By Stephen Smoot
An ancient hatred has regrettably made its way into the United States, emanating from hundreds of thousands of hearts and minds of those within whom it burns brightest.
Make no mistake, they and their American fellow travelers on the right and the left are coming for the Jewish people of America. It is the duty of every person who considers themselves civilized to stand for them.
As history tells, once “they” put in place their solution for the Jewish people, they will cast their eyes about for others to send to a similar fate.
The kind of malicious and murderous antisemitism seen in central Europe over the centuries and the Middle East as well has never before now found a natural home in the United States. Prior to the Civil War, one of the most vibrant communities of American Jewish people established itself and grew rapidly in Richmond, capital of Virginia.
Most were drawn by the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, passed in 1786. This allowed freedom of worship for all religions. James Madison penned the bill, which had the thorough support of Thomas Jefferson. Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, explained that the act was “a true standard of religious liberty: its principle the greatest barrier against usurpations on the right of conscience. As long as it is respected . . . these will be safe.”
The bill itself stated that “the rights hereby affected are the rights of all mankind” and any act of government or legislature to “narrow” the scope of the law “will be an infringement of natural right.”
Also, the United States legal system of Constitution and lower level federal law comes from the colonial covenant model that follows the concept of the Mosaic Code conforming to the Ten Commandments.
Jewish freedom to live and worship freely in America thus dates back to the Founding Fathers and their vision of the future. Until the 20th century, Jewish people enjoyed their natural right to worship freely and simply be themselves nowhere else on earth except the United States of America, one of many facts to be proud of about this country.
The 20th century brought challenges, however. The resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan after the release of the film Birth of a Nation, and also indirect encouragement by President Woodrow Wilson, expanded its targets to include European Roman Catholic and Jewish people. Outside of New York City from the 20s through World War II, they and a number of other groups rising in mimicry of National Socialists in Europe had mixed results trying to get the average American to see Jews as an existential threat.
Most average Americans living outside of prominent social circles learned from Sunday School that the Jewish and Christian faiths were as brothers and would be reconciled during the Last Judgment. Antisemitism found that soil sterile for growth. The most educated and affluent classes held more tightly to a less murderous and more snobbish “looking down the nose” antisemitism for much longer.
In the first few decades of the 20th century, large numbers of Jewish immigrants came to the United States seeking respite and safety. With the German Empire’s Hohenzollern dynasty until 1918 a defender of Jewish people there, the heart of the ugliest European antisemitism lay in the Russian Empire.
There, the Czar’s secret police invented one of the most malicious and destructive pieces of propaganda ever created, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This false tract was purported to be the Jewish plan for world domination and described vile acts against Christians and others. It described methods of using various levers to undermine Western nations and bring about a Jewish king.
Antisemites linked these with older “blood libel” mythology from medieval Europe, that included accusations of Jewish people drinking the blood of Christian infants.
While the Protocols did not go that far, last month the New York Times did, publishing completely debunked accounts of Israeli forces in that war against Hamas inciting dogs to rape so-called Palestinian prisoners. This rivaled and may have even outstripped ignorant antisemitic Middle Ages era tracts for both the malicious falsehoods and the potential for those to lead directly to Jewish deaths.
Only 20 years ago, no one would have expected the former paper of record in the United States to be a blood libel source alongside Jew hating publications that saturate the Middle East.
But they went and did it.
Through much of the 21st century so far, unfettered immigration has led to a dramatic and dangerous influx of peoples who have little civil or social restraint and visceral hatreds of Jewish people. They have concentrated in cities, elected their own into prominent positions, and allowed repeated outrages against Jewish individuals and communities without so much a word in protest.
One of the catalysts for these outrages came as Israel successfully defended itself against an invasion of its own country. Crimes of unspeakable horror were perpetuated on that infamous October 7th day against innocent Israeli citizens. Attackers targeted concentrations of civilians instead of government, police, or military targets. Their goal lay in inflicting as much pain, degradation, and suffering on those they captured as is possible.
Israel, quite naturally, responded with full force and obliterated much of the city of Gaza and the surrounding area. Leftists slammed the response to invasion and gave Hamas and their fellow travelers’ reports complete credulity while giving zero credence to Israeli Defence Force and government accounts.
Most of these individuals pointedly ignore what Generals Sherman and Sheridan did to defeat the Confederate States. Or what the Allies had to do to end National Socialism. The Civil War ended in part because the Union adopted a starvation and devastation strategy to kill the will of the South to fight. Thousands of incendiary bombs set fires burning at thousands of degrees in German city centers.
As terrible as these actions had to be, William Sherman himself explained that one must make war “hell” to end it more quickly, reduce overall suffering, and quell the appetite for war in the hearts of the enemy.
Ever since the Hamas invasion of Israel and the successful counter-offensive, elite college campuses have developed into places in which Jewish people are not safe. Jews have been quietly pushed out of certain fields, such as technology and video gaming. New York City, once the safest haven for Jews worldwide, now allows constant attacks and mass intimidation of Jews with barely a response.
Many will try to explain that they are critiquing the State of Israel and not Jewish people. For all but a handful, that is disingenuous, since mass intimidation rallies take place near synagogues, Jewish schools, and in Jewish neighborhoods, not outside the gates of the Israeli Embassy or consulates. They target Jewish kids and Jewish groups on college campuses only seeking to study and congregate in peace.
Antisemitism is in a large percentage of instances a childish act of hatred by people seeking a target for their personal failures. It is the last resort of the “can’t get rights” of the world whose self-examinations never lead to self-criticisms. Adolf Hitler himself did not turn completely to antisemitism until he was rejected from art school for having an excessively banal painting style. Most of those claiming to separate hatred of the State of Israel from hatred of Jewish people are exercising a juvenile version of pedantry, pushing their behavior to the gray area between the limits of what is acceptable and what is punishable.
Their goal is to push the lines to the point where hatred of Jews is mainstream.
And even those who claim some basis in history for their antisemitism don’t get it right. For example, the Jewish people as a whole did not crucify Jesus Christ. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate reluctantly crucified Christ at the behest of the small cadre of those in Judaea collaborating with their conquerors to gain social position, hardly a group of people who would be widely respected or followed in a Jewish nation chafing under the Empire..
Both the Left and the Right share this problem gurgling up from online fever swamps. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens leapt through the cracks in the floor of civilized society, Carlson likely enticed by Middle Eastern investors in his media project. Indeed, foreign funds and foreign intelligence services are pulling the levers of American culture to maximize hatred of Jewish people worldwide along with the State of Israel.
It is time for good Americans, good Christians and faithful of other religions, and good civilized people everywhere to voice their objections to the rapid dehumanization of Jewish people in the larger cities and elite college campuses of the United States.
It is time for non citizens and naturalized citizens backing these odious developments to lose their privilege of living in the United States. United States v. Schenk is very clear on the legal limits of speech when it will in all certainty instigate a violent response. That includes those organizing antisemitic events.
It is time to end this ugly chapter in the history of the world once and for all. If Americans do not stop the antisemitism train from leaving the station, we may expect that the consequences will be not only profound, but horrific.
Also, odds are that when “they” are through with the Jews, “they” will come for me and you.
