On the Foreign Policy night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, there was a great deal of focus on the eruption of antisemitism and anti-Israeli violence that has surfaced in recent years, most particularly since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

Many would have assumed that the nature of those attacks – 1400 viciously murdered, 250 kidnapped, thousands more injured, in one single awful Saturday – would have been sufficient to drive the bigots into hiding. No decent person could possibly continue to support Hamas and their ilk after that nightmare.

And yet…

We saw an explosion of support for Hamas in the weeks and months that followed. Our college campuses were littered with tent cities of Hamas sympathizers, our big cities and state capitals were overrun with demonstrators, creating traffic jams full of people waving that imaginary “Palestine” flag and chanting vicious slogans like “From the River to the Sea.”  (in case you’re unaware of the meaning of that one, it’s a call for genocide against all Jews currently residing in Israel).

That such an issue is a sign of cultural rot is undeniable, but one might ask how an election can change it.  There has always been bigotry in the world, after all; unjust prejudice against the Jewish people has among the oldest pedigrees in human history, going all the way back to their enslavement in Egypt nearly four millenia ago.

What on earth can a political change – the replacement of Democrats by Republicans – do to change the human heart?

Well, actually, quite a bit.

It wasn’t that long ago, after all – the 1970s and '80s – when there were efforts to spread antisemitic propaganda in the United States.  The Illinois Nazis sued to march in Skokie, IL; a vocal antisemite – David Duke – ran for office in Louisiana. Such efforts were met with nationwide derision.  The Blues Brothers movie earned its biggest cheers when they scared the Nazi characters into jumping off a bridge into a shallow river.

The American heart stood against the antisemites back then; we should consider what has changed in the years since.

•        The Left has consolidated their domination of K-12 textbook publishing and the public school system.  They have used this domination, in part, to whitewash islamofascist terrorism, skip or gloss over the Holocaust, and teach children that Israelis are “occupiers” rather than the rightful government of a sovereign nation.
•        The Obama-Biden regime encouraged both legal immigration and illegal border-jumping by middle-easterners, primarily people raised in the bigoted madrassahs that teach jihad and sharia law, establishing mini-mideast enclaves all over the country.  After a four-year respite under the Trump administration, the Biden-Harris regime made up for lost time.
•        Over the past twenty years, our colleges have seen an explosion of anti-Israel demonstrations, known as the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment Sanctions), essentially an illegal call for colleges to use the Arab League’s boycott against Israel as a controlling rule for their endowment investments. The government enforces anti-boycott laws against businesses, but not against these colleges.
•        A high percentage of our colleges and universities have developed partnerships with Middle Eastern nations, especially Iran’s polite sister Qatar. These partnerships have included professor swaps, student quotas, cultural exchanges, satellite campuses – and money,  so much money - all sorts of collusion giving the anti-Israel position the patina of propriety for a generation of students.

No wonder the current generation is more tolerant of antisemitism -- and even anti-Israel terror -- than the generation before; this generation has been brainwashed.

Fortunately, there are clear and appropriate policy changes that can right the ship and remove much of this pollution, and quickly, too.

•        A Trump/Vance administration will take immediate action to restore our borders and start deporting illegals, both those who were illegal from the start and those whose student visas lapsed but they remained anyway. This includes a huge number of these undesirables.
•        A Trump/Vance administration can direct the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Office of Anti-Boycott Compliance, to crack down on the clear flouting of the U.S. Export Controls at our institutes of higher education, particularly our research institutions. A lot of the people poisoning our children’s minds belong in jail.
•        A Trump/Vance administration can return the terrorist supporters to our official sanctions lists.  After years of the Biden-Harris regime and the United Nations pouring countless billions of American tax dollars into Hamas front groups, we can turn off that spigot on day one.
•        A Trump/Vance administration will once again support Israel in the United Nations Security Council, working to stand up for Israel’s good name in the midst of the constant onslaught of Arabist slanders for which the UN is sadly so well known.
•        A Trump/Vance administration can return to the great work interrupted by the installation of the Biden-Harris regime: the continued plan for Middle East peace and mutual respect that began with the Abraham Accords in 2020.  Donald Trump already brought Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to the table with Israel; more such progress can be expected this next time.
•        A Trump/Vance administration will work to remove DEI/ESG/BDS influences at the Department of Education, and will institute safeguards in the contracts for taxpayer-funded federal research partnerships with the colleges to stop promoting and rewarding antisemitic bigotry and counter-cultural behavior.

In most cases, the federal government doesn’t need to put a thumb on the scale to specifically help Israel; all we need to do is take off the thumb that’s currently on the scale to help the Jihadists.

The Biden-Harris regime has given countless billions to Israel’s enemies. The Biden-Harris crowd has allowed the Iran’s puppets in Yemen, the Houthi pirates, to hold global shipping hostage by terrorizing the Red Sea. And the Biden-Harris bunch’s anti-petroleum, anti-natural gas policies have enriched the oil-producers of the Middle East, funding their poisonous global messaging, while impoverishing our own American energy producers.

Just reversing these bad policies will go a long way toward removing many of the threats against both American Jews and America’s allies in Israel -– some slowly, others immediately.

Some issues, of course, are out of the hands of the federal government.  The threats of violence and actual physical attacks on Jews, particularly Jewish students on the campuses, must be addressed by local law enforcement; even  a saner White House has no authority over the police departments of our cities.

But the correction to our border issues and a return to the deportation of people with lapsed visas, not to mention a return to enforcement of the sanctions against members of terrorist organizations, will go a long way toward removing many, if not most, of the very vermin posting these physical threats.

We have a rogue government in Washington today.  A responsible election this fall, restoring America First policy to the nation’s capital, can indeed do a great deal to cleanse the stain of antisemitism from the American experience.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

Image: SWinxy, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0