Anti-Semitism, whether casual or overt, is still anti-Semitism

Marching for Hamas means glorifying terrorists who slaughtered defenseless men, women, and children

Careful, Mr. Spiro, guns are dangerous. Especially the end with the hole.

• Eoin Colfer, The Eternity Code

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

• Albert Camus, The Plague

I’ve been shocked by the number of people, both in this country and elsewhere, who’ve celebrated that Hamas attack on innocent civilians in southern Israel. Rather than seeing 10/7 as a horrific attack on defenseless non-combatants, they see freedom fighters attacking those dancing and living on “stolen land.”

These people aren’t just pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas, they’re virulently anti-Israel. They ignore the reality that both Arabs and Jews had lived in Palestine prior to Israel being declared a state in 1948.

But, by all means, let’s celebrate freedom of speech and expression, eh? Even when that “free speech” calls for driving Israel and the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea.

Sitting on an outdoor bench at Bard College on Thursday, I watched a procession of several dozen students weave its way across the New York State campus. A young white man with a bullhorn in his hand and a kaffiyeh around his neck led the group in chants of “Long live the intifada” and “No peace on stolen land.” The protesters displayed Palestinian flags and banners that provocatively read from the river to the sea. Although some observers almost certainly disagreed with the message, others stood up and applauded the students as they passed. All of this transpired peacefully, if obnoxiously, and after five minutes the area was silent again.

Like many Americans, I am appalled by the student and political organizations that have excused or, in some cases, rallied in celebration of the October 7 Hamas attack on Jewish civilians, the deadliest single-day assault on Jews in Israel’s history. But I am also grateful to call home a country where such rallies are permissible and where, despite the illiberal criticism of open debate that became fashionable in the summer of 2020, freedom of expression still prevails.

I’m all about the 1st Amendment and, as I’ve often said, free speech can be and often is offensive and repulsive speech. But how is anti-Semitism acceptable when other types of racism aren’t? If groups were marching against Blacks, Asians, or the LGBTQ community, the outcry would deservedly be loud and long. But do the same against Jews…and somehow the response is…crickets.

If this same march had featured signs saying “Blacks Back To Africa,” what do you think the response might have been? The outrage from virtually all corners of society (save for White Nationalists and other racists) would have been incendiary. But make the signs say “From The River To The Sea,” and not only does everyone know it means, many applaud the sentiment.

The same day that I watched American liberal-arts students so callously miss the point, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told police, “Pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order.” He stipulated that the organization of protests would lead to arrest, and further noted that any foreigner who commits anti-Semitic acts would be “immediately expelled.”

Parisians may protest anything and everything at a moment’s notice- “manifestations” are a fact of life.” Freedom of speech and expression is a cherished right in France- but it doesn’t come without boundaries.

In recent years, street protests against fuel-tax increases, retirement reform, and the shooting of a young motorist have turned spectacularly violent and led to looting. Even so the government did not categorically impede public demonstrations.

But “the right to protest is not a fundamental right in France,” Sebastian Roché, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research and Sciences Po Grenoble, told me. “The Ministry of the Interior is authorized to limit this right on the grounds of public order, and local prefects enforce prohibitions. Since 1935, we have had this system of administrative control. Furthermore, the political messages of the President (during public speeches) are taken as instructions by the prefects. If the President expresses total solidarity with the government of Israel, it is locally interpreted in terms of law enforcement: no room for criticism.”

The right to speak isn’t limitless, either. French Muslims cite interdictions against public display of the veil as a violation of their ability to express themselves freely, and hate speech is a crime. Holocaust denial carries various penalties up to imprisonment. Even merely offensive speech can be against the law, as many outside observers learned when the fashion designer John Galliano was arrested in 2011 for making anti-Semitic comments at a bar. The far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has been convicted multiple times for violating hate-speech laws, including in 2022, when he was fined 10,000 euros for describing unaccompanied migrant children as “thieves,” “rapists,” and “murderers.”

In France, not only is the context different than here in the US, but the situation on the ground is also very different. France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish AND Arab diasporas. In recent years, Islamic terror attacks in Paris and other regions have frequently targeted Jews.

2015 saw the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the attack on the Bataclan, and an attack on a kosher supermarket. These terrorist attacks spurred record numbers of French Jews to emigrate to Israel.

