Is the U.S. Next?

from "Washington Post"

from “Washington Post”

While everyday anti-Semitism has become part of the fabric of Western European life in a way it has not been since the 1930s, the situation in the U.S. is also becoming troubling. I would compare American manifestations of anti-Semitism to ugly boils on the body politic whose poisons have not yet entered the bloodstream.

Here is a survey of anti-Semitism around the U.S. during the Summer of 2014 that is far from complete:

• Jewish comedian Elon Gold, walking home from a Sabbath dinner in Los Angeles with his family, is verbally assaulted by a carload of “Middle Eastern men” shouting “Free Palestine!” and that his children should die. The Los Angeles police treat it as a “hate incident” but not “hate crime.”
• In New York, a carload of Palestinians or Palestinian sympathizers leave their car to assault a Jewish husband and wife, apparently because the man wore a yarmulke.
• In Chicago, a high-profile pro-Israel event featuring Jewish Mayor Rahm Emanuel is partly disrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors, many of them Jewish leftists.
• In Chicago, youngsters styling themselves “the incinerator clan” are given a slap on the wrist for taunting a Jewish eighth graders with a computer ap called “Jew Incinerator.”
• In Florida, an Israeli women, stopping to get gas, is denied service “because you are a killer.”
• President Obama sends MSNBC talk show host and New York City power broker Al Sharpton to Ferguson, Missouri, as the White House’s virtual representative because “he gets it”—despite Sharpton’s history (for which he has never forthrightly apologized) of inciting anti-Semitic violence starting with the Crown Heights Riot of 1991.
• Rabidly anti-Semitic Malik Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party is legitimized as a “peacemaker” by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, despite videotapes of him inciting violence.
• Some protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, carry “Isis” flags while Hamas attempts to inflame anti-Semitic prejudice among them.
• In Portland, BDS protestors occupy offices of a security company that does business in Israel.
• In Oakland, protestors repeatedly try to organize a blockade to prevent unloading of an Israeli Zim container ship.
• The East-West Foundation, in the business of promoting “global understanding” and funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, features representatives of The Nation of Islam despite Louis Farrakhan’s continuing assaults not only on Jews and Israelis but Korean, Chinese, Asian Indian, and Arab merchants, gays, and single mothers.
• In Maryland, an arrest warrant is issued for a restaurant employee who called her boss at home in the middle of the night threatening him unless he removed an Israeli flag from the window of “Benny’s Bar and Grill.”
• The Episcopal Chaplain at Yale writes a letter to the editor of the “New York Times” blaming the wave of anti-Semitism in Europe entirely on Israel’s misdeeds in Gaza.
• A Temple University student is punched in the face and called “kike” after trying to talk to “Students for Justice in Palestine.”
• Nearly 200 U.S. historians sign a petition blaming Israel for the Gaza War without mentioning Hamas while calling for boycotts and aid cutoffs to the Jewish state.
• The “New York Times” continues to feature unsubstantiated claims by Palestinians, including relatives of senior Hamas’ leaders, against Israeli soldiers, while “Time” magazine runs before retracting an item reviving the medieval blood libel in the form of the new charge that Israeli soldiers are harvesting the organs of dead and dying Palestinians.

Anti-Semitism is becoming the twenty-first century’s global common denominator of hatred. The U.S. was not immune to prior anti-Jewish epidemics, and is not immune to this one.