October is especially hard for those from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Earlier in the month, we recalled the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Now we recall the terrorist attacks of Oct. 27, 2018. The two atrocious days are bookended in our collective memories, a nexus of mourning the surreal realities of both the deadliest attacks on Jews since the Holocaust and within the United States, thousands of miles and less than a mile from targeted hate and devastation, respectively.
It is poignant that these events connect in time, as they bridge two distinct realities of Jew-hate in the world. The attack on the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha synagogue encapsulates the traditional antisemitism of the far-right: white nationalism, Great Replacement theory, Holocaust denial. One might say it exhibited the “right” kind of Jew-hate—the type generally agreed upon by modern society as unacceptable and the kind acceptable to publicly denounce.
The massacre in southern Israel, however, exposed the “wrong” kind of Jew-hate—the kind we weren’t allowed to speak of. And if one did, it must not be acknowledged. This is the counterpart to the right’s antisemitism: the deeply ingrained anti-Zionism of the left.
The ultimate irony is that both bigotries operate from the same root core. They stem from a desire to dehumanize Jews to lay a rational framework for extermination. If one can successfully prove that Jews are void of humanity, then it’s reasonable to treat them as subhuman and logical to create a pathway for the destruction they deserve.
Society certainly doesn’t dismiss these desires of the antisemitic right as frivolous. When Nazi proponents say they want Jews dead, they are taken at their word. It is a bipartisan truth that they should be reviled for their Jew-hate, and this doesn’t tend to be up for discussion in civilized society.
The ideological left doesn’t actually want safe spaces from intolerance; they want a safe space to practice their own brand of it.
Yet a disturbing pattern has emerged within said “civilized society,” where those able to resolutely condemn the evil in such calls will, in the same breath, condone identical calls from their parallels across the political spectrum. As a result, we have the unbelievable insult of those who so easily condemned the 10/27 murders now glorifying 10/7’s own.
Why is one hate recognized and admonished, while the other is unable to be addressed? One seemingly black-and-white and the other gray? One simple fact and the other requiring “context?”
How can Holocaust revisionism remain staunchly unacceptable, yet Holocaust inversion heralded as trendy truth? Why is it morally appropriate to decry supporters of Nazism, but inappropriate for supporters of jihadism? What’s the actual difference between praising Hitler’s mass genocide of Jews and Hamas’s attempted one?
Does anyone legitimately think there’s any meaningful disparity between calling for Jewish slaughter via white nationalism versus Islamic fundamentalism? If not, why treat the crystal-clear “intifada” any differently than “gas the Jews?”
Though the far-right is more than content to proclaim its Jew-hate proudly and loudly, the left’s movement relies entirely on concealment of both reality and agenda in order to manipulate its audience. Jews are relabeled as Zionists, and antisemitism is repackaged as anti-Zionism for more easily accepted slander. Crimes of others against Jews are projected back onto us. We are also blamed for resisting and fighting others’ attempts at our very extermination.
But concealment also makes it easier for a strain of hate to survive across nations and for generations to come. Anything obviously in the open, such as the right’s stark method, is able to be addressed and more likely to be squashed.
Contrarily, a concealed problem cannot be addressed and therefore never solved. Keeping Jew-hate hidden in the sewers of the left has allowed it to not only continue, but to grow, evolve and fester over the years under society’s ignorant surface, waiting for the time when it could rear its toxic head en masse in public. That culmination is what we are now witnessing in the West.
Setting an empathy trap by rebranding bigotry under a movement for social justice promotes popularity among youth. It provides the gift of espousing all desired hate under the security blanket of the “right side of history” and the guarantee of social immunity from criticism of moral failing. The ideological left doesn’t actually want safe spaces from intolerance; they want a safe space to practice their own brand of it.
Still, all should agree that the existence of acceptable Jew-hate is an inarguable symptom of civilizational decline. Just as the individual bigot is always concealing an internal void, a society’s infection of Jew-hate always reveals an abyss of moral failure, no matter its political roots. The West should be more concerned with genuinely addressing these fatal flaws than continuing to bury them, as it will eventually be forced to take accountability for tolerating intolerance.
The lights are on, and the masks are off. There can be no more pretense that Jew-hate is only a product of a single side while anniversaries are forced on us to remember the bigotry of both. Jews simply no longer have the luxury of friends only calling out hate from comfortable avenues, and in the decaying state of this world, neither should anyone else.
For those who place value in consciousness, facts and humanity—and not just when applied to one side of the aisle—it’s past time to denounce hate stemming from any side, any party and any ideology, not simply from that which one already comfortably opposes.
And for those who have true concern for the well-being of Jews and society as a whole, confronting and exposing this long-concealed reality is the only way to ensure everything which caused the world to say “never again” truly never happens ever again.
Originally published in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle on Oct. 31, 2024.
