Dozens of world leaders gathered in Israel on Thursday for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where nearly a million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The sentiment at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem remembrance center can be summed up with the oft-used phrase, “Never again.”
But around the world, and increasingly in America, news is more likely to trigger the words “not again,” for anti-Semitic attacks are increasing rapidly. As our cover story by editors Philip Klein and Seth Mandel and another by Eli Steinberg make clear, Jews are being attacked viciously (in one case with a machete), synagogues are being set ablaze, and Jews whose forbears fled for safety to America now conceal the trappings of their religion to avoid attack.
Anti-Semitism’s spread is facilitated by the falsehood that it is exclusively or primarily a right-wing phenomenon. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Bill de Blasio, several extremist Democrats in Congress, and the legions of the Left conceal the truth by citing right-wing white supremacists. Some on the Right fringe do indeed adhere to vile racist tropes. But the fastest growth area for anti-Semitism is unquestionably on the Left, and it now far outweighs the threat from the Right.
This is partly because racial loathing is camouflaged by ostensibly more respectable political opinions opposed to Zionism and expressing concern for the plight of Palestinians, even though it is largely self-inflicted. It also goes with multiculturalism and intersectionalism, which categorize Palestinians as dark-skinned and oppressed and Jews as white oppressors. In this, although the prejudice against Jews is older and more violent, it is nevertheless akin to modern secularist prejudice against Christians in what used to be Christendom.
All decent people should recoil from it in disgust, and fight it, especially by refusing to let its origins be disguised for ideological and partisan purposes. We hope our features on the subject this week can do some good in that regard.
To tie up serious loose ends and correct egregious fictions from Democrats following President Trump’s elimination of Iran’s terror master, Qassem Soleimani, we also have two features, one by Tony Badran on revisionist history about the Iran deal being peddled by President Barack Obama’s former officials and another reminding armchair strategists that America’s conflict with Tehran didn’t begin when Trump took office but has been a salient feature of the past four decades.
Mary Rice Hasson excoriates policies that allow schools to help children transition genders without their parents being told. Stephen Moore, our finance and economics columnist, writes that low interest rates are the unsung hero of America’s booming economy.
Reviews in Life & Arts are on the acclaimed new war film, 1917, Christopher Caldwell’s book, The Age Of Entitlement, and the TV comedy, Avenue 5, starring Hugh Laurie.
