Low-life in the White House, who’s in Jerusalem?

Students at Portland State University demonstrated on behalf of Palestinians by trashing the university library. It reminded me of the Palestinian thugs who vandalized the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002. They too were resisting what the Palestinians call the Israeli occupation, and though they eventually surrendered and were deported, their brethren went on to intimidate and extort the Christian population of that city until the Christians became a minority in the birthplace of Christ. The Latin primates of Jerusalem and environs supported the Palestinian vandals, much as the faculty and administration of elite American colleges indulged their wayward and gangster students. One can expect a fate for these universities no different from that which befell the Christians of Bethlehem. And if we extrapolate a bit from Portland State and Bethlehem, we might say that the fate of America is likely to be no different from the fate of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority. Time of course will tell, but the signs all point to the moral and cultural collapse of the West, of which America was the most vigorous embodiment. Lest my readers think I exaggerate, let me remind them that when French Muslims went on a rampage in 2023 they burned down the municipal library of Marseille. And a recent poll in England revealed that more than half of young Muslims in the UK want sharia law to govern the land.

Of course, it would help if the political leaders of the western world showed some intellectual rigour and moral clarity by supporting Israel unreservedly in both word and action. Such alas is not the case. In the face of the violent intimidation of Jewish students on American campuses, the President of the United States could only mutter words of condemnation, not only of antisemitic protests but also of people who, in his words, “don’t understand what is going on with the Palestinians.” Mr. Biden did not explain what exactly is going on with the Palestinians, leaving the latter’s supporters and detractors to fill in the blanks. As for the president himself, he clearly has no clue about what is going on with the Palestinians. If he did, he would not be withholding arms to Israel, not building a pier to provide humanitarian aid to people who seek to liquidate the Jewish state and its Jewish population, not having his Senate Majority Leader call for Prime  Minister Netanyahu’s resignation in the middle of a war. If he were serious about protecting Jews from a holocaust, he would not be issuing vapid statements about the right to free speech not including the right to destroy property, as if that were the main takeaway from the violence of student encampments at Columbia and elsewhere. Instead he would be instructing his Justice Department and the FBI to use the RICO and anti-Klan Acts to prosecute all those who financed, organized, as well as engaged in such despicable racist demonstrations against American Jews and America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East.

Instead, President Biden himself, and through his minions trained in the duplicitous echo chamber of President Obama, leaked innuendo upon innuendo about “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria, one more blood libel perpetrated by pro-Palestinian groups in America; about Israel’s flouting international law during its military conduct in Gaza, which military experts even in the USA showed to be false; about sanctions on IDF units for similar offences, especially the Netzah Yehuda battalion composed of religious soldiers, which recalled to mind the international blood libel regarding the so-called Jenin massacre in 2002 that never happened, except for the deaths of many IDF soldiers protecting Jews from the suicide bombing campaign of Yasser Arafat’s thugs. Worst of all, saying without saying it, the low-life resident in the White House let it be known that his Administration would not countenance an Israeli attack on Rafah to root out Hamas once and for all from Gaza. Instead, his Secretary of State, carrying on his Department’s time honoured hostility to Israel, keeps visiting Israel like some Roman viceroy to insist that the only way out of the current situation is a revitalized Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. Beautiful words on paper, no doubt, which perhaps Mr. Blinken could submit to Professor Massad of Columbia for comments, even if a hundred years of Palestinian mayhem and murder would indicate it to be a pipe dream that is never going to happen. And lest we forget, there were also reports about criminal charges against Israeli political and military leaders being brought by the International Criminal Court which the Biden Administration did nothing to condemn or prevent, leaving it up to Republican senators to tell the ICC jurists they would do so at their peril and spelling out what that peril would be.

