In this week’s episode of “Top Story,” JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin discusses how antisemitism went mainstream in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. He’s joined by legal expert and author Alan Dershowitz, who says it’s no surprise that the media and hard-left did exactly as the terrorists wanted and began blaming Israel for the war. It is, he said, Hamas’s “dead baby” strategy that they’ve used before to manipulate their “useful idiots” in the West who smear the Jewish state.
According to Dershowitz, who has written a new book about the current conflict, War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism, the students who are marching for Hamas on academic campuses and in the streets are no different than the Hitler Youth during the Nazi era.
The surge in antisemitism, he says, is the result of years of indoctrination from the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies at colleges, which have been at the center of the surge in antisemitism. “Virtually all of the DEI programs have ended up being antisemitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and anti-American,” says Dershowitz.
Dershowitz worries that Israel being forced to negotiate with Hamas to gain the release of its hostages will have terrible consequences. “It’s going to encourage more hostage-taking. And by the way, I think it’s coming to America. I think we’re going to see hostages taken in America. We’re already seeing that some of these Hitler youth from the extreme, extreme left are now engaged in violence and terrorism.”
Pondering the future of the Democratic Party he has long supported, he stated that the real danger is not from the far-left “Squad” but from less extreme progressives who are attacking Israel. “I’m much more scared of [Maryland Rep.] Jamie Raskin than I am of [Minnesota Rep.] Ilan Omar,” said Dershowitz. The Maryland congressman, who is a former Dershowitz student, is “a progressive woke leftist” who “uses his Jewishness” to call for a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza, “which means a victory for Hamas and defeat for Israel.”
Speaking of the future of the Democrats, Dershowitz says that “it would be a terrible thing if Israel became a partisan issue. And it may, and in which case I will support Israel over these radical progressives.”
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