Strangely, anti-Jewish malevolence has accelerated in the USA following the October 7 atrocities by Hamas. This is because of the equivocations and partial blaming of Israel by the Democrats. Further, the anti-Israel madness has ballooned to include outpourings of Jew hatred on our campuses fully reminiscent of pre-war Nazi Germany. This outpouring of anti-Semitism and Israel hatred has been fostered and to some degree embraced by the Democrats who have not pictured Israel as the victim it actually was on Oct. 7. Rather, Israel has been partially blamed for the atrocities committed against its citizens (along with Americans), and has borne criticism from our Democrat leadership.

Anti-Israel sources have even questioned the truth that the Oct. 7 massacres occurred. The Washington Post ran an article raising the question of whether the events of Oct. 7 were a “false flag.” American social networks have censored it and vainly attempted to cover it up by vilifying Israel as a colonial power and aggressor. These are false but familiar tropes which ought to be repudiated.

The claims that Arabs (incorrectly called “Palestinians” or “Palestinian Arabs”) are being held hostage by Israel in their own land is patently false. The sovereignty of Judea and Samaria was firmly established militarily in the aftermath of the 1967 war in a self-defensive act against the rising tide of Arab aggression. Ever since 1967, Jews have every right to make their homes there so the laws of occupation do not technically apply. While international law clearly states that a nation may not occupy the land of another nation, to label Israel as an occupier is historically incongruous.

Dr. Harel Arnon, an international lawyer of renown, explained this in a speech to the Knesset in February 2014: “In 1967, Israel returned to Judea and Samaria, got rid of the illegal Jordanian occupation, and took control… This prompted scholars of international law to coin the phrase ‘terra nullius,’ meaning a territory without a sovereign, or a vacuum territory. Judea and Samaria is a territory over which no country has legal sovereignty, not even Israel, but Israel holds it.” Next, he goes on to argue “…when we want to examine the question of whether or not Israel is occupying Judea and Samaria, we must address the fact that Israel took Judea and Samaria from someone who was there illegally, and therefore Israel cannot be seen as an occupier… the laws of occupation do not apply to Judea and Samaria.”

But Democrats, starting with President Biden, do not seem to understand the threat that this recent attack means for Israel or for the U.S. Instead, the President on October 20 issued a statement that seemed at first glance to acknowledge the atrocities of October 7, but then went off script and in the same speech began a long diversion to the Russia v. Ukraine war. Then, the President came back to the topic of the October 7 attack but softened his criticism of Hamas and the Arab world. He said, “We’re a nation of religious freedom, freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree without fear of being targeted at schools or workplaces or in our communities. And we must renounce violence and vitriol, see each other not as enemies but as -- but as fellow Americans.” Yet, what have we seen the last few weeks but aggressive anti-Semitic speech and anti-Israel speech and sit-ins and blocking of Jewish students and threatening of Jewish students from coast to coast.

In Biden’s Oct. 20 speech his emphasis was on not overreacting against Islamic persons, as though supporting the people who were victims of an atrocious massacre were in some sense “imbalanced,” whereas actually it is a moral imperative. He called for “balance,” but he has not unequivocally attacked the imbalanced accusations against Israel and against Jews on campuses coast to coast. It would seem he is more concerned with the imbalance called Islamophobia than with the violent imbalance of anti-Semitism which we see so blatantly on display with very little backlash.

The Democrat failure to respond aggressively and constructively on university campuses must be seen as the betrayal of lawful, constitutional values and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN signed in 1946 that it is. The demonstrators hate both America and Israel with vitriolic and reckless intensity. Worse yet, they are shilling for Iran and their proxies -- Hamas, Hezb’allah, the Houthis, and Islamic Jihad. It would be as if the KKK were justifying lynchings by saying that blacks being lynched was legitimized because so many Southern whites were killed during the Civil War -- thus blacks must be killed to make up for that loss to the North. They are saying that Hamas’ terrible actions are because the Arabs lost four wars to Israel and many Arab men were killed by Israel -- wars which the Arabs started in every instance.

The campus demonstrations encouraged by the equivocations of our political class reveal the bankruptcy both of the Democrats and of our culture. A few campuses where students replaced Arab flags with American flags should not be taken to express a victory of righteous American values over terrorist or Hamas-like attitudes. Rather these happy moments are a deceptive cover for the failures of leadership in the country to throw out the campus encampments on the first days. (What do tents on campus have to do with “peaceful protests”?) Protests are inherently not peaceful if they interfere with the normal functioning of legitimate enterprises and jeopardize such basic activities as ingress and egress. Peaceful assembly is not only not shooting, not stabbing, and not punching others, but is not disrupting the normal rights of others to go about living their lives. Peaceful protests must be circumscribed and defined by the authorities, not by the protesters. There is an important distinction between peaceful assembly and peaceful disruption. The latter is not acceptable. Only the former is.

Had the Palestinians freely elected a viable coalition of leaders to govern Gaza in 2006 instead of a terrorist entity, they could have had peace. They didn’t. When Hamas took power in 2007, their charter mandated the destruction of Israel and all who live there.

The events on our campuses and the equivocations of Democrat leadership after October 7 reveal that Democrats both propitiate and capitulate to radical Islamic extremists. They have not stood firm regarding Israel’s right of self-defense nor have Democrat leaders expressed pride and thanksgiving for our Jewish fellow citizens. Claims of Hamas or the PA should be expressly deemed as less worthy because of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and the ugly disturbances on our campuses.

Image: Ted Eytan