Dear Weekend Jolter,
Nearly 150,000 Holocaust survivors are estimated to live in Israel today. That might sound like a lot. Then you read, per the Times of Israel, that their average age is 85.
Their stories, at a not-too-distant time, will come to exist only in museums and in the texts of that period, and will compete forever with the efforts of those who aim to dilute or deny Nazi atrocities. This is a heavy burden to put on the dead.
The living have work yet to do.
It goes beyond determining which books about that era are or aren’t in school curriculums. It involves, more fundamentally, guarding against the conditions that allow the most ancient and infamous of bigotries to explode in the streets. Right now, we’re doing a piss-poor job.
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, the West is witnessing outbursts of antisemitic hostility to a degree unseen in decades. FBI director Christopher Wray testified this week that the threat is “reaching historic levels” in the United States. The possibility of this tipping into something more than isolated violence, all tied up in and presumably rationalized by Israel’s war with Hamas, is real and immediate. It can happen here.
Aside from their intensity, what distinguishes these incidents is that the hostility is coming not from right-wing, neo-Nazi torchbearers but activists of the political Left. Rich Lowry explains why it matters:
There’s no doubt that there are neo-Nazis and right-wing Jew-haters, who deserve to be ostracized and are, in some cases, truly dangerous.
But they are marginalized. They don’t have tenured positions at prestigious universities. They aren’t capable of mustering sizeable crowds on campuses and in cities across America. They aren’t organizing morally repugnant statements that engender wide-ranging debate in the political mainstream.
Richard Spencer does not operate from a position of prestige. The academics and students at $60,000-a-year schools who have cheered on Hamas the past four weeks do. They benefit, further, from a pervasive campus Newspeak that has rendered the anodyne “unsafe” and the insidious “just”; antisemitism can travel easily in this environment by other names. This makes it all the more important for those institutions — and politicians, no matter which party — to plainly condemn the mobs, the graffiti, the callous statements targeting Jews. As Noah Rothman writes, “The time for Democrats to pull the support structure out from underneath the pro-Hamas Left is now. Tomorrow will be too late.”
Examples of this bigotry spiraling out of control are mounting already. Cornell University had to dispatch guards outside the campus Jewish center in response to online threats that left nothing to the imagination (“if you see a jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats”). Jewish students were forced to seek refuge in a locked library at Cooper Union while classmates banged on the doors and shouted at them. At Tulane, a pro-Israel student was hit with a flagpole after snatching an Israeli flag from a protester trying to ignite it.
The response from many university administrations has been, to put it charitably, ineffectual. As NR’s editorial points out, the response from Democratic officials also has been more muted than it would be if this threat were emanating from the far right.
It isn’t so much that antisemitism is being excused because it has the wrong victims, but the current wave of Jew hatred has the wrong perpetrators. . . . The makeup of those behind the incidents is politically inconvenient.
In just the last few days, some institutions have taken welcome action. Harvard, after dragging its feet, launched an advisory board meant to “disrupt and dismantle” antisemitism. Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, offered an “expedited transfer process for Jewish students in danger of antisemitic discrimination” at U.S. campuses. A University of California regent tore into the system’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council for acting as “surrogates and supporters for Hamas’ destructive action.” Law firms issued a stern warning to schools they recruit from that they need to take an “unequivocal stance” against the discrimination and harassment. And New York police have made an arrest in connection with the online threats at Cornell, which canceled classes Friday.
In exercising vigilance, it will be important to distinguish between legitimate protest and actual threats; between understandable compassion for ordinary Gazans, including the civilians caught and dying in this hell, and unforgivable support for Hamas butchers who killed civilians as their primary objective. And while “Islamophobia” in recent weeks has served as a convenient deflection for some officials, terrible acts of violence have been committed against Muslims in the U.S. since October 7, including the fatal stabbing of a Palestinian-American six-year-old in Illinois.
