We’ve spent a year in the pages of COMMENTARY detailing how the surge in anti-Semitism in America and around the world is the result of two decades or more of organizing, propagandizing, and spending. We’ve talked about the role of Qatar as the literal bank from which Jew-haters were drawing cash. We’ve written about the universities training students and turning them into the academics who have spread the gospel of anti-Zionism by serving as the mentors and sponsors of the kids and groups that have made the post–October 7 atmosphere so poisonous, toxic, and dangerous.
Indeed, the rise of anti-Semitism occurred so fast in the wake of the massacre in the Gaza Envelope that there was no other way to view it but as the deployment of pre-positioned assets finally being activated. I wrote an article called “They’re Coming After Us” in February. Well, now they’re hunting us. Literally.
In fact, the rampage against Israelis in Amsterdam in November was literally dubbed a “Jew hunt” in the WhatsApp chat groups that organized it. True to classic anti-Semitic form, the beatings and menacings were instantly blamed on Jewish soccer hooligans in town to watch the Maccabi team play. That is the Big Lie of the year. It had begun to take shape the evening before and was organized through WhatsApp and Telegram—with Uber drivers and others sharing information about where Israelis were walking and where they were staying. People working in hotels sent word that the Jews had come back to their rooms.
Officials in Amsterdam have made it clear in no uncertain terms that whatever behavior Israelis might have engaged in, they did not precipitate, nor do they bear any responsibility for, the violence. The “it was Jewish soccer hooligans who did this to themselves” line is the deployment of a classic anti-Semitic trope, and the Jews who have engaged in it because they cannot bear to look at reality in the face better wise up. Because even an Episcopalian vegan loather of Israel who bears the once-Jewish name of Sulzberger might find himself being hunted.
In the same week that the Jew hunt was taking place in the land of the wooden shoe, a little boy was nearly snatched away from his father on a street in Brooklyn; a 13-year-old kid on a bicycle was slapped as he rode by; a Hasidic man was brutally beaten; another man was slashed in the face by a man shouting “f—k you guys.” Outside a kosher supermarket in Manhattan, a man was called a dirty Jew and spat upon. In Chicago, two Jews at DePaul University were beaten just weeks after an illegal immigrant from Mauritania shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he shot a visibly Orthodox man on his way to synagogue. There are daily incidents now in Toronto and Montreal in which individual Jews are being targeted.
It’s 13 months since the slaughter of 1,200 Jews, the wounding of thousands more, and the taking of hostages. Attacks on Jews are increasing in number and in brutality. The effort to “globalize the intifada” is no longer metaphorical. The design of the intifada in Israel two decades ago was to make everyone feel unsafe at every moment, to render daily life intolerable. Here in America, either law enforcement will rise to the occasion and raise the cost of Jew-hunting so high that those tempted to engage in it will stand down. Or Jews are going to take matters into their own hands.
And when we decide to do a thing, we do it.
Photo: Screenshot via X/@TheMossadIL
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