what has always animated him.”
For mysterious reasons of diseased psychology, the past several millennia of human history have seen the Jewish people scapegoated and mistreated to an almost unfathomable degree. Today, the two largest groups responsible for the hatred against Jews are radical Islamists and white supremacists. And it is just a fact of history that where antisemitism thrives, the horrors of mass pogroms, terrorism, and holocaust almost always end up spilling well beyond Jewish targets, ruining lives of vast numbers of other innocents as well.
The ADL report should serve as a wake-up call. Or, rather, yet another wake-up call. The presence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 of hundreds of angry marchers yelling, “The Jews will not replace us,” fomenting hatred and fear that resulted in the death of a counterprotester the next day, should have provided plenty of awakening itself. There was no moral equivalence, none whatsoever, between those white nationalists and the counterprotesters. The white nationalists were and are evil.
Two imperatives arise from the ADL report. First should be a spirited defense, any time antisemitism shows its ugly face, of the Jewish people. Their tradition of good citizenship and astonishing levels of philanthropy should be enough to make the case for them without defense from others, but the reality shown by the ADL report is that such defenses obviously are needed.
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The second imperative goes well beyond Judaism. Whenever one person or group demonizes another because of faith or ethnicity, or even whenever anyone advocates the division of people by law or treatment based on such group identities, the evil and danger of bigotry grow. This rule applies to the Left as well as the Right, to those claiming to be “correcting past wrongs” as well as to those exacerbating historical ills.
Stop the groupthink. Stop the identity politics. Stop the hate. And, particularly, stop the hatred against Jews, with all the historical horrors implicated therein.