incident. The number is startlingly high, and since no prior studies exist for comparison, these data are hard to interpret. Perhaps anti-Semitism is spiking, but it may be that the current environment of extreme solicitousness toward racial and gender sensitivities prompts some Jewish students to take note of relatively minor slights that they might have ignored in a different era.
If so, they may be in for a surprise, for the prevailing atmosphere is less acutely reactive to anti-Semitism than insults to other identity groups. When a campaign at UCLA demanded that candidates for student government sign pledges not to take part in trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations, the university chancellor registered his disapproval but insisted that the campaign “fall[s] squarely within the realm of free speech, and free speech is sacrosanct to any university campus.” Yet, within the year, when the David Horowitz Freedom Center put up dramatic posters linking the radical anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine with Hamas and adding the hashtag, #JewHaters, the campus administration ordered them torn down. The posters were surely provocative, and the Horowitz center is not a student group, but either free speech is “sacrosanct” or it isn’t. If the pledge campaign had been aimed at a black or Latino or women’s or gay project, one wonders whether the sanctity of free speech would have seemed equally dispositive to the university administration.
In this respect, the university is only reflecting the outside political atmosphere, as emblemized by the president of the United States. Barack Obama has injected himself into controversies with a racial aspect, such as the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Trayvon Martin; the president even enlisted the inflammatory militant, Al Sharpton, as his informal representative following the shooting of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. Then, after the massacre of black worshippers by a white supremacist in South Carolina, Obama delivered a stirring funeral oration with a meditation on race. Obama apparently believed that these incidents touched on a transcendent issue for our country even though none involved the federal government.
Such a view is entirely understandable. What is hard to understand is how little moved the president seems to be by anti-Semitism. When French Muslim jihadists massacred editors of Charlie Hebdo and patrons at one of Paris’s main kosher markets in January 2015, singling out four Jews for death in the latter (and apparently one in the former, too), Obama displayed startling indifference. More than forty presidents and prime ministers joined a solidarity march of a million-plus Parisians, but Obama, who had nothing else listed on his schedule and whose presence would have been powerful, chose to stay home. Of course, an American president has less call to go to Paris than to Charleston, but the decision to stay away and also not send the Vice President or Secretary of State was baffling, all the more so the decision that the Attorney General, who happened to be in Paris, would not put in an appearance. More mystifying still, in an interview, Obama went out of his way to obscure the motive of this hate crime which was no less horrific and no less racist than the one in Charleston, dismissing it as “zealots . . . randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli.”
In response to the Charleston church massacre, Obama declared that “racism is in our DNA,” a rather sweeping indictment of the country that he leads. If it is true, it is no less true that anti-Semitism can be found in the DNA of Islam and Christianity, each of which defined itself in contradistinction to Judaism. Moreover, the world’s great sensitivity to racism is a post–World War Two development stemming from Hitler’s genocide of the Jews that the Nazis justified, indeed celebrated, in terms of “race.” How ironic, then, that today’s culture registers less alarm at threats or derision aimed at Jews than at other groups.
The rubber of Obama’s insouciance meets the road of Jewish endangerment at the point of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb. Trying to blunt the opposition by supporters of Israel, Obama gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that stoked the very anxieties it was intended to allay. About the thinking of Iran’s rulers, he said:
The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power . . . . They may make irrational decisions with respect to discrimination, with respect to trying to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as an organizing tool. At the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to self-interest. But the costs here are not low. . . . There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but . . . they also are interested in maintaining power, having some semblance of legitimacy inside their own country, which requires that they get themselves out of what is a deep economic rut that we’ve put them in.
Apart from the fact that there are no signs that the Iranian regime’s grip on power is weakening, a calculus that Obama himself seemed to make in 2009 when he conspicuously failed to speak in favor of the post-election uprising; and apart from the fact that long before nuclear sanctions, the Islamic Republic of Iran was one of numerous twentieth-century governments that made decisions driven by ideology that defied economic rationality, sometimes with catastrophic effects (for example China’s “Great Leap Forward” that generated a famine claiming an estimated twenty to fifty million lives)—apart from all that, no argument could be less reassuring to Jews than the premise that economic self-interest will trump Jew hatred. Considering the role Jews have played in commerce, the persecutions Jews suffered throughout their history were almost always economically counterproductive for their persecutors. Above all, there is the Holocaust, most of which was carried out after the tide of battle had already begun to turn against the Nazi regime. Despite its needing all possible resources for the war effort, men and materiel were diverted from military uses to the industrial-scale killing of noncombatant Jews. Contrary to Obama’s thought that policies based on hatred only hold “when the costs are low,” Hitler sacrificed his country, his regime, and his own life to the single-minded pursuit of his hatred. Is Obama innocent of all this history, or is he simply unable or unwilling to take it on board?
Jews face mounting peril. It makes little difference which comes first, hatred of Jews or hatred of Israel. The peril does not arise because the hatred is spreading: indeed it may not be spreading. The peril arises because the hatred is growing more lethal as radical Islam becomes ever more extreme. The Islamic republic of Iran once shocked the world with its wanton use of terror, its abuse of diplomatic immunity, its vaunting ambitions, and its festivals of hate. Then Al-Qaeda, which seemed so much more outré, eclipsed this, and now the self-styled Islamic State has in its turn outdone Al-Qaeda. The Jews of course are far from being the only targets, but they are a vulnerable one, and the attacks grow more frequent and more violent, making it increasingly difficult or impossible for Jews to live in various parts of the Diaspora.
The question of the hour is whether it will also make it impossible for Jews to live in Israel—or for the Jews of Israel to live. A regime that never tires of announcing its genocidal intent stands on the threshold of possessing a nuclear bomb that would fulfill its aim of becoming the hegemon of the Muslim Middle East and would give it the power to perpetrate a second Holocaust. Despite Obama’s jejune theories, Iran will not abandon this quest in order to raise its GDP.
This points to the second source of the peril confronting the Jews in addition to the heightening violence of radical Islam. It is the lethargy, cowardice, and even indifference of Western leaders. Thus, as before, the Jews are left on their own to contend with a threat to their very existence even though, as before, what threatens them will also come to threaten others. The outcome is uncertain, but thank God they are far better prepared to defend themselves this time.
Notes
1. Jen Gerson, “Pro-Gaza protests worldwide tainted by anti-Semitism; Calgary organizer to apologize for violence,” National Post, July 21, 2014. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/pro-gaza-rallies-worldwide-tainted-by-anti-semitism-calgary-organizer-to-apologize-for-violence.
