By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
JNS
It was no coincidence that on the same day that much of the mainstream media swallowed Hamas lies about Israelis slaughtering people in the Gaza Strip, that another violent anti-Semitic attack occurred in the United States. What happened in Boulder, Colo., on June 1, when an Egyptian immigrant attempted to incinerate a group of American Jews, many of them elderly, who were walking in a public space on behalf of the remaining Israeli hostages being held by Hamas, was a horrifying crime.
But this third incident of violence in recent weeks—following the murder of two young Israeli embassy employees in Washington last month and the attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in Harrisburg on Passover—cannot be separated from the avalanche of anti-Israel propaganda coming out of the mainstream liberal media in the last 20 months since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
As such, it means that American Jews should do something many of them would prefer to avoid: accept that many of their erstwhile political allies on other issues who have embraced “pro-Palestine” advocacy are part of a movement that is inextricably tied to anti-Semitism.
Is Trump Right?
More than that, they also need to acknowledge something even more painful for them. That involves admitting that the man so many of them despise—President Donald Trump—is correct to be pursuing policy initiatives that aim at fundamentally reforming and/or defunding educational institutions that enable anti-Semitism, as well as to seek the deportation of foreign nationals promoting Jew-hatred and, as in the case of Boulder, actually carrying out attacks on Jews.
Yet as fearful as many American Jews are about their safety in the wake of the third separate such incident in the six weeks, it’s far from clear that many of them have grasped the full extent of the crisis. Doing so would require them to understand that what’s going on is not just a series of isolated, scary incidents involving “lone wolf” terrorists or merely a vague threat. It is, instead, the inevitable response to the way that those who run the legacy media, academia and popular culture have embraced a narrative rooted in falsehoods about the conflict in the Middle East. It’s also the product of an ideology embraced by fashionable opinion on the left about the role that Jews and the Jewish state play in the world. Those who chant in favor of genocide against Israelis will, sooner or later, advocate for and ultimately participate in as attacks on Jews in America—and everywhere else.
Assessing Blame
Much of the American Jewish establishment and possibly even a majority of U.S. Jews would still rather not come to grips with the fact that the current surge in anti-Semitism is connected to concerns they would prefer to dismiss as issues related to a right-wing culture war. It would be so much easier to cling to the belief that Trump and the political right are the primary engines of anti-Semitism, which is essential to preserving their equilibrium in a world that makes sense to them.
Anti-Semitism certainly exists on the right, and the rise of what, for lack of a better word, is now termed the “woke right”—in which Internet talk-show hosts like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens promote Holocaust denial and attacks on Israel—is deeply concerning.
But the mobs that have promoted the pro-Hamas agenda on college campuses and are targeting Jews are not following their lead. They and those like the perpetrators of the Harrisburg, Washington and Boulder attacks, who have translated campus advocacy for terrorism against Jews into action in the United States, are, instead, part of a very different camp. The notion of Israel as a state carrying out genocide against Palestinian Arabs in Gaza has been acted on by extremists because it has been mainstreamed by much of the political left and its leading media outlets.
Once that is accepted (and no honest or rational observer can deny that this is happening), and then individuals must come to some stark conclusions about anti-Semitism in 2025. That obligates them to reject the liberal media establishment as hopelessly compromised by inherent biases against Israel. Even worse for liberal Jews, it should also mean supporting Trump’s campaign to hold elitist academic institutions accountable for their tolerance and enabling of Jew-hatred that masquerades as concern for human rights.
At this point, any serious discussion about the topic must revolve around the way progressives have used their dominance over mainstream media and the academy to do more than just engage in smears of Israel’s conduct in its post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas.
Media Fuels Hate?
The willingness to accept at face value the lies emanating from the terrorists about the conflict and the notion that Israelis are engaging in genocide is more than just the product of routine media bias. It’s the result of a mindset that has adopted the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, in which Jews and Israelis are falsely labeled as “white” oppressors of “people of color.” In this view, the messy complexities of a century-long conflict are blurred into a simplistic morality play in which the Jewish people are accused of evil deeds in a way that plays directly into traditional anti-Semitic tropes.
It’s far from clear, however, that much of American Jewry—and the liberal groups that purport to speak for them—are willing to come to grips with these difficult facts. And so long as they refuse to do so, they will be useless in the fight against contemporary anti-Semitism. Those who believe that the most important cause for Americans and Jews is that of opposing Trump are reluctant to concede that his position has been vindicated by real events. The attempt to defend those institutions that have enabled anti-Semitism and to downplay the impact of media bias against Israel is rooted in partisanship, as well as the impact of years of demonization of Israel and Jews by the political left.