These horrors, all generating more victims and grief, do not negate each other. Nor do they make the case for Israel to forget those its people suffered a month ago, or its need to eliminate the terror organization that chose to inflict them and vows to return “again and again” until Israel is erased. (Philip Klein and Jim Geraghty explain here why “cease-fire” isn’t actually a call for peace.) Meanwhile, the West’s challenge is to resist the forces that would pile new horrors atop recent ones, by allowing latent antisemitism to boil over; last weekend’s Jew-hunting riot at a Dagestan airport is a glimpse at its uniquely destructive potential.
Elie Wiesel, a decade before he died, wrote of the “careless and patronizing indifference” toward the Holocaust among adults of a certain age during the ’50s and ’60s. He marveled at how this changed over time, attributing the interest to perhaps a collective understanding that the window was closing to hear from true witnesses. Yet his son, Elisha, told NR’s Zach Kessel this week that he sees such indifference, even denial, returning, this time in response to Hamas’s savagery. He is not losing hope:
I think that every time somebody stands up on social media and corrects misinformation, reminding a community of what happened on October 7, of what exactly Hamas did, the more that comes out. . . . I genuinely believe that there is still an American center, which is decent and spans both parties, and when they see more clearly what has happened here, we’ll have a lot less tolerance for the anti-Israel antisemitism that we’ve been living with for far too long.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Other candidates should consider Mike Pence’s honorable example: Exit Mike Pence
This is a political play, and little else: Senate Judiciary Democrats Turn Their Committee into a Partisan Direct-Mail Operation
The antisemitism editorial, once more, is here: The Worrisome Spread of Antisemitism
ARTICLES
Roy Altman: The Israelis Slaughtered by Hamas Were Not ‘Settlers’
Ryan Mills: Rashida Tlaib’s Hamas Fundraising Ties
Haley Strack: How to Spot an Antisemite
Rich Lowry: Why Aren’t the Arabs the ‘Colonizers’?
Becket Adams: The New York Times Shows How Principled It Really Is
Photos: These Are the Hostages Being Held by Hamas
Dan McLaughlin: How I Became a Zionist
Dan McLaughlin: The Case for DeSantis over Haley as the Alternative to Trump
Ken Buck: Republicans’ Moment of Choosing
Henry Olsen: Donald Trump Wants to Be Held in Contempt
Charles C. W. Cooke: Trump Fights — but for What?
Dominic Pino: Afghanistan Is Cricket’s Cinderella Story
Jay Nordlinger: A Q&A with Matt Labash
Brittany Bernstein: James Biden Wrote Brother Joe $40,000 Check Immediately after Receiving Chinese Cash, Bank Records Show
CAPITAL MATTERS
Edward Ring reports from the water beat: California Bureaucrats Embrace Water Rationing
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen attends and reviews one of his favorite fairs. Check out the work of Stow Wengenroth, to start: NYC’s Annual Print Fair Stars Known and Unknown Artists
Armond White praises (relatively speaking) Sofia Coppola’s depiction of the King’s Queen: Priscilla Perfects the Female Gaze
EXCERPTS: HOW I HIT THE WORD COUNT WEEK IN AND WEEK OUT
Republican congressman Ken Buck made something of a splash this week with his retirement announcement, in which he blasted the election deniers in his party. He wrote a strong op-ed for NR elaborating on his concerns:
Difficult problems require serious solutions, of course, but they also require a willingness to tell hard truths. And neither party in Washington is willing to tell the truth to the American people these days.
Democrats, for their part, have spent decades promoting falsehoods about the consequences of our spending policies, expanding the role of the federal government and about the fragile state of Social Security and Medicare. They are committed to big spending — not to the truth.
Meanwhile, Washington Republicans have been too busy rewriting history to be bothered with tackling our nation’s problems.
A growing number of Republican politicians are eroding their own credibility, and simultaneously undermining the entire GOP brand, by continuing to breathe life into the lies surrounding the 2020 election. In 2023, the Republican machine refuses to move on from the destructiveness of President Trump’s final months in office. These falsehoods around the 2020 election and its aftermath continue to captivate a very vocal segment of the GOP base and thus animate many Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The lie that the election was stolen is so pervasive among elected officials that it has become almost a litmus test for loyalty to Donald Trump. To even suggest that there is no credible evidence of widespread, outcome-determining election fraud is an act of heresy in today’s Republican Party. Republican politicians have set aside facts in favor of social-media fervor. . . .