It was against this backdrop, and following a call by a former Hamas leader for a global “day of rage,” that the government banned pro-Palestinian protests. (A Muslim immigrant may have been heeding this call when he stabbed to death a high-school teacher last Friday in the town of Arras.) During a televised address, French President Emmanuel Macron urged the country to “stay united” and condemned Hamas, maintaining that France’s “first duty” was to protect French Jews. But demonstrators at the Place de la République, and in cities across the country, had their own ideas. They defied the ban, chanting “Palestine will prevail” as police dressed in riot gear fired tear gas and water cannons into the crowds.

The obvious problem here is that Palestinian terrorists consider innocent Jews anywhere in the world to be legitimate targets simply because of their Jewishness. By this definition, their religion of birth links them inextricably to the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This is true for Palestinians even if a Jew is non-religious, non-political, and has never set foot in Israel. The simple fact of being Jewish makes one a “legitimate” military target. Of course, according to the internationally accepted laws of war, unarmed noncombatants cannot be targeted.

Then again, Palestinian terrorist grows have never followed the laws of war. They live by their own cowardly code.

The question of how to balance the freedom of speech and assembly with legitimate security concerns is one of the most difficult dilemmas for a free society to face.

How- and why- can Americans celebrate the deaths of innocent civilians?

This becomes a real concern when Americans- especially those on the Far-Left- openly celebrate the horrific murders of innocent men, women, and children. And that’s not even to mention the other war crimes committed against those unable to defend themselves.

Even as I’m angered by the spectacle of activists and students praising homicidal actors from afar, I’m grateful for America’s comparatively extreme free-speech norms, its formal and informal commitment first of all to personal liberty. This culture of free exchange is a privilege we take for granted at our own peril. This is what the leaders of the ACLU understood when they defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the largely Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, in the late 1970s. And it is a core commitment too many have been willing to sacrifice in the feelings-first debates around cancel culture.

Sitting on that bench last week, watching those students march by and feeling uncomfortable with the glibness of their statements and actions—in their foisting themselves on perfect strangers who may very well have been grieving—I was nonetheless proud to be on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. In Paris those same statements might have been drowned in clouds of tear gas.

An understandable sentiment, and the author’s not wrong. Nonetheless, what’s missing here is an acknowledgement that comparing the US with France and other European countries is apples and oranges. We don’t have the history of violent clashes nor (yet) the terrorist attacks that plague Europe.

I had my own moment as I watched a very pro-Palestine and virulently anti-Israel march proceed up Broadway in downtown Portland directly past my office.

It was a pretty disgusting scene as several hundred Portlanders celebrated a terrorist attack that slaughtered several hundred innocent Jews- men, women, children, and babies

And scenes like these have been common from coast to coast. The people involved will call it supporting the Palestinian people; I call it not-so-casual anti-Semitism.

These young people may not have thought things though, but what they’re doing is advocating for pogroms in Israel.

Campus politics in America irrevocably changed this week when student groups that champion the noble goal of justice for Palestinians endorsed the evil means of war crimes in pursuit of it.

Last Saturday, hundreds of gun-toting men stormed into Israel by land, air, and sea with the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. They succeeded in perpetrating a pogrom reminiscent of the Cossacks and the Nazis. They murdered civilians in their homes as their families watched. They massacred young people at a music festival. They kidnapped children.

We should not forget the horror visited upon southern Israel and the manner in which innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered.

Sadly, some in this country already have.

Across America, millions of people with wildly diverse opinions on the longstanding conflict between Israel and Palestine denounced those atrocities, because it is always wrong to deliberately target and slaughter civilians and it is always wrong to abduct, let alone kill, children.

I naively believed that those were near-consensus beliefs on college campuses––that whether one sided with Israelis or Palestinians in the long and heartrending conflict between them, almost everyone could agree that certain actions were evil regardless of who took them. Then this week, on dozens of campuses, student groups reacted to the attacks by attempting to absolve the murderers and child abductors of all responsibility.

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” a letter signed by multiple student organizations at Harvard stated. (Several of the named groups have since withdrawn their endorsement.)

How does any moral human being side with those who slaughtered those unable to defend themselves? Worse, how can anyone in good conscience hold Israel culpable for the massacre Hamas conducted against defenseless civilians?