Sadly, too many are reacting to this crisis in much the same way as some of those groups who have helped organize the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses that targeted Jewish students on behalf of the “Free Palestine” cause. They’re just as worried about more Jews realizing that Trump is right about left-wing anti-Semites and the need to reform and/or defund elite academia as they are about the clear and present danger to Jewish life.
Giving up delusions about the source of most contemporary Jew-hatred would also mean that Trump is right to seek to deport students and others in the country, such as the Egyptian immigrant who carried out the Boulder attack, who is just one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of questionable persons who have been allowed to stay in the country while pursuing a dubious asylum claim.
Immigration Politics
That’s a particularly bitter pill for much of the organized community that is still treating support for open borders and opposition to those seeking to curb illegal immigration as a Jewish issue. It did make sense in the past, when Jews were fleeing the Nazis or seeking freedom from the Soviet Union. But those clamoring to enter the country now via student visas or other means of entry are more likely to be people who will be carrying the virus of virulent animosity with them from countries where Jew-hatred or Marxist dogma is normative.
Noting these facts is not “exploiting” these attacks, as some on the left insist. It’s just connecting the dots between factors that have both made such anti-Jewish violence inevitable and limited public concern about them.
Understanding this requires asking about what hasn’t happened as much as about what is taking place.
No one can deny in good faith that had the perpetrator of the Boulder attack been someone that could be labeled a white supremacist and had the victims been “people of color” rather than a group of Jews, much of the nation and the press would be up in arms over the incident. In that case, there might well have been mass demonstrations and an endless news cycle about the need for the country to engage in soul-searching about endemic racism.
Instead, the response to an attempt to burn American Jews to death for the crime of identifying with Israeli Jewish victims of Hamas terror, which is itself a bitter reminder of the Holocaust, provoked nothing like that sort of outrage. A country where so-called enlightened opinion thinks that Israelis and Jews are the bad guys in a war against genocidal Islamist terrorists is not likely to treat terrorism against American Jews as a significant issue.
Indeed, the series of violent attacks didn’t cause liberal media outlets like CNN and The New York Times to rethink their coverage of the Middle East or the way they have validated anti-Semitic narratives about Israelis and Jews. It never seems to have occurred to them how their bias feeds the toxic myth that Israeli Jews are child-killing monsters, when it is Hamas and the Palestinians that have deliberately targeted civilians and children for slaughter and kidnapping. How can they be surprised by how this smearing of the Jewish state contributes to the belief that Israel has no right to exist or defend itself and that any violence, including terrorism, directed against them or their American supporters is morally defensible?
After Boulder, Washington and Harrisburg, it’s no good pretending that Jews can go on insisting that opposition to the war on Hamas is a “good faith” political position.
Prioritize Self-Defense
Calls for more efforts to harden Jewish targets to make them less vulnerable to anti-Semitic violence are all well and good. Still, more aid to help Jewish institutions afford the security that unfortunately they need isn’t enough.
The response to this crisis must involve a variety of common-sense measures.
That should include encouraging more American Jews to possess firearms and be trained in their safe use. Such a suggestion would likely horrify many liberal Jews, who see guns as inherently dangerous, if not immoral. However, if any gathering of Jews is now seen as fair game for violent harassment, if not domestic terrorism, it requires even those who are most reluctant to go down that path to realize that relying on the authorities to deter terrorism is unrealistic and self-defense is an unfortunate necessity.
Honest Re-Evaluation Needed
A sane response to an epidemic of anti-Jewish violence also means an honest re-evaluation of the assumptions about American life that no longer make sense. And that involves supporting rather than opposing Trump’s campaign against the left in higher education, as well as taking action against the threat that unfettered and illegal immigration is increasingly posing for Jews today.
In a culture in which partisan politics plays the role that religion used to play in most people’s lives, it is second nature for liberal Jews and Democrats to oppose anything Trump does.
Yet no matter what you think about Trump, his flawed character or his stands on other issues, the policies he has proposed to deal with anti-Semitism in America are essential for the defense of the values that made this country a safe haven for Jews.
Only by rolling back the woke tide in the education system and establishing a zero-tolerance policy on foreign nationals engaging in advocacy for Jew-hatred and violence—both against Israel and here in the United States—can Jews be safe.
Canaries In The Coal Mine
If Trump fails, the real losers won’t be Republicans. It will be Jewish citizens who are acting, as they always do, as the canaries in the coal mine, indicating the imminent danger for the entire country if this leftist war on Western civilization succeeds. Should the so-called progressives continue indoctrinating a generation of young Americans who go on to run our government and media in “pro-Palestine” propaganda that fuels anti-Semitism, then the security of the Jews will not be the only value that will be sacrificed on the altar of woke ideology.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). He may be followed at @jonathans_tobin.
