By Ezra Meyer
Friday, October 27, 2023
I’m sure all of us, at some point in our lives, have asked ourselves what we would have done in Nazi Germany. The answer given by some George Washington University students this week was to glorify the massacre of Jews and the “martyrs” who perpetrated it.
I am an American. I am a Jew. I have family in Israel. I am shocked and angry. I feel let down.
On Tuesday night, vile antisemitic messages were projected in 20-foot letters onto the outer wall of the GW library. The phrases such as “Glory to our martyrs” came from students too cowardly to come out from behind anonymity.
I graduated just a few months ago from GW, where I served as president of the group GW for Israel and subsequently as chairman of GW College Republicans. I began at GW in the fall of 2019, after a gap year in Israel where I worked as a volunteer for the country’s national ambulance service.
Throughout my four years at the university, I and my Jewish peers continually faced antisemitism (often masked as anti-Zionism). We regularly saw our school in national headlines about high-profile antisemitic incidents. Still, I could not begin to imagine that there would be a grotesque antisemitic light show in the center of campus propagating ideology that calls for the genocide of my people.
My older sister, Jordana, encountered a similar type of rhetoric, along with violent antisemitism, during her time as a student at New York University. This had a significant influence on her decision to move to Israel and join the Israel Defense Forces following her graduation. My family is proud of her and the decision she has made, even as it heightens our concern about the recent horrors.
On October 7, I woke up to texts from my sister unlike anything I had seen before. Unfortunately, those of us with family in Israel have become all too accustomed and desensitized to news of rocket barrages from Gaza and the latest terror attack. But this was different. “I woke up to sirens, and then hundreds of terrorists broke into Israel simultaneously and started shooting at random, entering houses, now they’re all over the south. . . . They’ve kidnapped both soldiers and civilians and smuggled them to Gaza,” she told me. “I’ve never experienced anything like this,” my sister, an anti-tank-missile specialist, continued. “THIS IS A POGROM.”
Jordana now is required by the IDF to walk around with a dog tag in each shoe — in case her body needs to be reassembled like a doll.
It’s tough to understand the magnitude of evil that humans are capable of. It’s even tougher to comprehend how classmates of mine could support this evil. Anyone justifying, explaining, or even attempting to contextualize the atrocities committed by Hamas is either grossly misinformed of the reality on the ground or willfully ignorant so that events fit a narrative — or worse. These students are so deep in the pervasive contemporary campus ideology that there is nothing for them to do but double down, even if this means supporting the indiscriminate murder of Jews in Israel . . . and worldwide.
When these students say “Glory to the martyrs,” to whom are they referring? The martyrs firing rockets at my cousins in Tel Aviv? The martyrs who force my sister and her roommates to sleep in a bomb shelter as shrapnel rains down from the sky? The martyrs who savagely kidnapped Omer, the boy I knew at sleepaway camp? The martyrs who murdered my friend Gili at a music festival? These are the martyrs that GW students glorify?
As for university administration, they have done little to respond to incidents of antisemitism and even less to preempt them. Occasionally we’ll get a platitude-filled statement from the administration saying they condemn antisemitism along with all other forms of hatred.
True to form, GW on Wednesday released a mealymouthed statement condemning the “unauthorized” projections, stressing that they “in no way reflect the views of the university.” But this isn’t nearly enough. The day-late statement claims that “leadership intervened to ensure that these projections were removed,” yet the messages were displayed on loop for roughly two hours. “We recognize the distress, hurt, and pain this has caused for many members of our community,” the statement went on, while making no mention of Jews or the persistent antisemitism on campus, or even alluding to the broader situation. Such statements also typically lack any indication of a substantive follow-up. This problem is not unique to GW. The schools that manage even this meager step fail to realize that “Never Again” requires action.
The one heartwarming ray of light from the last couple of weeks is the way the worldwide Jewish community has come together. Every Jew I know is calling out the antisemitic slogans and demonstrations around us, using every platform available to them. But where is everyone else?
As for the virtue-signaling social-media activist class, they post about every issue under the sun if it lends them social capital — except this one. They have been silent about the rise of antisemitism on the left, and in turn they are silent when the Jews of Israel, a country demonized by the Left, are slaughtered. And when they do finally talk — they blame Israel. They blame the Jews. And they endorse a “globalized intifada” and the extermination of my people.
So here’s a message to my fellow members of the GW community: Maybe you would have fought the complacency of Nazi Germany. But that is the past. You were not alive then. You are living now. You are experiencing this now. The question is not what you would have done. The question is, What will you do?
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