In the last 48 hours, there have been two horrific anti-Semitic incidents in New York City. On Monday, a gang of masked thugs took over a subway car, following a pro-Hamas demonstration:
Masked anti-Israel protesters took over a New York City subway car on Monday and demanded to know if there were any “Zionists” on the train — then warned them: “This is your chance to get out.”
The sickening moment came after protesters rallied in Union Square Park in Manhattan and held up a banner that read “Long live October 7.”
One antisemitic demonstrator at the event yelled that he wished “Hitler was still here” to “wipe out” the Jews.
Later, the mob of protesters lit flares and waved flags associated with Hezbollah and Hamas in front of the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on Wall Street during an organized “citywide day of rage for Gaza.”
Last night, in a separate incident, the homes of the Brooklyn Museum’s director and some of its Jewish board members were attacked:
The Brooklyn Museum’s director and a number of its Jewish board members were targeted by antisemitic vandals overnight, multiple Big Apple lawmakers said Wednesday.
Director Anne Pasternak’s home was apparently among those targeted by the vile mob.
When reached by The Post, a spokesperson for the museum only said, “We are deeply troubled by these horrible acts.”
We should all be deeply troubled. One wonders, where does this contemporary eruption of anti-Semitism come from? I talked about this with Seth Leibsohn on his Phoenix radio show today. I think there are two sources. The first is the presence in America and Western Europe of a large number of Middle Easterners who have brought their ideologies with them. Where possible, these people should be deported.
But the second factor is more chilling. I think most people do not understand the extent to which anti-Semitism has been institutionalized in much of America’s educational system. We have seen this for years at the college level, and now it has infected our high schools, middle schools and elementary schools. The ideology being promoted by the Left adopts the scheme that was popularized by al Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs. They denominated Israel the “Little Satan” and the U.S. the “Great Satan.” That is exactly how our two countries are seen by today’s Left.
Students at all levels are now being inculcated with the idea that the great evil of world history is “settler colonialism.” What, exactly, is settler colonialism, a recent addition to the Left’s lexicon? It turns out that in all of history, there are just two main examples of this evil phenomenon: Israel–never mind that the Jews arrived there more than two millennia before the Arabs–and the United States. The Little Satan and the Great Satan. If your children are attending a public K-12 school, it is likely that they are being introduced to this ideology.
So it seems to me that the resurgence of anti-Semitism that we are now seeing is not entirely irrational or inexplicable. On the contrary, it has more of an official sanction than is commonly recognized.
