In America and Britain, political violence and attacks on Jews are becoming normalized and even justified.
Many have commented on the fact that Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old shooter from California who allegedly set out to kill U.S. President Donald Trump and administration officials at the White House correspondents’ dinner last Saturday evening, parroted the same demonization of opponents and calls for violence against Trump and his supporters that incessantly emanate from the Democratic Party.
In videoed street interviews in New York after the attack by Allen, young Americans said they definitely thought political violence was justified as “resistance” or protest because government systems were themselves violent or failing the people. One said that while he felt that Trump wasn’t bad enough to be killed, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was.
In London this week, there was yet another attack on British Jews when two men in the heavily Jewish suburb of Golders Green were stabbed. The attacker lunged at an ultra-Orthodox man in his 30s, before launching himself at an elderly man at a bus stop who had just put on his kippah. Both men were hospitalized.
Appallingly, violent attacks on British Jews have now become a regular occurrence. In the past few weeks, synagogues and a Jewish charity have been targeted by arson attacks. Four Hatzola ambulances were firebombed in Golders Green.
Two congregants were killed last year on Yom Kippur in a terrorist attack on a Manchester synagogue. An ISIS plot to carry out what Greater Manchester Police described as potentially the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, targeting Jewish schools, synagogues and nurseries, was foiled by an undercover operative.
The stabbing attack in Golders Green has elicited the now-familiar mantra of shock and concern from politicians. The hypocrisy is off the charts.
Once again, there were ritual incantations that “there’s no place for antisemitism in Britain.” On the contrary, as is all too bitterly apparent, there’s a growing place for antisemitism in Britain.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “deeply concerned” about “the latest in a spate of utterly vile attacks on the Jewish community.”
Yet he has refused to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. He has refused to take action against jihadi hate preachers who incite murderous hatred of Jews in the mosques. And for the past two and a half years, he has done nothing to stop the hate marches that have taken place every week with chanting for jihad, the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
What did government ministers, who shed crocodile tears every time British Jews are attacked, think those chants of “Globalize the intifada” actually mean?
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for London, has said Jews shouldn’t be subjected to this hate. You don’t say.
Countless demonstrators on the marches that his officers have protected on the grounds of “free speech” have made the inverted v with their fingers, denoting the Hamas call-sign for the murder of Jews. Which part of “murder the Jews” doesn’t Rowley or Starmer understand?
These rallies, where placards accuse Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid,” have been critical in creating an atmosphere of impunity toward antisemitic attacks.
Rowley was, however, all too correct in criticizing the muted public reaction to the antisemitism now rampant in Britain. Given its nature and scale, one might have expected widespread demands that the government and justice system take effective action to stamp it out.
Although some individuals have expressed proper revulsion and outrage, there are no widespread demands for something to be done. Instead, there’s a widespread attempt—as there is also in North America, Australia and elsewhere—to cast Israel and Zionism as pariahs.
This has fueled an onslaught on Diaspora Jews, who are being held collectively responsible for the perceived crimes of Israel. These claims, which are all based on malevolent lies, distortions and mind-twisting inversions of the truth, portray Israelis—and, by extension, all Jews—as evil and demonic.
This has ripped out the social guardrails that formerly served to corral antisemitism on the fringes of society. The devastating result is that it’s now become mainstream and acceptable. Far from rushing to support Diaspora Jews against this onslaught, people in the West are sickeningly—and ludicrously—accusing them of “killing babies in Gaza.”
Many, if not most, in the West refuse to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is itself a murderous creed. Instead, they promote it.
Starmer, like his Canadian and Australian counterparts Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, has promoted the demonization of Israel through spreading boilerplate lies about its behavior.
Unforgivably, his government falsely accused Israel of wantonly killing Gazan civilians and depriving them of food and other essentials, in direct contradiction of the facts; stopped some arms sales to Israel as punishment for its war to defend itself against genocide; and even rewarded Hamas by recognizing the fictitious “state of Palestine.”
Virulent anti-Zionism and demonization of Israel have laundered antisemitism. And the laundromat has been the Palestinian cause.
Support for the Palestinians is the motif of the progressive West, the issue that stands proxy for conscience and idealism.
But the Palestinian cause and the fictitious Palestinian identity that underpins it are devoted to the destruction of Israel and the theft of the Jews’ own ancestral history in the land. Far from being moral, it’s an evil cause.
The stock in trade of the Palestinian Arabs is to project their own crimes onto the Jews and to accuse the Jews in turn of committing atrocities of which they have, in fact, been the victims.
Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs have been accusing Israel for decades of committing genocide, causing a Holocaust and acting like Nazis.
So it’s not surprising that those in the West who have adopted the Palestinian cause as the acme of righteousness are themselves using precisely these vile terms about Israel and its supporters.
Everyone who has perpetrated these lies and supports this cause is an accessory to murderous violence against Jews. But the baleful impact of this has been even wider and deeper than merely stoking such attacks.
Horrifyingly, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become so deeply ingrained in the West as an unchallenged narrative presenting Israel as the fount of all evil that they’ve developed into a belief system that defines an individual’s moral identity.
This has been made possible through the decades-long erosion of the West’s historic culture and the moral precepts on which it was constructed. That cultural attrition has replaced objective truth by feelings and emotion, with morality being reframed as “anything that offends me.”
The values of the Western nation, which have been deemed illegitimate because of colonialism, oppression and “whiteness,” are said to be superseded by universal laws and transnational institutions such as the United Nations, human-rights law, the international courts and the big NGOs, such as Amnesty International or Save the Children.
However, because such transnational bodies are dominated by dictatorships and fanatical Islamic regimes that hate Jews and Judaism alongside their left-wing Western acolytes, this entire humanitarian infrastructure has been fashioned into a weapon against the existence of Israel.
For the post-religious West, though, this infrastructure is assumed to embody the ideal of the brotherhood of man. It’s therefore become a kind of priesthood administering the secular religion of human rights.
The shocking outcome, therefore, is that the West has framed antisemitism and anti-Zionism as conscience itself. Western conscience has thus been enlisted in the service of evil.
Small wonder that Jews and all decent people feel as if they’re now inhabiting a looking-glass world where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor have all been reversed.
With the Western mind already spinning crazily from the onslaught on truth and core biblical values, the Palestine cause has delivered a definitive blow to its moral compass.
Diaspora Jews won’t be safe—and nor will anyone else—unless the West disentangles itself from this morass and returns to the core values of the civilization that it has so tragically tossed aside.
