It’s a little too late to warn us about the dreadful consequences for Jews that might arise from Hamas supporters being deported.
By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
When immigration enforcement took Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-Algerian who had been part of a movement that had terrorized Columbia University, attacking Jewish students and faculty, along with employees and law enforcement, while promoting Hamas flyers, ‘Death to America’ stickers and the “total eradication of Western Civilization”, the impassioned leftist outrage poured forth.
The Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, came out entirely against it.
Liberal Jews who rallied for Khalil had to rationalize it by digging up that old chestnut, “First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist” until somewhere after the litany of all the socialists and other leftists, “they came for the Jews” and then finally for everyone else.
Rather than a condemnation of antisemitism, it actually exploits the Holocaust to suggest that persecuting Communists is akin to racial and ethnic genocide.
There is also the minor point that when the Communists came to power, they killed Jews.
But the “First they came for Hamas, then they came for the Jews” wielded by many liberal Jews in defense of campus Hamas supporters is an even worse version of that one.
The trouble with it is that Hamas already came for the Jews, not just in Israel, but at Columbia, UCLA and other college campuses. They might as well assert that “First they came for the Nazis, then the Jews”.
Alex Soros’ Bend the Arc rewrote the poem to argue that “after detaining immigrants, activists, and trans people, the Nazi regime in Germany came for Jews.”
The ‘activists’ in this case are the ones who want to come for the Jews making the whole proposition at best a wash.
Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth contended in a New York Times op-ed titled ‘Trump’s Crusade Against Antisemitism Is Extremely Bad for the Jews’ that, “Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas; lists of those under government scrutiny; official proclamations full of bluster and bile — Jews have been here before, many times, and it does not end well for us.”
These amateur prophecies by a college president who a little over a week after Oct 7 was suggesting that “Muslim students on campus are feeling particularly vulnerable right now… they feel targeted as terrorist sympathizers or anti-Semites” and emphasizing ‘Islamophobia’ are unconvincing and also largely irrelevant in the face of the actual antisemitism here and now.
And yet the ominous warnings that fighting antisemitism will be bad for the Jews keep coming.
“Any Jew who thinks this is going to start and stop with a few ‘Palestinian’ activists is fooling themselves,” Amy Spitalnick, the former press secretary for the anti-Israel J Street group who now runs the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told the New York Times.
“The administration is rounding up people with no evidence of crimes or even of violating the standard of damage to foreign policy and national security they have cited,” David Saperstein, the former director of Reform’s Religious Action Center, told a Congressional hearing on antisemitism.
“Antisemitism… thrives in authoritarian environments where civil liberties are curtailed, not in spaces of robust, protected democratic discourse.”
No one followed up by asking Saperstein what this implies about the state of college campuses.
“It may be pro-Palestinian protestors who are targeted and denied their rights today, but we don’t know who will be next. If we support the selective denial of protected speech and rights of others, even those with whom we strongly disagree, we fall into a dangerous trap that will only come at our own peril,” Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and a former foreign policy advisor to Kamala Harris, warned.
All this concern about “dangerous traps” and “it does not end well for us” seems to only pop up when Islamists and leftists actually face consequences for supporting Islamic terrorists, but did not seem to be an issue when the FBI, state governments and private activist groups, like the ones now targeting campus Hamas supporters, were coming after the Klu Klux Klan.
There were no lectures about the danger of criminalizing protest when it came to sending away elderly women for a dozen years for protesting outside abortion clinics.
There were no poems about how “First they came for pro-life protesters and other people I actually disagreed with, then they came for me” because the Left is fine with locking up people for their views.
As long as their views are the ‘wrong views’ not merely views so extreme that, like Communists or Hamas supporters, they make liberals squeamish, but still convinced they have a point.
Consider the vastly differing treatment of J6 and BLM rioters or the entire system of suppressing ‘misinformation’ advocated by the same people who now worry about the “free speech” of foreign nationals calling for “Death to America” or cheering on the Oct 7 massacres.
If only campus Hamas supporters had said something truly dangerous like “Masks don’t work” or “Trump won the 2020 election” that would classify them as urgent threats to democracy.
The Left is not defending campus Hamas supporters because they genuinely believe in free speech and the right to protest even for those who, as Sen. Schumer and the more ‘moderate’ Jewish liberals say, have “abhorrent” views.
If they did, the last ten years would have looked very different. When they encounter someone whose views they truly abhor, they don’t rally for them, sign statements demanding their release or even bother talking about “due process”.
Talking about how deplorable they find Khalil’s views is a facade for normalizing the abnormal to their base of Jewish liberals by selling it as a “Nazis marching in Skokie” moment.
But when was the last time Schumer or the JDCA rallied for Nazis in Skokie or in Charlottesville?
After over a year of unpunished antisemitic harassment of Jews from UCLA to Columbia, the Trump administration is cracking down on campus antisemitism as no one had done before.
And Jewish Liberals and Democrats are warning that the crackdown will endanger Jews.
But it’s much too late for that because Jews have already been ‘endangered’. Jewish professors and students have left campuses.
Jews have been assaulted in front of synagogues and Holocaust museums with very little in the way of consequences.
Not all that long ago, I watched Jewish community members in Los Angeles being beaten by a mob of terrorist supporters in keffiyehs while the LAPD watched and did nothing.
Jewish students at UCLA were assaulted while campus security refused to intervene, CNN hunted down the few Jews who were willing to stand up to the pro-terrorist mob and the LA Board of Supervisors paid the legal bills of the mob.
It’s a little too late to warn us about the dreadful consequences for Jews that might arise from Hamas supporters being deported.
The consequences of their presence is far worse than their absence. Violent bigots have always existed, but this particular set has the support of much of the liberal establishment along with a good deal of its liberal Jewish organizational contingent.
Some American Jews are still willing to believe something as abysmally suicidal as the notion that unless they rally for the civil rights of those who want to kill them, they may be next, but growing numbers are waking up to the fact that they’ve been sold out by the Schumers, Spitalnicks, Sapersteins and Soifers who aren’t standing up for them, but for the antisemitic Left.
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