by Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness Dec 4, 2023
Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now
in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities,
the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration
from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.
Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now
in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities,
the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration
from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.
At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students
rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account
had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and
screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school
property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her
classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an
eventual police arrival.
The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose
school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City
schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed”
they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own
teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel,
she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok
video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack
tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth
gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our
new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common
denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.
Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the
country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into
normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish
students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped
down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.
A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.
Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library
surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were
warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous
for them.
What would happen to a university president who warned black or
Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee
their safety from other students?
A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast
Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has
ever been capable of speaking the truth.
The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a
supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot
was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians
in Israel.
No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed
misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed
civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did
not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape,
when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.
The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were
an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that
decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those
it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least
ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the
“journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate
of their fellow citizens.
The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely
the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current
war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and
shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently,
that such murdering will only increase?
Sometimes the anti-Semitic hatred reaches Orwellian levels of
absurdity. A British reporter asked an Israeli official whether his
country valued life less than Hamas did because it had agreed to Hamas’s
demand to release three convicted terrorists in exchange for one
Israeli captive. The media fawned over a released disfigured Gazan
terrorist—without mentioning that her injuries came from a car bomb she
exploded in hopes of killing Jews.
The media is further emboldened by the Biden administration. When
asked about the outbreak of anti-Semitism across the U.S.—nearly 60
percent of hate crimes are committed against Jews, who make up 2.5
percent of the population—Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
dismissed them with the false claim that the White House “had not seen
any credible threats” to Jews. And then she claimed that the real danger
to American residents was Islamophobia and threats to Arab-Americans.
Hate crime and interracial crime statistics do not support Jean-Pierre’s
assertions, which prompts the question of why she made them in the
first place.
Note that almost all the violence in demonstrations over the current
war comes from the pro-Hamas side that shouts “river to the sea”
genocidal threats, swarms the Capitol rotunda and the White House wall,
disrupts traffic, occupies bridges at peak traffic, defaces private and
public property, shouts down speakers on campus, harasses passers-by,
and often battles the police. One wonders whether, should the U.S.
military be forced to try to rescue American captives, the demonstrators
would cheer for the American troops or Hamas hostage-takers.
Abroad, the world has gone even crazier.
The United Nations has appointed Iran—a theocratic,
terrorist-supporting government that kills dissidents and takes
hostages—as the chair nation of the UN Human Rights Council Social
Forum. What a cruel joke.
But what would one expect from the UN when its secretary-general,
António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, a former Portuguese socialist
politician, condemns the Israeli response to October 7, but rarely, if
ever, the Hamas mass killing of civilians that prompted it. Right after
the mass killing Guterres opined, “The attacks by Hamas did not happen
in a vacuum.” According to the secretary-general’s logic, I suppose,
Pearl Harbor, the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, and the Russian invasion
of Ukraine did not happen in a vacuum either.
When told that an Irish citizen hostage was freed by Hamas, Irish
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar declared that the “lost” child was finally
“found.” In other words, he wished to hide the obvious fact that a
terrorist organization had kidnapped an Irish citizen child, held her
hostage for 50 days, and released her only when Israel gave up convicted
terrorists to obtain her release.
Our domestic political leadership is not helping the situation.
Just days after October 7, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along
with the foreign minister of the now often hostile Turkish government,
were calling for a cease-fire to prevent an Israeli response.
When the Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israeli cities went off course
and damaged a Gaza hospital (leading to the fake story that Israel
bombed the hospital), President Biden joked, “You got to learn to shoot
straight.” Did Biden mean that, had the terrorists only launched a
successful terrorist rocket into Jewish neighborhoods, there would have
been no ensuing controversies?
Biden later apologized for doubting fatality figures provided by the
Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas—a terrorist
organization that has lied about the hospital “bombing,” denied it had
tunnels under hospitals, denied that it had engaged in mass rape in
Israel, and has supplied no proof of its civilian casualty numbers. Has
Hamas released figures of how many of its terrorists were killed, and
does it separate those numbers from lost “civilians?” And so are there
really vast new cemeteries in Gaza to handle the 15,000 graves for those
who, Hamas asserts, were killed?
What explains the collective madness?
For the last 40 years, while Western leftists have naively supported
Palestinian terrorists, their governments have appeased
terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern governments for very practical
reasons. The old subtext to such mollification was that 500-million
irate Arab Muslims, and a Middle East with 40 percent of the world’s oil
reserves, in realist terms, simply argued against the interests of 10
million Israelis.
But now there are two new, venomous elements in the matrix.
One is that the racist DEI industry assumes that all intersectional
nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy.
Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of
being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the
supposed victimizers—in this case American Jews, who are declared
culpable whites.
So the oppressed, according to the DEI bible, cannot be anti-Semitic,
though many certainly are. And they apparently cannot be held
accountable for their hatred or frequent violence.
Secondly, in the last two decades there has been an epidemic of
immigration into Western nations from the Middle East. In often-divided
democracies like ours, politicians seek to appease as many pressure
groups as possible, whether citizen voters or merely resident
demonstrators, to acquire and maintain power.
Such pro-Hamas demonstrators, rah-rahing from a free, prosperous, and
secure West, expect no rebuke for their obvious hypocrisy in cheering
on an autocratic, dictatorial Hamas that has wrecked the economy of
Gaza, shoots dissidents, and allows no free expression. And Middle
Eastern guests and immigrants are never reminded that their very
demonstrations are predicated on not being physically present in their
homelands, where they might be shot for what they say and do freely in
the West.
We are on a trajectory similar to that of 1930s Germany.
Every time a student is cornered, harassed, or threatened; a high
school mob tries to swarm and harm a teacher; a government spokesperson
dismisses such hatred; or American soldiers are targeted by Iranian-fed
terrorist organizations; the madness, racism, and anti-Semitism will
increase—until it reaches a saturation point of abject violence in our
streets.
Once a society mainstreams the values of thuggish brownshirts, and
ignores their “from the river to the sea” eliminationist chants and
screams of “beat the f—king Jew,” then the next emboldened step is
foreordained.
True, most Americans were appalled by October 7 and accept that every
nation has the right to defend itself from terrorist killers. Most
Americans deplore vicious demonstrators and their calls for violence on
behalf of the Hamas death cult. And most Americans want their President
to demand the release of American hostages and to deter Iranian-backed
terrorists who attack U.S. military personnel in the region.
But unless the public demands that their universities enforce on
campus the Bill of Rights and the right to move freely in safety, that
police enforce laws against mob violence on America’s streets and in our
schools, and that the United States stops greenlighting mass
immigration from anti-Western nations and extending student visas to
residents of anti-American, terrorist-supporting, and autocratic Middle
East regimes, then in suicidal fashion we are headed for a 1930s
nightmare.
