By Madeleine Kearns
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Last weekend, Hamas advanced its assault on Israel, targeting the most vulnerable and defenseless they could find. Young men and women were gathered at an open-air concert near Kibbutz Re’im, a short distance from the Gaza Strip, when Jihadist paragliders swept in and began their barbaric rampage. The terrorists broke through the barrier into Israel and murdered hundreds more. At this writing, the death toll is more than 1,300, including 27 Americans.
Independently verified reports confirm the extent of the atrocities. Eyewitness testimony is similarly shocking. Children murdered in front of their parents. Women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends. The elderly brutalized. People burned alive as they tried to escape. Hostages murdered on camera, the terrorists sending footage of their executions to the victims’ families via their loved ones’ phones. And much of this in plain sight, too, with terrorists parading their victims’ naked corpses through the streets.
You would think that any civilized person would find it easy to denounce the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. For years Hitler has been the secular stand-in for Satan. And the term “Nazi” has been leveled at much lesser offenses since.
But it seems that some progressives are partial to wielding the “Nazi” charge only when it suits them. A few weeks ago, staffers at the office of Representative Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) circulated a memo to House Democrats suggesting they slam Republicans who need to “focus their energy on the Nazi members of their party before anything else,” which conveniently included investigating why Bowman pulled the fire alarm before a critical vote.
Last year, Democratic Party adviser Kurt Bardella told MSNBC that “we are watching right now a very radical and extreme Republican Party mirror what we have seen in other places like Nazi Germany.” In 2019, James Clyburn, then House Democratic whip (S.C.), compared Trump to Hitler in an interview with NBC News, saying that “we had better be very careful” since “Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. And he went about the business of discrediting institutions to the point that people bought into it.”
On International Holocaust Memorial Remembrance Day in 2018, Representative Yvette Clarke (D., N.Y.) stood in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Manhattan and said: “We are standing in front of a building that has become the headquarters for the gestapo of the United States of America.” In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the Trump administration’s migrant-detention centers to “concentration camps.” A recent piece in the Institute for Policy Studies’ publication argued that “Ron DeSantis and other GOP leaders are following the Nazi playbook, substituting transgender youth for Jews.”
In July, left-wing magazine the Nation published a piece titled “The GOP’s Nazi Problem Has Deep Roots,” in which the author warned of the outsized influence of a handful of fringe antisemites on the right, one of whom dined with Trump, another of whom was a pro-DeSantis social-media influencer.
Evidently, the Left takes the Right’s antisemitic trolls very seriously. You’d think, then, that they would be in absolute, unmitigated uproar over the actual slaughter of Jews and the despicable praise of this slaughter across the world.
It’s not as if there’s a shortage of examples. As Israelis are burying their dead and spending sleepless nights reckoning with the unimaginable horror their kidnapped relatives must be facing, antisemites are getting together to rejoice in their suffering. In London, nearly 5,000 Hamas supporters gathered near the Israeli embassy, setting off fireworks in its direction. In New York City, Democratic Socialists had a swastika on display in their rally in support of the terror attacks. In Sydney, Australia, they chanted “Gas the Jews.” The Black Lives Matter chapter in Chicago posted a silhouette of a Hamas paraglider, descending to murder Israeli civilians, with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”
A week before the attack, the Nation published a piece titled “The War Against Palestinians on Campus Keeps Getting More Absurd.” But clearly, it’s the argument that college campuses are not hotbeds of antisemitism that’s absurd.
The national chapter of the National Students for Justice in Palestine posted a “call to action” on social media, instructing its student chapters to hold demonstrations. They explained in their tool kit: “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the façade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near.”
At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed their support for a statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” though some of them walked back their support after backlash. Students outside the University of Madison-Wisconsin chanted: “Glory to the martyrs.” My colleague Zach Kessel has collected a list of a dozen or so student groups at American colleges praising Hamas’s terror attacks, including at Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan Law School.
Yet rather than resort to their Nazi comparison — which in this case is actually fitting — these left-wing voices in the Democratic Party, think tanks, and publications have doubled down on excuse-making, moral equivalency, or, in the case of some students, full-throated support of the attacks.
As the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, in the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were despised because of their race. Today, in the 21st century, they are attacked because of the existence of their nation state — a nation state that emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. Writing for the Times of London, Daniel Finkelstein notes that 45 percent of the world’s Jews live in Israel. He asks if Israel does not defend itself, then “where will we go?” Hamas has answered this question very clearly.
If cheering on the murder of Jews isn’t antisemitism, then I don’t know what is. Progressives who refuse to condemn Hamas have forever forfeited the Nazi charge.
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