Sitting in my office almost forty floors above ground level in midtown Manhattan last week, I was astounded to be drawn away from my work by chants of “Free free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  Even up in the clouds, the demonstrators’ voices were clear and loud, almost as if they were just outside my window. 

Based on the level of violent protests taking place across the globe, the pro-Palestinians in New York seemed comparably tame – yet no less offensive.  For if there is any question that chants of “from the river to the sea” are wishful thinking for the annihilation of the Jewish State of Israel, the calls for “Death to Israel” were anything but vague. 

Domestically, pro-Palestinians are using Israel’s defensive military incursion into Gaza as an excuse to let loose on the Jews.  In San Francisco, 300 anti-Israel protestors surrounded and threatened 30 peaceful pro-Israel demonstrators.  In addition to the usual chants, they screamed, “Long live the intifada, we support the intifada,” calling for violent uprising against Israelis. 

At a protest this weekend in Los Angeles, what began as a peaceful pro-Israel event escalated as pro-Palestinians attacked the demonstrators, drawing in Federal Homeland Security officers, one of whom was forced to fire a weapon.  Farther north in Seattle, signs and chants reflected more of a general hatred of Jews rather than simply protests regarding the current conflict in Gaza.  “Zionist Israel = Nazi Germany”; “Palestine screams terror, Israel screams greed”; “AIPAC Supports the Murder of Children”; and a poster depicting a Jew eating a gentile child with a cup of blood on the side are but a few examples of the anti-Semitic displays.

Not to be outdone by their anti-Semitic brethren out west, here on the east coast (aka the other left coast), protests were not limited to the streets of New York.  In Philadelphia, a pro-Israel vigil was interrupted by the typical chants for Israel’s destruction, but it was in Boston where things turned physical as a pro-Israel activist was assaulted by a woman shouting "that Muslims and Christians would someday take possession of Jerusalem and that the ‘Jews will go to hell, inshallah [God willing].’”

Alas, the domestic ugliness is in fact tame compared to the violent demonstrations erupting throughout Europe, reminding us that the hatred that led to the Holocaust during World War II remains alive and well.  Last week pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris led to hundreds of Jews being besieged inside a synagogue while police clashed with the violent extremists; three Jews were hospitalized.  While the pro-Palestinian demonstrators on Paris streets outnumbered domestic events, the violence, which the leader of the French ecology party justified, was quite distressing.  One reporter stated, “What I have seen today is Arab hatred against Jews. Pure hatred. Right in the middle of Paris. Don’t try to ‘explain’ or ‘understand’, it was hatred, period.”

This past weekend, a rabbi walking to synagogue in Casablanca was badly beaten while his cries for help were ignored by passersby.   Earlier this week, neo-Nazi Islamists took to the streets in Frankfurt chanting, “You Jews are beasts.”  The police allowed the protestors to use their vehicles and megaphones, purportedly in order to “deescalate” the situation.  In London, protestors stood in front of the Israeli embassy and in “blood curdling speeches” compared “Palestine” to Auschwitz and Dachau as “some mocked the Holocaust, others disfigured the Israeli flag, a few screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’, [and] they all called for the destruction of the Jewish state.”

Despite the latest wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it is important to recognize that anti-Semitic voices are not new.  In Europe, anti-Semitism is so pervasive that some are questioning whether Jews even have a future living there.  Even before the violent demonstrations in response to Operation Protective Edge, Jews in Europe have been targeted – e.g., the recent murder of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.  France is particularly hostile, with 50% of all racist crimes in France motivated by anti-Semitism despite Jews representing 1% of the population. 

In the U.S., our college campuses are rampant with anti-Semites making their voices heard.  From NYU and Harvard to the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley, it is not uncommon for Jewish students to receive death threats or faux eviction notices while administrators remain silent.  Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and others have been documenting and fighting the growing anti-Israel movements on colleges across the nation while the average American, the mainstream media, and our government take little notice of the dangers this trend poses.

But it is not just colleges that have been infiltrated with anti-Israel views.  The mainstream media has been obsessed with demonizing Israel for decades.  HonestReporting has been documenting the media bias in reporting on Israel, and it is without question that this bias has helped lead to anti-Israel indoctrination across the globe.  As this sickness takes hold in the minds of mostly leftists, the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement is also growing with hate-filled supporters who call for boycotts of Israeli products (reminiscent of those that occurred against Jewish businesses in Europe pre-WWII). 

A new Pew Research poll reflects the partisan divide in support for Israel: “the share of Republicans who sympathize more with Israel has risen [since April] from 68% to 73%; 44% of Democrats express more sympathy for Israel than the Palestinians, which is largely unchanged from April (46%).”  This is not surprising.  Note the cities where anti-Semitic, anti-Israel demonstrations have occurred.  They are all in blue states where Jews live and thrive.  Sadly, many of those Jews join the Israel-haters with their progressive ideology and politically correct obsessions that lead to anti-Semitic views being not only tolerated, but permitted to flourish.

Not all anti-Semites in the U.S. are peaceful protestors who simply shout hateful speech while encouraging violence.  Many are in fact violent.  The knockout game involves black youths beating people until they are knocked unconscious.  Although little mentioned by the media, Jews have been disproportionately targeted by these haters in cities across the country.  And the FBI’s hate crime statistics indicate that Jews are the most targeted faith, constituting 62.4% of victims.  By comparison, Muslims constituted 11%.  So much for Islamophobia.

In an article entitled “Does Anti-Semitism Threaten American Jews?” Kenneth Marcus of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law observed:

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) important new study, there are now one billion adult anti-Semites in the world. As Rabbi Yoffie acknowledges, this is fully a quarter of the world’s adult population. Can American Jewry shrug this off?

….

As the post-Holocaust taboo against anti-Semitism erodes, the ramifications are troubling. Suppose that one in ten thousand anti-Semites should physically harm or threaten Jews or Jewish institutions in a given year. Under this scenario, serious anti-Semitic incidents would increase to 100,000 per year, even if anti-Semitic attitudes remain constant. In other words, things can get much worse.

While despots around the world murder and maim their citizens with poison gas, torture, and work camps, it is Israel, a democratic, tolerant, and free society, that faces demonization, U.N. and international condemnation, and boycotts.  While Jews are a charitable people who have contributed to the advancement of medicine, technology, academia, and the like, hate for them is irrationally exploding worldwide.

The sickness known as Nazi Germany is rearing its ugly head under the guise of pro-Palestinian movements.  Despite the fact that it is not state-supported outside Arab lands, as it was during WWII, it is no less dangerous and far more open and pervasive today.

While my office may sit up in the clouds, anti-Semitism had no trouble reaching me last week.  It is my hope that world leaders, Jewish leaders, and sane citizens of the civilized Western world come down from the clouds to help stop this psychosis before it spreads too far and wide to contain.