By Steve BermanThis got almost no press: almost exactly a year ago, the Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney’s Office issued a news release that unsealed three indictments against the “tiki torch” marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at a “Unite the Right” rally. They were charged with “a single count of burning an object with the intent of intimidating a person or group of people,” which is a felony with a maximum penalty of five year in prison.
Zachary Smith of Nacona, Texas, one of the indicted marchers, accepted a plea deal, which remained sealed when last reported. These marchers didn’t get nearly the penalty they deserved (I’m in favor of throwing them under the jail until it rots on top of them), while former President Donald Trump got all the negative press for what they did.
Last week, the California Highway Patrol arrested 38 people who closed down the Golden Gate Bridge and I-880 in San Francisco and Oakland, respectively. These protesters did more than just block the roads with their bodies. They brought barrels filled with concrete and physically blocked access. “We have to use jackhammers and saws to break into those barrels,” CHP Golden Gate Division Chief Don Goodbrand told ABC 7. “You can imagine how complicated that is.”
They did this on a weekday—a Monday morning—during rush hour. It took hours for police to get these major arteries open again, and traffic was snarled all day. People missed appointments, work, and emergency vehicles had difficulty reaching those in need of service. All because some leftists protesters think their actions will somehow move events over ten thousand miles away.
Hundreds of marchers outside Columbia University yelled “burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” in their hatred of Israel (which is easily transferrable to hatred of Jews who happen in to be in the area of Columbia University). They were part of a growing body of students forming a “Gaza Solidarity” movement that seeks to use mob tactics to occupy schools and workplaces.
Google fired 28 employees who occupied the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, New York City and Seattle. These employees were upset that their company has a signed contract with the government of Israel. Google’s offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa employee 2,000 workers—mostly Israeli. I am not sure what the fired employees wanted—for their employer to close those offices and fire everyone?
CEO Sundar Pinchai played the adult in the room in a memo to employees: Google “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
As convulsions of Jew hatred have swept over campuses and progressive enclaves, administrators and officials struggle with what do. I say, nothing.
Oh, not nothing, as in nobody should do anything at all. But as for administrators and officials who are walking a fence between their own progressive ideals of oppression, oppressors, and all that is holy to their sociological taxonomies, and the simple humanity of letting Jews go about their business without being harassed, they should do nothing. Their help is not needed. As for the people closing down bridges, highways, sitting in Google offices, and shouting obscene calls for genocide on college campuses, let them revel in their disgrace.
The editors of National Review called for putting down the protests, and their reasoning, vis a vis Columbia at least, is fairly sound.
The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. On Saturday, students and anti-Israel New Yorkers alike converged on Columbia’s campus. There, they harangued and physically intimidated the Jewish student body.
“We were verbally harassed, and some of my friends were physically assaulted,” one matriculated student told Jewish Insider. “They yelled at us to go back to Poland, that we have no culture, and chanted, ‘Strike, strike Tel Aviv.’” Her experience is borne out by video footage of the protests that cascaded onto the internet. “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too,” demonstrators chanted in the faces of their terrified targets. In a now-infamous image, one demonstrator appeared before a group of counter-protesters holding Israeli and American flags with a sign pointing in their direction that read, “Al-Qasam’s next targets.”
This was not simply an expression of support for oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. It was a full-throated call for the destruction of the world’s only nation that presents an open door to Jews from anywhere, along with the closing of the door of friendship to Jews in the U.S. It’s Jew hatred in its purest form seen in such numbers since the Nazis marched with torches. It’s the same thing as Charlottesville, in different clothing.
Do nothing, and revel in the disgrace created by the Marxist and Marx-adjacent ideologies that are not simply “lackadaisical” but encouraging to thinking of Palestinians without reference to their own history, leadership, and social engineering by people not interested at all in “solving” the problem that’s plagued Israel for 80 years.