All this, of course, is fuel to light the age-old flames of anti-Jewish hatred and invite the rest of the world to pile on, putting Israel in the dock even when they say they back its right to self-defence. Cameron, Macron, Trudeau, Borrell, the Spanish Prime Minister, the Colombian President, Trinidad and Tobago, NATO member Turkey, sanctimonious South Africa, the big, the small, even those who cannot put their own house in order, find time to chime in and tell Israel what to do, some with slander, some with threat of sanctions, some with aid to the enemy, while others rush to recognize a Palestinian state that does not exist. Some do it on their own; others take their cue from Washington. All misread the situation, just as they misread history and the calamitous future that awaits them. Even as I write on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Canadian students have settled in with encampments at their universities, but the feckless Prime Minister can only issue a statement commemorating the destruction of European Jewry without telling the students and the universities bent on re-enacting it that he will be sending in the troops to expel and arrest them. But then the students are not truckers challenging his authority; they are only the future announcing his country’s demise.

Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to remind the West that Israel is fighting to defend Western society as much as it is fighting to defend itself. He is right, but what he does not understand is that Western society no longer is interested in defending itself. The explosion of Jew hatred in North American universities signals a significant escalation in the drift to collapse now at work throughout liberal democracies. If things continue apace - and how can they not when the elites themselves have succumbed to the delirium of fascist progressivism - the West will fall much quicker than the Roman Empire did in its long agony. No need, however, for Israel to join in the decline and fall. Indeed, Israel has an obligation to world Jewry to stand up and defend itself whatever the cost. President Herzog recently told Diaspora Jews under attack on college campuses that Israel will stand with them. “Together,” he said, “we will continue building a flourishing life-affirming nation.” What better way to protect Jews everywhere than to enter Rafah, destroy Hamas, and take over Gaza. Happily, today Israel has finally taken the plunge, resisting the pressure of allies who are not allies to delay the inevitable until it does not happen.

But if Israel does its part, Diaspora Jewry can well do its too. American Jewish organizations should stand up and denounce President Biden’s tepid and hypocritical support for Israel and for America’s Jews. They should demand immediate and effective action against all who have made academic life dangerous and difficult for American Jews. They should call on American Jews to abandon the Democratic Party in droves. Canadian Jews should do likewise with their Liberal and NDP governments federal and provincial. Muslims who call for the end of Israel under the varying slogans of Palestinian propaganda should not be welcome in these countries. Calls should go forth for Jewish self-defence bodies to step in where pusillanimous governments fail to act. Only when Jewish students at UCLA counter-organized and fought back against the Palestinian-crazed thugs of the encampment did the police finally enter the fray and dispatch the protestors. Jewish day schools should teach their students the self-defence art of krav maga and how to use firearms. Jews should learn how to shoot and apply for gun permits wherever it is legal to do so. There is nothing like power to intimidate bullies and stop them in their tracks. To do otherwise, as the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s learned to their peril, is to pave the way for the rise of gangsters.

That should be the response of Jews everywhere to President Herzog’s stirring words: “In the face of this terrifying resurgence of antisemitism: Do not fear. Stand strong. Stand proud for your freedom. Israel stands with you. Israel cares for you. We care for you. We are here for you.” How right he is. And how right will we prove him to be if we send our young to Israel on a massive aliyah to build and be built, as the heroes of Zionism did a century ago when the pogrom of Kishinev drove Haim Nachman Bialik to pen his famous poem “In the city of slaughter.” Only this time the damage of October 7, however great, does not announce another Holocaust for the Jews. It announces a fierce response to secure the borders of the Jewish state for centuries to come. First Rafah. Then Judea and Samaria. After which Jewish might will turn its fist against the rotten Hizbollah, which is only Hamas to the power of ten, and free the north of Israel from the threat of drones and missiles by holding Lebanon to account. Lest we forget, there are still sixty to eighty thousand Jews displaced from the north of Israel. Refugees in their own land, they shall return home. Hopefully we shall be spared any talk of innocent Lebanese civilians and their need for humanitarian aid. And if not, we now know what to do, for in Jerusalem the adults are supposedly in charge. At least for now.