What Is Causing Antisemitism to Increase?

Democrats, antisemites, and other Left-wing groups have often demonized Israel and Jews. However, the antisemitism has increased in recent years. Victor Davis Hanson recently discussed this topic in a podcast, and a transcript was published at The Daily Signal. 

We’ve seen these campus protests on American universities where they have these signs, “From the river to the sea.” That’s an eliminationist slogan that Israel would be wiped off the map from the Jordan River all the way into the Mediterranean Sea and, I guess, dumped into it.

And, of course, we’ve had antisemitic incidents of students chasing Jewish students into a library and trapping them there, roughing them up on campus. Demonstrations where they get quite violent, and they’re overtly and proudly antisemitic.

And the point is, what’s behind all this? Why in America now? Because after all, there are more Jewish citizens, or at least roughly comparable, in the United States than there are in Israel, which has about 2.5 or 2 million Arabs and a number or Christians as well.

So why in the so-called bastion of Jewishness in the West, here in the United States, which has avoided the antisemitism of Europe and the Middle East, why is it starting to come out now? What’s behind this? And from people that you wouldn’t expect it from.

Well, the first is DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion divided the nation into a 70/30 binary. It was dreamed up by [Barack] Obama because he felt he didn’t have enough traction with the old binary of 12% blacks being victimized, which was true, they were, by the 88% whites, when, due to immigration, the country was no longer 90% white.

So, he bundled a new group and said it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, it doesn’t matter what your class is. If you’re not white, you are a victimized, oppressed person with legitimate grievances.

What that did is it allowed people exemptions, so you didn’t question somebody’s performance on the job or how somebody was hired if it was race-based, because that would be insulting or racist.

But it also did another thing. It meant that people could express themselves in racist, biased fashion. But if they were from that protected binary, you couldn’t say anything.

Now, that had been true of the black community, unfortunately, for a long time. I can’t think of a major black leader other than Martin Luther King that didn’t voice antisemitic tropes….

The second is demography. There had traditionally been about, oh, 6% to 7% of the population was Jewish and maybe 1% was Muslim, and that has radically changed now – mostly through immigration – and the Muslim birth rate in the United States is about 2.6, and all other ethnic groups, white, black, it’s about 1.7. And that population is about 5 million, and it’s projected to increase to a number higher than the Jewish population.

But you can see the trends already.

And then you have to factor in that it’s very hard for a Muslim to be secular, agnostic, atheistic, Christian. But in the case of Jews, they’re more and more being secularized or intermarrying much more, and their support of Israel is not contingent on their being Jewish.

More importantly, we’re getting billions of dollars. The UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are among the top five donors to universities in America, and they have founded Middle East studies programs, and those are not Middle East studies programs. They’re indoctrination centers for the entire student body.

So, demography means that people feel that in states like Michigan, the future will be you have to say something critical of Israel….

The third is the Democratic Party is not democratic anymore. As I’ve said before, it has a Jacobin agenda, a French revolutionary party agenda. It’s not just that they want to tear down statues and rename buildings and change the foundational date to 1619. Those were all Jacobin trademarks.

But they have a holistic socialist agenda: open borders, illegal immigration mainstream, mass amnesties, no-case bail, critical legal theory, DEI, and massive cuts in defense, raising taxes, and more entitlements. And of course, in the Green New Deal.

But embedded in that agenda is anti-Israelism and indifference to antisemitism.

I say embedded because that’s a non-negotiable agenda. If you want to be nominated for an office in the Democratic Party, you can’t come out for pipelines or more drilling…. You can’t say we need tougher criminal prosecutions. You can’t say, “I love the wall. It’s a good idea.” You can’t say anything.

And by that same reasoning, you cannot say you support wholeheartedly Israel.

Anybody who does so in the Democratic Party, like John Fetterman, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, becomes persona non grata in his own party.

Finally, there is a sense that the institutions in the United States that bequeath laurels and mainstreaming and adulation, they’re all left-wing. All the book reviews, the major venues are left-wing. The major media is left-wing.

And a lot of people feel that they’ve been in the wilderness. They’ve been pelted with this left-wing hailstorm, and at some point they get tired, and they want to come out of the storm.

And so, we’ve seen people … who have flipped over, and now they receive adulation. [The Left likes them once they start denigrating conservatives, Jews, Israel, etc.] …

The final irony, the so-called bigot, Donald Trump, the so-called racist, Donald Trump, he has admitted he’s probably going to be the last president that wholeheartedly supports Israel. For now, he is the last dam holding back this deluge.

[Emphasis added.]