Antisemitism: I Hate To Be A Downer, But….

And no, it’s not just California, this is worldwide.

When this is published, we will be a day away from the second anniversary of the attacks of October 7, 2023.

Are things any better for the Jewish people and for Israel?

On the bright side, Iran’s nuclear program is probably, at least temporarily, neutralized and Hezbollah’s ability to wage war on Israel seems to have been dealt a fatal blow.

Those are both VERY big deals and are great: but they should have happened a decade or more ago.

Instead, Israel spent decades attempting to make peace with the people who have vowed repeatedly, and relentlessly to destroy us, and instituted a policy toward Gaza that can only, charitably, be described as moronic “naïve.” The idea was that if Israel was nice enough, and cooperated economically with Gaza, and the “West Bank” (properly called Judea and Samaria), their populations would somehow decide that Jews are ok after all.

They would really like us.

Then the subhuman, animalistic, nightmarish murder of over 1,000 Jews in unimaginably brutal ways, showed the world what a bunch of savage, death-worshipping animals the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Lebanon really are. Right? Wrong.

Instead, we’ve experienced almost two full years of antisemitism, the intensity of which only those who lived through the 1930s/1940s have ever experienced.

But that horrified the West, and good people all over the world, and they actively rose up as one and fought back against this regressive trend to Nazi style Jew hatred, right? Wrong.

Antisemitism, the real kind – not “someone called me a name,” but threats of violence, actual violence, intimidation, terror, and maligning of Jews, and worse, murder, have become the norm throughout the West.

I can’t scroll through any social media feed without seeing images, or reading stories, that would have seemed unimaginable (to most people) two years and a week ago.

But the world at least saw the need to punish those responsible, right? Wrong.

Instead of applying common sense and decency to what had happened and understanding that Israel needed to fight back to punish those who were guilty, and reestablish deterrence, major Western nations like Canada, France, and the UK decided that for their bloodlust, they deserve their own state. Because murdering Jews, according to the West, is no big deal. The REAL problem, you see, is that those uppity Jews fought back. The Arabs of the regions are seen, more than ever, as the victims. And they, says the West, deserve an award for their treatment at the hands of those dastardly Jews.

So the world at least finally saw what a bloodthirsty, seventh century, violent, ideology Islam is, right? Wrong.

Islam is more accepted than ever on college campuses throughout the West, including the United States of America, as many college students convert to, and thousands of others accept Islam as some kind of exotic trinket that woke ideology views as superior to the Western religions – which they have always despised.

At the same time, thousands of Muslim men pray in the streets of cities like London, Paris and New York (blocks away from Ground Zero) with zero pushback from the locals. The purpose is to intimidate, it’s a display of power, which always seems to go unchallenged by meek, weak, pathetic Westerners who are still more concerned about the right amount of steamed milk in their latte than they are about the future of our civilization.

Meanwhile, because Israel has been so incredibly inept in the PR war, Palestinianism has been mainstreamed, and their list of “grievances” is accepted in a mainstream way which is new…and nefarious. Many, especially younger, and therefore more stupid (you know it’s true) people seem to have fully ingested the narrative that Israel is a “colonial” state, in which the poor, poor (oh so poor) “indigenous” Arabs were displaced, so that those evil Jews could come in and take their land away. It’s ALL a fairytale, but indoctrination and leftist ideology are powerful drugs for minds that have been taught that there is no such thing as objective truth, and who were raised in the racialist, hierarchy of victimhood that virtually all-American public schools now teach a version of.

The most recent heartrending result of the West’s denial of Islamism as a threat, and its increasing acceptance of the pervasive antisemitism that comes with it, was the horrific attack on a Manchester synagogue during Yom Kippur. That attack, like so many others, was the result of a Western world in which our lives are cheap, and “globalizing the intifada” has become fashionable in every single Western liberal enclave.

Personal aside, I live near the Hollywood Bowl. I was driving down Highland (the street that the Bowl is on) and saw the crowd walking up the hill to see Neil Young. The crowd was largely what you would expect: middle class Baby Boomers, old hippies, young hippies, tons of people dressed in the now ubiquitous uniform of baggy t-shirt, and baggy shorts/jeans, and a baseball hat (all black, of course), and also…. People draped in keffiyehs to go see a musician who supposedly has embodied the “Peace and love” 60s vibes for decades.

Donning a keffiyeh is EXACTLY the same as donning a Nazi armband. Of course, none of them were so much as glanced at. Meaning, it is now normal for people in the United States to publicly embrace the symbol of the people who have been murdering Jews for more than a century. Peace and love, man.

I also took a hike in an area of the Hollywood Hills near me called “Runyon Canyon.” It is usually fairly peaceful, but a few weeks ago, these two lowly creatures sick people were walking around like this, as though it was normal. Because now it is normal. I gave them my usual look of (hopefully) pure, undiluted, hatred. Everyone else was either indifferent, or seemed to really like these two Islamist scumbags, as was the case of one youngish, blonde woman (definitely NOT Middle Eastern), who was flirting hard with them – because jihad is sexy now in some quarters.

That is the picture at the top of this article, and this is the America I now live in.

Worse: even after we lost more than 1,000 additional precious Jewish lives in the war, and terrorist attacks over that same period, Hamas still exists. It’s debatable whether Israel should have bombed Gaza into some form of pulverized nothingness on 10/8. It is not debatable that it is a moral outrage that there are people in Israel that would end this war before Hamas is destroyed.

In my opinion, it is also a moral outrage that the Netanyahu government has allowed both Hamas to survive in any form, and the war to go on for this long. Because it became obvious immediately after the attacks of 10/7 that world was NOT going to be on our side, and that the evil union of Islamists and the left in waging what has been deemed the “uni-cause” was already so well developed that it was more than obvious that they would continue to exploit ANY of Israel’s actions as fuel for its “victimhood” narrative.

Meaning: they would use each day of this conflict to gain support, globally, in their war against not just Israel, but every last Jew on this planet.

And, you know what?

It’s been working, and working more effectively than most of us ever imagined.

So what are we doing about it? Basically, nothing apparently. We continue to sit there and take the attacks on our fellow Jews in the streets, the constant imagery of Palestinian and Hamas flags waved in the streets of every single Western city, the relentless murders of Jews in Israel, recently an attack in Jerusalem, in which five more of our people died needlessly, while a still functioning Hamas celebrated, and on and on and on.

This has to stop. But, given our lack of unity, our attitude of inevitableness about all of this, the world’s usual moral blindness, and the relentless campaign of hate by our foes – I don’t have a lot of confidence that this will get better, much less end, any time soon. Who knows what price we will ultimately pay for our attitude of passive acceptance of even the least of this.

Never be afraid. Never give up.

Am Yisrael Chai.

A version of this article originally appeared in Orange County Jewish Life.

Joshua Namm is a longtime Jewish community pro, passionate Israel advocate, and co-founder/co-CEO of Moptu, a unique social platform designed specifically for article sharing, and dedicated to the principle of free speech.