For Jews in America and around the world, Israel represents a thriving land of survival and opportunity, and not only for my people.
Nowhere else in the Middle East are those of all races, religions, sexes and
sexual orientations welcome to live in peace and prosperity.
Now the dream is dying — thwarted by people who’d like nothing better than to see Israel wiped from the map.
It’s a sad day across the United States and abroad as whiny, privileged college students and thrill-seeking provocateurs, egged on by leftist professors, the “mainstream” news media and numbskull politicians, foment pro-terrorist, anti-Jewish violence.
They prove, once again, that no place is safe for Jews.
My parents, originally from Europe, fled in the 1930s to what was known at the time as the British Mandate for Palestine – now Israel – then immigrated to New York City.
They believed that raising children here would give us the greatest chance to escape the antisemitism with which they grew up.
They never lived to see the day that, ironically, Germany is a better place for the Jewish people than the USA.
In Germany, a great number of whose inhabitants are ashamed of their forebears’ attempts at Jewish elimination, expressions of Nazism is against the law and government officials are determined to erase the memory of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Problem: Genocide.
But in America, these atrocities are too often considered Constitutionally protected free expression. Even when free speech morphs into hate speech.
Even when hate speech leads seamlessly to physical violence.
Even when it’s shamefully practiced by other Jews.
A campaign aimed at appeasing the terrorists while sucking up to those who’d gladly wipe Israel from the map began in earnest not long after Hamas fighters massacred more than 1,200 souls in Israel and snatched scores of men, women, and children as hostages on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel’s justified retaliation for this unprovoked bloodshed led not to US solidarity with the grieving nation, but to a campaign of appeasement with the monsters.
Almost from the beginning, various news outlets lined up behind Hamas, quoting without skepticism the terror organization’s count of tens of thousands “civilian” deaths and ignoring the fact that the terrorists count their own savage combatants as innocents.
It all conspires to justify vicious Jew hatred that has bubbled under and above the surface for eons.
Suddenly, it’s 1930s Germany all over again.
President Biden in February called the Israeli military’s justified response to the slaughter “over the top” and said “it’s got to stop.”
Weeks later, he praised Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York for calling on the Senate floor for the ouster of Israel’s democratically elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he condemned for what he claimed was the senseless killing and starvation of Gazans.
In early March, members of the Hollywood brain trust, including singer Billie Eilish and actor Mark Ruffalo, wore red pins to the Oscars ceremony, a call for an Israeli cease-fire in Gaza and loyalty to Palestinians.
Later that month, Vice President Kamala Harris warned that Israel could face “consequences” if its military launches a ground assault on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.
Not to be outdone, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Jew-despising far-left “Squad” member, said in a speech on the House floor, ”If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.” She’s clearly ignorant of the meaning of the “G” word.
What a collection of hypocrites!
All are parroting uncritically Hamas claims of death and suffering.
They and others are all but excusing the murders and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians and people who had the misfortune of traveling to the Holy Land last October.
And all are fanning the flames of campus unrest and unfettered attacks on Jews.
We thought America was a land where Jews might live without fear of oppression, violence and scapegoating. We thought we were free.
Boy were we wrong.