Any honest historian following the news in this country has got to a bit queasy these days.
Those paying special attention to the Middle East have to be verging on nausea.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” and other venomous drivel spewed by the empty-headed hatemongers in our major institutions of higher education has a special meaning: Israel must be wiped from the Earth, and every Jew with it. That is what it means. They may as well be saying “Hitler was right! Jews to the gas!” It’s the same thing, without equivocation.
I lived in the Middle East for a while, so I’m not unfamiliar with the memes: the anti-Jewish diatribes in major newspapers, the grotesque cartoons of ultra-stereotypical rabbis prostrated in prayer in front of flaming toilets, the blood libels… I just didn’t expect it to appear in our country in such sudden and vehement form.
In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The Democrat party is, and always has been, the party of racism and social division, of setting Americans against one another in the name of accumulating and guarding power. In the earliest days of the Republic the Dutch and Germans were their targets. Then the Irish. Then Asians. Then Italians and Southeastern Europeans. And from the beginning, Black Americans. And Jews.
That’s right. A Republican president fought the bloodiest war in our nation’s history, which destroyed chattel slavery. Democrat legislators local, state and Federal then created Jim Crow. A Republican president invited the best-known Black leader of the time to dine with him in the White House, to the scandal of a Democrat-dominated Washington, D.C. His Democrat successor-but-one segregated the Federal Workforce. Throughout his 14 years as President, the much-worshipped FDR had several opportunities to support anti-lynching legislation. He refused in each case. And finally, when they had chances to support grass-roots efforts in America’s Black communities that had resulted in the fastest-rising standard of living they had yet seen, Democrats instead chose to establish programs that destroyed the black family and created a permanent underclass – which would supply the party with a reliable source of voters. Because that is what Democrats value most: dependent voters and the power they bring.
Speaking of FDR, his was the State Department that refused entry to the 900-odd German Jews of the “S.S. St. Louis’” 1939 voyage to the Americas, and pressured the government of Cuba to do the same. The passengers returned to Europe, where many eventually ended up in Hitler’s concentration camps.
In 1941 the Roosevelt administration tightened immigration restrictions on immigration from Europe, essentially abandoning its Jewish residents to the tender mercies of the Nazi party. The Roosevelt administration was also clear about Hitler’s extermination camps, at least from June of 1941 when he was told of the systematic murder afoot in the Third Reich. It did and said nothing until there was lukewarm support for private humanitarian aid in late 1943. There were pleas, including directly to the President to bomb support and transportation systems underpinning the Nazi murder factories, but the death trains ran on time nearly until the end of the war.
After the war things didn’t change much. FDR’s successor okayed further restrictions targeted on Europe’s few remaining Jews, such as the 1948 immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans. But his administration had no problem admitting ex-Nazis and sympathizers – as long as they had experience with espionage or rocketry…
So here we are today, facing the results of decades of sloppy thinking about the virtues of “diversity” without the necessity of assimilation and respect for others, and about the need for history based on fact: on prestigious campuses across the country; throughout social media and even in the Well of the House of Representatives, the sentiment if not the language is clearly “death to the Jews.” And the people saying it think themselves perfectly within their right not only to say it, but to act on the thought.
Jewish-Americans are 2.4% of our population, but they suffer more than 50% of the religion-based hate crimes in the country. According to the FBI, in 2022 there were 1302 crimes targeting Jewish-Americans. Anti-Muslim hate crimes numbered 205. The Anti-Defamation League says the first number is about three times higher, and the rate for 2023 has almost quadruped since Hamas’s barbaric murder attack of October 7.
The Biden Administration’s solution is to develop a campaign against “Islamophobia.”
This is not only tone-deaf, it is shameful. And it will beget more of the same, quickly.
Modern Americans may look with horror at the old, black-and-white, jerky footage of anti-Semitic atrocities in 1930s Germany; we look at what was discovered in the camps FDR and others assiduously tried to ignore. We ask ourselves how so civilized a nation could have sunken so deeply into animal barbarism. We reassure ourselves with the hoary Shibboleth “Never Again.” But we ignore what we see before us and we refuse to understand that there is a straight, bright line between today’s empty-minded college students squealing about Israeli “occupation” and the Hitlerjugend, or between Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest and Democrat Rashida Tlaib.
Because hating “the other” is so useful in gaining and holding power. So useful that one of our political parties has forgotten entirely where that sort of hate leads, although the evidence is right in front of it. And behind it. And deeply ingrained within it.
Which is the most shameful thing of all.