Do nothing, and let Columbia, and its fellow-travelers walking the Silk Road of Marxist class warfare take their money and pull it out of Israel. They should do it. In fact, they should make a statement that Jewish money is not welcome in their institution and Jewish students would be well-advised to leave (this is happening anyway). See, Jews have been stripped of money and belongings since before Jesus Christ walked the earth, and many times after the rise of Christianity—by Christians. Jews will do just fine without Jew hater money, investment or education. We will see how Columbia does without Jews.
Who should do something? Why, everyone else, starting with Jews. Those who have placed their values in with the parts of the world who hate them need to realize that this hate cannot be slaked by reason, or by half-measures. It can only be opposed and exposed for what it is. Jew hatred is an ancient, satanic strain of hate, aimed at a people who are seen by their haters as unfairly gifted, and somehow undeserving of continued existence.
Jews should divest in places, people, and politics that won’t have them. Unfortunately, this means the Democratic Party, as well as a large swatch of the Republican Party. Where’s Joe Biden, asks Erick Erickson; and this is “Joe Biden’s ‘Fine People on Both Sides Moment’.”
At the White House, Joe Biden stood by while Alexandria Ocasio Cortez praised the pro-Hamas protests at Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Biden then declared he “learned a long time ago to listen to that lady.”
Later, a reporter asked Biden if he condemned the antisemitic protests.
“I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden told the reporters. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
The Democratic Party and its president will do nothing to end the protests, mostly because they can’t. They can’t because many of the people who are thought leaders in the party’s circles believe in the causes expressed by the Jew hating protesters. President Joe Biden doesn’t believe in that; he’s old-school. But he won’t stand up to those who do believe it, just like people who know better in the Republican Party won’t stand up to Trump.
The only people who can stand up for Jews are Jews, and those who believe that God’s chosen people are in fact chosen by God’s own will. Those who oppose the God of Israel oppose Israel in toto. Whether the government of the State of Israel is doing right or wrong, if you believe that God made a covenant with Abraham, and that God doesn’t break his covenants, then things cannot go well for people who call for the extermination of Israel and Jews.
I’m just fine pulling my money, my business, and my support for any organization that is willing to entertain the Jew haters and their cause. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have great sympathy and compassion for Palestinians. It’s a terrible situation, but the one-and-a-half state solution is what we have, and it’s very unlikely this will change in the near future. Hamas must be eradicated.
Hamas is a direct descendant—a branch—of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood took the side of the Nazis in World War II. It still takes the side of the Nazis. It is feared in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia. It is coddled by Iran, because the extremist ayatollahs, despite being in the Shiite sect of Islam, oppose the existence of Israel.
There are 57 nations on earth that consider themselves “Islamic” in their government and law. There is one nation that is based on Jewish law. There are 1.9 billion Muslims on earth. The 57 nations and 1.9 billion Muslims can’t find it within themselves to make homes for 3 or 4 million Palestinians who live in squalor. Israel makes room for Jews from anywhere in the world, including Jews who are poor and do not contribute economically to their small nation the size of New Jersey. Israel also accepts Arabs as citizens, recognizes LGBT and gay marriages, celebrates women and the equality of the sexes, and offers a liberal, high quality of life, education, and scientific achievement.
These facts don’t penetrate the ideology of the Jew haters marching on campuses and on bridges. They only want the 10 million Jews in Israel to “go back to Poland” (there are under 20,000 Jews in Poland, out of 1.2 million of some kind of Polish ancestry in Israel) where they were murdered by the railcar less than a century ago.
Let these marchers revel in their disgrace. Let them soak in their inhumanity. Let them bathe in their evil. Then let them be shunned from civil society. Don’t put down the protests. Let’s see the full measure of hate. We need to see it so we can really understand why we say “never again.”
We need to see it because we must know why we say “Am Yisroel Chai.” It’s not yellow stars on Jews. It’s the black hearts of people who have been led into hate and out of the light of reason that needs to be exposed to the world.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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