Published by The Washington Times on 11/1/23. Story by Valerie Richardson. President Biden rarely misses an opportunity to blast “MAGA Republican extremists,” but the pro-Hamas displays at U.S. universities are undercutting the administration’s framing of antisemitism as a right-wing problem. Mr. Biden forcefully condemned Hamas shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians and vowed to stand by Israel, but the administration has tiptoed around the post-attack surge of protests against Israel and antisemitic screeds on campuses and other left-wing hotbeds. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avoided describing the campus protesters as “extremists” at Monday’s press briefing. Instead, she denounced “any form of hate, including antisemitism, including hate against the Muslim community.” She pivoted to the administration’s benchmark for antisemitism: the 2017 White supremacist rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “[W]hen the president decided to run for president is what he saw in Charlottesville in 2017 when we — he saw neo-Nazis marching down the streets of Charlottesville with vile, antisemitic — just hatred,” she told reporters. Ms. Jean-Pierre has been criticized for skirting the leftist-antisemitism issue, but her responses follow the administration’s playbook laid out in May in its U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which began with a condemnation of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. The report said nothing about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, the annual Israeli Apartheid Week events at U.S. universities or Students for Justice in Palestine, the anti-Israel group that promoted its post-Oct. 7 rallies with an image of a paraglider, a reference to the terrorists who slaughtered Israeli civilians. The Zionist Organization of America ripped the report. It said “the Biden Strategy fails to explicitly identify or deal with any source of antisemitism by name other than white supremacy,” including the Black Lives Matter movement and radical Islam. The difference is that nobody with any juice is defending the neo-Nazis, but Democrats have largely shrugged off or given a pass to the rising anti-Israel sentiment on the intersectional left. “I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been on the radio that while there are real and disgusting anti-Semites on the right, they are considered ‘fringe’ by almost all conservatives and Republicans,” Ross Kaminsky, a Jewish libertarian talk-show host on KOA Radio in Denver, posted on social media. “The true home of ‘acceptable’ antisemitism in America, where the true evil hides, festers and spreads, is on the left.” He cited “Marxist anti-Semitic professors who are guests of honor at all the best cocktail parties in Manhattan and Berkeley and Boulder.” In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attack, however, Democrats appear to be losing their left-eye blindness when it comes to extremism. After the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter advertised a rally in support of the Palestinians’ “right to resist,” Democrats led by Rep. Ritchie Torres called it “despicable.” The organization later clarified that it condemns “all hatred and the killing of all civilians.” Mr. Torres wasn’t impressed. “If you have trouble clearly condemning Hamas for butchering babies, there’s something profoundly wrong with you. Period,” he posted on social media. Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said the nation is witnessing “historic levels of antisemitism on both the left and the right” but the rise on the left is only now widely recognized. “Within the Jewish community, I’m seeing in recent months, and especially in recent weeks, an acknowledgment that we have a very serious problem with left-wing antisemitism,” Mr. Marcus said. “Even strongly progressive Jewish advocates who have been reluctant to address this problem in the past are speaking out about it. “My hope is that the Biden administration will follow suit,” he said. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told a Senate panel Tuesday that 60% of all religiously based hate crime incidents target Jewish people, even though they make up just 2.4% of the U.S. population. The Anti-Defamation League released a report last week showing a 388% surge in harassment, vandalism and assault in the two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack. They included incidents of distributing antisemitic propaganda by the Goyim Defense League, a White supremacist group. The bulk of the incidents, however, were tagged “Anti-Israel Rallies” or “Anti-Israel Rallies w. Support for Terrorism,” referring primarily to pro-Palestinian events. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama White House official, stunned Israel watchers when he acknowledged Monday that antisemitism had become a problem on the left. “Look, it’s clear that the hardened anti-Zionists from the far left are the photo inverse of the White supremacists from the far right,” Mr. Greenblatt told CNN. “And I mean, there is no argument anymore than anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I mean, that is as plain as day. And to think that extremism only comes from one side of the spectrum is a joke.” Max Abrahms, who teaches international security at Northeastern University, was surprised by Mr. Greenblatt’s statement. “More than any other organization, the ADL has been responsible for pushing the false view that the biggest danger to Jews comes from the far-right rather than the far-left-jihadist alliance,” Mr. Abrahms posted on social media. “To see ADL now assume the role of educator in this topic is just unbelievable.” On Monday, the White House outlined a series of actions in response to the antisemitism surge, including deploying second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who recently met with Jewish community leaders. The administration also plans to accelerate the handling of complaints about antisemitism under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That is a bone of contention with Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, who said the Biden administration has been stalling. “We’ve filed more Title VI cases on behalf of Jews suffering vicious antisemitic discrimination than any other organizations, and most of the cases are just sitting there,” Mr. Klein said. “His administration is not moving forward on them. They’re ignoring them.” He said the administration needs to stop reflexively conflating Islamophobia and antisemitism, condemn Hamas-friendly groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine by name and call out the “Squad,” the far-left House Democrats accused of pushing antisemitism, which they deny. Mr. Biden, he said, “should be making a major speech on antisemitism, and he should not be combining this with Islamophobia,” Mr. Klein said. “Islamophobia is a very minor problem compared with antisemitism. The overwhelming majority of hate issues are against Jews, not against Muslims.” FBI hate crime statistics for 2021, released in March, found that anti-Jewish incidents represented 51.4% of religiously motivated hate episodes and anti-Islamic incidents accounted for 9.6%. Mr. Marcus said the president deserves credit for his strong denunciation of Hamas, but he would like to see more condemnation from those on the left of the U.S. political spectrum. “I agree that President Joe Biden has shown strength when it comes to the response to Hamas,” he said, “and would just like to see consistency from within the Democratic Party and throughout the administration on that point.”