^^ John Fetterman expresses the common sense view. How can anyone in our free world disagree / But some do.

America responded en masse and with devastating effect to the 9/11 attack. All of the major instigators have been dealt with, and most of the ordinaries. Likewise, Israel responded by declaring war upon the Gaza enclave and has prosecuted its war without half-steps. This is what free nations do when attacked by foes, It’s what we did in World war II. You want to start a war ? We get to finish it, in ways you will not be happy about.

On October 7th, a mob of terrorists attacked several kibbutzim in southern Israel as well as a music festival, raping, torturing, mutilating, burning, murdering and kidnapping some 1400 Israeli citizens. Joined by thousands of civilians from the city if Gaza, the mobs wreaked the worst pogrom upon Jews since the World War II Holocaust. It was also the worst attack by Islamic terrorists upon the democratic world since the 9/11 attack upon America in 2001.

There has never been a clearer war of goodv ersus evul, or of just cause, than the war that israel declared upon the rlers of Gaza. No nation would ever allow its citizens to be pogrommed as were the citizens of Israel on October 7th. It speaks highly of Israel’s civic strength that nearly all of its 9 million people heeded the call to mount all out war upon its foe and have continued to serve unabated ever since.

Yet here in the free world, where support for Israel should be universal, as its fight is ours as well, there has been a storm of hate unleashed upon Istrael and upon Jews generally, from a small violent corner of what we call “the political left.” Virulent Jew Hate such as not seen in the free world since the 1930s has been visited upon Jews, Jewish busineses, Jewish hospitals, synagogues, and university campuses. Small groups of “left” anti-semites ahve blocked city streets, railway terminals, bridges, factories, airports and the White House as they attack our entire society in support of our Gazan enemy.

Hiow can this be ? Where did this Jew hate vandalism and outlaw acts arise from ?

I have no comprehensive answer. the acts of mobs can have many origins. But one cause is clear : in universities especially, for decades, students have been taught to hate Israel and to view Jews as evil.

The reason is this : a theory has come to be, that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and that oppressors are white, the oppressed brown or black. Therein, the white oppressors “colonized”’ areas where the brown and black oppressed live. Colonizing is, of course, a bad thing, says the theory, not aware, I guess, that every human society that ever was has “colonized” the places into which humans have moved.

I do not intend here to refute the ignorance of the “colonizers are bad” assertion. That’s a topic for another day. Nor do I intend to debunk the lie that Jews in Israel are “colonizers’; who have “stolen land” from the “indigenous” Palestinians. In fact, no one is indigenous to anywhere. All of our ancestors, at all times in human history, have come from somewhere else.

How this theory of justice arose, by which the nexus of reward and punishment is decided strictly by skin color, I have no idea. But it did arise. It appears to have taken over the curriculum of social studies in many of our universities and some of our schools. How did it not be vigorously opposed ? How did university faculties — and administrators — who supposedly oversee enlightenment and the guarantees of freedom that our society has committed to — not sweep this racist theory away at the outset, much less embrace it ? And how did they ever allow Jews — the most constantly persecuted people in the Western world — to become the number one target of the propagators of this race theory ?

You can answer these questions as well as I. Obviously the teachers and administrators agreed with the theory. That everything is a matter of skin color, and that as Jews are white, they are evil too. Ans maybe the primary evil, because, as the race theorists constantly tell it, Jews run everything ; the media, entertainemnt, finance, the arts, eduaction, medicine, the courts. Thus, say the race theorists, the first step toward justice is to eliminate the Jews.

And of course the state of israel is exhibit A in the race theorists’ attack upon Jews. Not only is Israel the most successful Jswisbh vengture since ancient times, but it has taken effect in lands occupied in part by people we now call “Palestinians,” many of whom were displaced by the wars in which Jews established the indepoendnece of an Israeli state. Even worse, in the race theorists’ view, many of the Jews who fought the enemies of Israel independence came from white Europe. that hey came as refugees fleeing the Holocaust made no difference to the race theorists ebcause to the Palestininians already in the land, they came as immnigrants, a flood of newcomers.

This the Jewish refugees did. They were in fact newcomers to what becanme indepodnent Israel. Inconviently, however, to the race theorist, far more ewish refugees came from the Middle Eat itself and North Africa and were not white at all. But they too did co me, and they displaced or irrotated yet more Palestinians.

Thus the establishment of Israel and ts development provided the race theorists with an ongoing fact, and Israel’s many succeses in wars waged against it by neighboring counties and several wvaes of terrorists have infuriated the race theorists gto the boiling point.

Thjus the violent Jew hate response to the pogrom on October 7th — a burst of frustration by folks who for 40 years had had to watch israel grow and triumph and triumph and grow, against all odds and comers, wthiout being able to do or say anythjng about it.

No wonder wde see this level of villent, nazi-like Jew hate from the believers of race theory. For the Gazan terrorists who raped, tortured, murdered, burned, and kidnapped 1400 Israelis did what they, the race theorists, wished they could do.

I pull no punches here .

The violent street mobs of Jew haters wish they could pogrom every Jew in the world. The loudest of them say so, out loud and in public.

Yet the race theorists have, I nk, vastly overplayed their hand. They have alienated everybiody else, and, in the Congressional hearings dominated by Congresswoman Stefanik, three university presidents amde clear that talking the genocide of Jews did not violate their campus policies. This shocked the nation, as it should have. two of the university presidents have since resigned, and universities generally are now under several lines of attack upon the dominant position that race theorists occupy in their faculties and administraion.

Clearkly the heyday of race is everything are over, thank goodness.

But the clearest evidence that the Jew hate mobs have overplayed comes from two battlefields. In the one, of war, Israel is defeating the Gazan foe engtirely, permanen tly. On the other, political, field, the loudest, most extreme Congressional haters of Israel and Jews generally are likely to lose their sats in the Democratic primaris upcoming.

I think the entire apparatus of “progressivism” has peaked. Everywhere in cities whdere progressives had taken over diring 2018-2021, they are losing re-election to moderate-mindded challengers. Voters see that the progressives’ reckless experients contradict common sense, not gto mention the live and ,let live arrangements that most act ual poeople make with their neighbors. the natkion as a whle is moving sharply away from rabid visions — from what we call “the left” — and may well itself overreach as it erases the race theorists’ excesses. Can we find the reasonable middle in time to not lose our national blance entirely ? I pray so.

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere