Ben Franklin opined that there was nothing certain but death and taxes. I’d add a third to the list of certainties, anti-Semitism, and this week reminds us of that.

As Americans struggled with preposterously complex federal income tax regulations and ever-higher tax burdens, the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney tweeted “That’s the price we pay for 7 of the 10 richest counties being within commuting distance of DC.” Right he is. As the rest of the country struggles to keep on producing -- cattle, grain, merchandise, services -- hamstrung by ever more regulations and executive and judicial branch overreaching, DC lives high on the hog off that labor. Drive up and see expensive restaurants full of patrons every night and elegant spas and hotels fully booked. The price of real estate in the nation’s capital keeps soaring, as it does in the near suburbs. At the moment 86 million full- time private sector employees sustain 148 million benefit takers. Greetings, suckers!

In the Middle East and Africa death stalks, nourished by religious hatred -- against Jews, Christians, and Moslems of different sects than those doing the butchering. In Africa 200 young Christian children going to school exams were butchered by Islamic fanatics whose motto is “Western education is forbidden”.

Do you see celebrities and “human rights activists” or groups like the National Council of Churches speaking out against these atrocities? If they have I’ve missed it. Just as movie stars, “human rights activists” and left-wing Congressmen don’t tie themselves to Israeli nursery schools as rockets hail, they don’t do one thing to stop these unremitting slaughters in Africa and Syria. Instead they bitch and moan about walls built in Israel to keep these monsters from killing more innocents.

In Syria, where Christians and Moslems of other sects are being slaughtered daily by jihadis whose weapons were provided by the Turks, the Saudis, and probably the U.S. through its Benghazi arms bazaar, the only effective intervention I see is by Israeli medicos who are secretly treating the badly-wounded victims.

Death and mayhem comes to the U.S., too, from Moslem fanatics and left-wing anti-Semites.

In the very week of the anniversary of the Boston marathon massacre and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, one apparent Moslem convert, Mohammed Pedro Whitaker was arrested in Kansas City and charged with 18 felony counts related to 9 incidents including shooting into a motor vehicle and hitting a victim.

In nearby Overland Park another fanatic, this one heavily influenced by the anti-Semitic ravings of Max Blumenthal, son of Clinton buddy Sid Blumenthal shot three Christians in the mistaken belief they were Jewish. Instead of mentioning the shooter’s repeated endorsement of Max Blumenthal’s odious ranting, the New York Times  allowed a grad student space on its op-ed page to smear war veterans. The Boston Herald’s Howie Carr noted with disgust the “sob story treatment” of the surviving Boston bomber by the New York Times and others. Missing from the president’s speech on the anniversary of that tragedy are the terms “terrorism” and “bombing” .Nor did he ever mention that the horror was inspired by Moslem extremism. It seems to be the hate that (the West) dare not speak its name.

Adding insult to injury, the president sent his vice-president (aka Obama term insurance) Joe Biden to the memorial and he, in turn, tells the survivors “it was worth it”,

Why all this dancing around the truth? Almost as soon as the ashes of 9/11 stopped falling, the media and the nomenklatura, revealing their prejudices against the people who keep them employed, seem to have adopted a view of Americans so blinkered that they began acting as if telling the truth will unleash hordes of armed to the teeth bloodthirsty mobs (especially crazed war veterans) treating Moslems as so many of their coreligionists treat others. In fact, despite countless provocations, including outrageous demands for special treatment and bloody slaughter, real crimes against Moslems motivated by hate remain minimal. Undoubtedly because -- with exceptions like pogramist Al Sharpton (now Obama’s BFF) and Obama’s Reverend Wright -- Judeo-Christian ethics largely compel restraint, tolerance, and fair treatment. As a matter of fact, by a wide margin the FBI reports the largest number of hate crimes in America are committed against Jews.

Much has been written to explain the enduring nature of anti-Semitism, but I think there is a particularly original and convincing addition to the usual historic analyses by Thomas Dias at honestreporting this week. Discussing the virulent and irrational hatred of Israel in Europe, he observes:

Jealousy and envy might also contribute to Europe’s unreasonable opprobrium of Israel. I am not even referring to jealousy of Israeli achievements on every relevant scientific level, but to the measure of civility the Jewish people in general apparently poses. During the first half of the twentieth century, countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany descended into internal tyranny, only to drag the entire continent down into the abyss with them in the ensuing years. Then there’s the Jews. A persecuted minority who just endured the slaughter of six million of their people, is given a state for the first time since the biblical era, which from day one was outnumbered and outgunned, faced with Arab wars of extermination. What then happened, or better, didn’t happen next, is something that is rarely seen for its merits and mostly taken for granted: Israel, a state of a traumatized people under absolute existential threat, remained a democracy. It did not regress into a military dictatorship, something that would have been all too imaginable considering the condition the country was in. This showcase of civility is something that rightly so embarrasses European history, and shows that somehow, the Jewish people, under the most heinous circumstances, showed a ‘high culture’ that Europeans can only dream of.

Another modern day factor is that the EU was created for a single purpose: to abolish the European concept of nation states. It foresaw a utopian, somewhat mono-cultural and border-less continent. With this in mind, it is understandable that EU-minded Europeans shiver when they gaze upon Israel; with her nationalism, distinctiveness, deeply rooted cultural and religious practices and the most potent national military force in the region, the Jewish state is the epitome of a nation state. Not only that, but this nation state flourishes despite everything and is therefore a prime argument against the anti-nation state doctrines of European federalists.

But, it is also important to view European culture as a whole. Europeans have become a people that can no longer tell friend from foe, effective culture from ineffective culture, construction from destruction and progress from regression. Europeans are a people that took the exact wrong lessons from World War Two; they view nationalism as the sinful cause of that conflict, while it was collectivism in all its forms that dragged us into darkness. Europeans are a people who developed a fashionable disdain for the men and women who saved them from Italian Fascism, German National-Socialism, the Japanese Empire and the Soviet Union, and still stand as their only guardians – the Americans – and have come to despise the economic construct that blessed them with the largest increase of wealth for all in human history: the free market.

The philosophical foundations of the relativism and yearning for ‘high culture’ that transgresses materialism and pursuit of profit that today prevails in Europe, have always had a problem with the bourgeoisie. The enlightened merchant middle class, that saw hard work and responsibility as their core values, were despised by the philosophers that laid the groundwork for the European culture of today.

What people, in European culture, are most associated with money, trade and the pursuit of profit? It’s not the Sri Lankans, I’ll tell you that much. Of course, that honor goes to the Jews.[quote]

Do you suppose that Democrats -- the chief American statists, class warriors, multiculturalists, and internationalists -- are any different than their European counterparts? I don’t. Keep electing them and we will become more like Europe in its repulsive and pervasive anti-Semitism as we have in every other regrettable way.