And then, a letter holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” has to be one of the most sickening things to come out of the aftermath. Multiple student organizations at Harvard absolved Hamas terrorists for the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children…and shifted the blame on to “the Israeli regime.”

I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of sick and twisted things in my life, but that has to be top-ten material.

Nothing screams moral bankruptcy more than holding the Israeli government responsible for the slaughter of its own citizens by Palestinian terrorists.

George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine joined the swell of extremists who reject the Geneva Conventions on noncombatants. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” the group stated. “It is not an abstract theory to be discussed and debated in classrooms and papers. It is a tangible, material event in which the colonized rise up against the colonizer … We reject the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘militant.’ We reject the distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘soldier.’ Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”

That’s a wonderful concept to argue in a classroom debate, but this isn’t an antiseptic academic discussion. And it’s certainly not the sort of declaration to be issued from thousands of miles away by people who have no skin in the game.

Civilians don’t carry arms. That much has been established by the internationally accepted laws of war.

This clueless extremism is the type of sickening absolutism engaged in by people so self-righteous they refuse to even consider that there might be another side to the argument.

The argument that Israel is responsible for 10/7 is an unrealistic piece of pseudo-academic mental masturbation. It betrays a lack of seriousness, and a haughtiness intended to camouflage a lack of understanding of the subject matter.

There’s no moral high ground to be gained by endorsing or standing in solidarity with those who commit war crimes- and what Hamas did on 10/7 was nothing more than a parade of war crimes. Nothing can be gained by standing in support of those guilty of randomly slaughtering defenseless noncombatants.

That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before.

Liberals and progressives now see people from their own ideological side of the fence standing in solidarity with those who randomly slaughtered hundreds of defenseless civilians. How do these folks justify their support of those who raped women and beheaded babies?

And how can their ideological comrades continue to countenance such unimaginable monstrosity?

The issue isn’t support for Palestinian civilians, it’s revulsion for those in this country firmly behind Hamas terrorists.

Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.

Israel has been accused of too often being insufficiently careless about collateral damage in its rocket attacks upon Gaza, something that is very often true. That’s a complicated problem, however. Gaza City has 2.1 million people crammed into the most densely-packed piece of real estate in the world.

Worse, Hamas and other groups embed themselves among civilians and civilian institutions- schools, hospitals, and other public areas. This makes it difficult for Israel to exercise caution, and civilians inevitably become collateral damage, primarily because Hamas isn’t concerned with the lives of noncombatants.

Whether that is true of any given incident is subject to debate, but the wrongness of targeting civilians for death or kidnapping is not. Partisans of Israel who endorse those actions should lose moral standing. And Israeli President Isaac Herzog and others are wrong to assign collective responsibility to Palestinians, as if collective punishment is ever just.

There is no collective responsibility to assign to Palestinian civilians, just as there’s none to assign to Israelis. As in any war, it doesn’t determine who’s right or wrong, only who’s left (apologies to Bertrand Russell).

No matter what, though, no one who believes in human rights and the laws of war can cheer what Hamas did and retain their place on the moral high ground. One cannot defend the slaughter of innocent civilians, the rape of women, and the beheading and burning of babies and remain morally superior.

This also cannot be seen as an appeal to “cancel culture.” We shouldn’t be “canceling” anyone because of morally repulsive views, but educating them shouldn’t be out of the question. Casual anti-Semitism and advocating for what amounts to pogroms against Israelis may be morally reprehensible, but we can and should hope that seeing the truth about 10/7 can and will change hearts and minds.

Israel has a right to exist in peace. No country should be expected to live with a terrorist threat dedicated to its destruction just over its border. But there needs to be consideration of how to create a functional and viable state for Palestinians as well. A two-state solution is probably the only idea that has any hope of creating peace in that part of the world.

For now, though, moral people cannot in good conscience hold Israel responsible for the slaughter Hamas visited up it on 10/7. And there’s no way Hamas can be a trustworthy partner in any future solution, not after its role in murdering hundreds of innocent unarmed civilians.

As for the people marching in support of Hamas, I hope they’ll find reserved parking spots waiting for them in Hell.

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll leave it to my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their monetary support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)