Pogrom 2024

By John Podhoretz

Friday, November 08, 2024

 

Early Friday morning in Amsterdam, in the shadow of the house in which Anne Frank hid and where her family was betrayed, rampaging mobs of Muslim men targeted Israeli attendees of a soccer match featuring the Maccabi team. They beat up men and women. They broke into buildings searching for Israelis to attack. They assaulted at least one child. For hours, the streets were not clear of them, as the authorities in the Dutch city had no clue what to do or how to engage. The mobs had been prepositioned at stadium exits, subway station entrances, and near and around the hotels at which Israelis who had come to town to support their team were staying. This was a pre-planned attack. We are mere days away from the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day when Jews and Jewish businesses were specifically targeted for arrest, injury, and destruction. We’ve only ever really seen still photographs of the damage. You want to know what Kristallnacht was like? Go to Twitter and watch the videos, taken by the GoPro cameras of the goons, and you’ll get some flavor of what the word “pogrom” means. We have just seen the first unambiguous pogrom after October 7.

 

Now go to the home page of the New York Times. Go to the home page of the Washington Post. Go to CNN. Go. See where they have placed this story. It is two screens down, in smaller type. Now, fair is fair—it happened in the evening and these organizations no longer have things like Amsterdam bureaus. So this is a rare moment to thank God for the existence of social media; without X the world would not have known that the horror was upon us.

 

But as it happens, I did, and for a very personal reason. A dear friend of mine, with whom I’ve shared a friends’ text chain for a decade, sounded the alarm because her 20 year old daughter was there—traveled to watch the game from another European city where she is studying abroad for the semester. The first word was this: “A is in Amsterdam. Was going to the Tel Aviv v Amsterdam soccer game. No, she didn’t tell me. Turns out the tickets weren’t working so they went to dinner. Tel Aviv won 5-0 and insanity broke out. The waiter had to use a crow bar to lock everyone inside the restaurant.”

 

A little later I asked her if she’d heard from her daughter. She replied: “She’s in a hotel. Which is a dorm. I haven’t heard from her in a bit. She didn’t answer her phone so I hope she’s just sleeping.” As I was reading this, I was watching a video of hooligans breaking into a hotel for the purpose of hunting down Israelis staying there. I did not mention this. I asked if she could see her daughter’s location on Find My Friends. She said, “I see her phone is working. She said she and her friend would stay in and watch movies..”

 

And my blood ran cold because as she was texting this, I was reading that there were at least three people who had fallen out of contact and whose families did not know where they were or what was happening.

 

Oh, and I knew that my friend’s father had himself survived the Holocaust in Poland from babyhood in the guise of a child of a Christian family. Finally she got the story from her daughter: “A said a van pulled up next to her and was asking her ‘something palestina’ like did she agree. She said she played dumb and ran back inside. Then there were these fake bomb sounds and everyone was sprinting. She said it was terrifying.” And she learned her daughter had been at the game but had left early because the entry tickets of some friends hadn’t worked and she went to meet them.

 

Then my friend said: “She’s like, should I not go to the Anne Frank house today?”

 

Meanwhile, in America this week, here’s what’s been happening. On Monday, an Orthodox boy was slapped off his bicycle by a man as he rode in his Brooklyn neighborhood on his way to school. Also on Monday, a speech by an Israel Arab delivered at a synagogue in Chicago was disrupted by protestors who lay screaming on the floor and had to be dragged out. Also in Chicago, at DePaul University, two students—one of them an IDF reservist who had a shirt saying as much and offering to answer any questions anyone might have—were assaulted. As Reuters reported, “Chicago police identified the victims as two men, ages 21 and 27, and said two male offenders struck the 27-year-old about the face and body and pushed the 21-year-old to the ground then fled on foot….the students were standing near the student center just off campus property.”

 

The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, has yet to speak on either matter. It is important to note that it took Johnson four days to respond at all to the shooting of an Orthodox shul-goer on Shabbat morning by a gunman shouting Allahu Akbar, and this was his response, through a spokesman: “Mayor Johnson’s heartfelt thoughts and prayers are with the victim and his loved ones from this weekend’s shooting incident that took place in Rogers Park. This tragic event should have never happened, and we recognize the dedication of our first responders who put their lives on the line during this shooting.” Note the missing words. They are “Jew” and “anti-Semitism.” Johnson is a Black Lives Matter radical decarcerationist, and his behavior here comes as no surprise to anyone who watched him win the office in 2023.

 

There was an outbreak of encampment action at Yale this week, where Jewish students had their pathway blocked. At Harvard, there was a “protest”—which is to say, an unlawful disruption in a private area—in a library where foul goons shouted about genocide and settler colonialism. Courses were announced for 2025 at Cornell and Columbia on the Gaza “genocide.” And in the reporting of the invaluable AMCHA Initiative, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, “the Critical Race and Ethnicities Studies program shared on the program’s Instagram story a call for students to join the Students for Justice in Palestine group, stating, ‘Interested in advancing justice, liberation and self-determination for the Palestinian people? Join SJP!’ with accompanying imagery stating ‘Student Intifada —We are the revolution of the people’ with an image of a keffiyeh-clad individual firing a rock sling.” This program is an officially recognized major, run by tenured faculty and administrators.

 

On three continents this week alone—Europe, North America, and Asia, where the Houthis and Hezbollah are again firing rockets and drones at at Israel under the direction of Iran—they are coming after Jews every day. In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. The Passover Haggadah follows that deathless sentence with the words, “And the Holy One, blessed be He, stays their hand.”

 

As I was texting my friend, I was reading that the Israeli government was flying two planes to Amsterdam to help rescue the Jews from this pogrom. Which is why Israel exists, and why every single person who says anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism should have their tongues cleave to the roofs of their mouths until they speak different words.

 

The Holy One’s hand is here. It is the state of Israel