New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor.
Antisemitism – often called the “world’s oldest hatred” – predates Christianity by more than a thousand years and Islam by longer still. Hatred of Jewish people finds sanctuary within every nation and among adherents of all political affiliations.
While those who malign Jews and Israel today unconvincingly claim otherwise, Jew hatred past and present doesn’t arise from what Jews do.
It spawns from the fact that Jews exist and have outlived those who seek our death or subjugation. In every era, justification of antisemitism mirrors only the malice of those who advance it.
An April report from the Ohio Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documents the rise of antisemitism here. It notes that “The first quarter of the 21st century has seen the greatest level of antisemitic animus in [United States] history.” Considering that history, that’s quite a serious condemnation.
Jew hatred is worse today
The U.S. restricted the immigration of Jews fleeing European pogroms more than a century ago. My paternal grandparents were among them.
Many U.S. universities enforced quotas limiting Jewish admissions, and Jews were banned from membership in many social and civic institutions well into the 1970s. The authors of the report surely knew this history yet concluded that Jew hatred is even worse today.
The pretextual excuse is that most of the current animus toward Jews and the world’s only Jewish majority nation stems from Israel’s war against Islamic terrorism embodied by Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian sponsors.
It doesn’t.
For decades, these groups have engaged in terrorist attacks targeting Israeli civilians, culminating in the Hamas rampage on Oct. 7, 2023 – the greatest murder of Jews, just for being Jews, since the Holocaust.
Pro-Palestinian (and therefore inescapably pro-Hamas) protests began in Western cities and university campuses on Oct. 8, before any Israeli military response. If you marched that day, you weren’t protesting a war. There wasn’t one yet. You were celebrating a massacre.
THe ignorance is amazing
Even using Hamas’s own inflated casualty figures, the number of military and civilian deaths in Gaza is dwarfed by those in Islamist conflicts elsewhere. We’ve seen more than a million civilian deaths resulting from the bloodlust in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Iran but not a single notable protest anywhere.
The silence of Western activists about these cases is matched only by their ignorance, many of whom can’t name the river from which, or the sea to which, all of Israel’s Jews should be driven.
More than two-thirds of current United Nations member states have been recognized since Israel’s founding in 1948, including 40 with Muslim majorities. Many of those new members were previously colonial territories yet only Israel is demonized as an illegitimate, “settler-colonial” enterprise that has no right to exist.
This is a 21st-century Marxist framing of world affairs from a contrived victim-oppressor perspective. Hatched within the halls of Western academia, it places White people of European ancestry at the center of all modern ills. It’s a guilt-ridden exercise of self-flagellation that ignores all human history before it and excuses the barbarous hordes of Hamas and Hezbollah as justified “resistance.”
Spotting antisemitism
It’s ahistorical garbage that belongs in the dumpster, not the curriculum.
The point isn’t that Jews are perfect.
No humans are. But if you see only Jews as the cause of your or our country’s problems, you are antisemitic. If you deem only Israel as unworthy of nationhood, secure borders and the resources to defend itself from those overtly calling for its annihilation, you are antisemitic. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
And this is where the report’s recommendation for anodyne “education about the history of all racial and religious bigotry in America” falls short. The report’s dissent makes the case:
“First, the recommendation undervalues the particular virulence of antisemitism today, homogenizing the Jewish experience with others and thereby devaluing it. Second, and most disturbingly, it perpetuates the narrative of the victim and perpetrator, the evil that the United States has been to minorities throughout its history, and validates the kind of culture so prevalent on university campuses of hatred for the other. If followed, it will not ameliorate antisemitism but strengthen the very cultural grounding of it.”
Antisemitism is one of those hatreds that reflects only the inadequacies of the hater – and the mirror never lies.
New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a retired business owner. He was a two-term member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. He is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor. Reach him at philderrowdispatch@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Antisemitism at a high. it isn’t all about Israel’s military | Opinion
Reporting by Philip Derrow, Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
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