An ancient hate is resurfacing in the United States, Europe, and other places. It's an enduring but pervasive hate, wholly irrational, without any justifiable cause or reason, and for some insane reason, it keeps coming back. Despite the claims of the legacy media, academics, and liberals in and out of government, it is not the right that is spreading and promoting this hatred - it is the far left. It's happening on college campuses and in the streets. Places of worship have been attacked. Innocent people have been targeted.
I write, of course, of antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, and even here in what is supposed to be the land of the free, this irrational, ancient hate is once more rearing its ugly head. At Columbia University, an antisemitism task force has revealed just how bad the situation in this once-prestigious institution has become.
New York Jewish Week via JTA — Jewish students at Columbia University have been driven out of their dorm rooms, chased off campus, compelled to hide their Jewish identity, ostracized by their peers and denigrated by faculty, according to a report released Friday by the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism.
The report, the second one released by the investigatory body made up of faculty, illustrated the breadth of anti-Jewish discrimination at the Ivy League campus. It also said that pervasive antisemitism on campus has “affected the entire university community.”
“The larger social compact is broken,” the report said. “University policy and individual practice must change.”
Columbia, I remind you, is the university that recently saw a president resign in disgrace over her failure to deal with rising antisemitism on that school's campus.
Previously on RedState: Columbia University President Resigns Amid Constant Antisemitic Campus Controversies
This isn't just about Israel and Gaza. It wasn't about any of that in 1941, either - Israel didn't exist as such - and if Israel didn't exist today, there would still be antisemitism. Israel's existence may be making the antisemitism proponents more agitated; how dare those Jews reclaim their ancestral homeland! What is concerning is the response of the American left to all this, and I hasten to note, this isn't just on college campuses.
See Related: Tim Walz Gets Blasted for His Response to the Six Hostages Murdered by Hamas
My wife and I recently watched the 2000 miniseries "Nuremberg," which presented a brutal picture of a modern, advanced, industrial nation that went insane. This is a series I can't recommend strongly enough; not only did Alec Baldwin not shoot anyone during production, but it also presents a chilling picture of the architects of the Holocaust, their motivations, and how some got dragged along with it - or intimidated into, if not taking part, into at least looking the other way. My father used to talk about this time in history, how it was in all the newspapers, how it was discussed on radio broadcasts, and how most of the American people had little idea how bad things were.
But could it be happening again? Here?
There are signs that it may well be.
See Related: The Antisemitism Found With the Democrats That They Don't Want Anyone to Talk About
Cornell University Antisemite Sentenced to Prison for Threatening to Slaughter Jewish Students
At Columbia, it's already happening.
“After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe,” the report reads. “One student who had moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm.”
The report also details dozens of other antisemitic anecdotes and incidents on campus, including students wearing kippahs who were spit on and berated, a Jewish woman and her brother who were chased off campus at night, and classmates wearing keffiyehs who shoved Jewish students and shouted, “We don’t want no Zionists here.”
These Jewish students, I remind you, who are suffering these bargain-basement Kristallnachts, have nothing to do with Israel, Gaza, or anything else. They are kids seeking an education who are being targeted for harassment and worse due to their religion. The United States, as we need no reminding, has the freedom of conscience as one of its most basic founding principles. We are - supposedly - a nation that abhors unreasoning religious discrimination.
And yet here we are.
Throughout my life, I've been fortunate to have several Jewish friends - observant and non-observant - and if I could characterize them broadly, it would be with the words "thoughtful, intelligent, and industrious." That's a very broad categorization, I grant you, but it's accurate.
Which makes the current trend all the more disturbing.
If it is a solution we seek, I have none to offer. It's difficult for a rational person to understand an irrational hatred, much less how to reverse that hatred and turn it, at the least, into tolerance. But there will have to be some kind of solution found because only one long lifetime ago, the entire world was treated to a horrendous, atrocious (in the literal sense) example of what may happen otherwise.