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: The GOP can be the political party with integrity and a relentless commitment to telling hard truths, or we can be the political party that gives in to fanciful lies. We simply cannot be both.
Rich Lowry offers historical context for the “decolonization” debate — specifically, on the history of Arab conquest that’s often ignored:
Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.
All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.
The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.
Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.
The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.
A bit more history, from Roy Altman, on the “settlers” charge:
The people who were slaughtered [by Hamas] were not settlers (and, even if they were, they weren’t legitimate military targets under any legal regime I’m aware of). On the contrary, under international law, they had just as much right to be where they were as an American does in New York City.
To understand why, we’ll need to retread a bit of history. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate in Palestine into what would become two states — one Arab, the other Jewish, with Jerusalem under international administration. Nor was there anything artificial about this new Jewish state. In partitioning the land between Jews and Arabs, the U.N. recognized that Jews had lived in the land of Israel since biblical times — until they were expelled (and their Temple destroyed) by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 b.c.; that they had been allowed to return to Israel by Cyrus the Great of Persia in the 530s b.c.; that they ultimately built a flourishing (if semi-autonomous) Jewish state within the Greek Seleucid Empire in the first and second centuries b.c. — until the Romans ousted the Greeks and established a Jewish client state in Judea in 63 b.c.; that the Jews had built the Second Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of a Jewish king, Herod the Great, in the 20s and 30s b.c. — a temple the Roman emperor Titus later destroyed after he crushed the Judean Revolt in 73 a.d.; that Jews were living in Israel when the Ottomans conquered it in 1516; and that they remained in Israel throughout the 402 years of the Ottoman occupation, which came to an end when the British took over the region after World War I (in 1918). In granting the Jews their own country, in short, the U.N. acknowledged that Jews are (and have always been) indigenous to the land of Israel.
The Mandate was set to expire on May 15, 1948. That same day, the surrounding Arab nations, rejecting the partition, invaded the Jewish lands — the newly declared State of Israel.
Unfortunately for the Arab states, they lost that war.
Remember the presidential primary race? It’s still going on, sources inform us. Dan McLaughlin writes here on why he thinks Ron DeSantis remains the better alternative to Trump, as Nikki Haley’s stock rises:
As a traditional Reaganite, I probably agree more with Haley than with DeSantis on the few areas where they actually disagree. I’ve been a longtime Haley booster going back to her first campaign for governor in 2010 and was openly discussing her four or five years ago as my preferred candidate to lead the party after Trump. She managed to get out of the Trump administration on good terms with Trump and with her dignity intact — not an easy thing — and if the party had chosen a new nominee in 2018, it might well have been Haley.
I’ve soured a bit on her political judgment since then, as she has struggled to navigate the innumerable pitfalls of a political landscape dominated by Trump, exemplified by a spectacularly ill-considered (and swiftly walked-back) interview with Tim Alberta in Politico in 2021. I saw her stump speech in Iowa in August and was unimpressed with its simplistic and gimmicky proposals (a competency test?) and overreliance on her gender. The debates have been a godsend to her campaign, allowing her to sink her teeth into more serious stuff and find a foil in the haplessly shallow and irritating Vivek Ramaswamy. They have reminded many of us why we thought she was a real talent in the first place.
In pursuing conservative goals, however, there is much to be said for preferring DeSantis. Comparing their records as governors, he has been more relentless in using the levers of power to attain conservative ends, more effective at imposing his will on his own state party, and much more willing to take tough stands that made him public enemy number one for liberals, progressives, and the national media — and take the slings and arrows that come with that territory. His political success has been more impressive in the context of Florida, and more recent, than Haley’s success in pre-Trump, deep-red South Carolina.
DeSantis has — correctly, in my view — identified the liberal/progressive domination of unelected institutions as a grave threat to democracy, republicanism, and everything conservatives hold dear about America. His attempts to address that domination, especially as it exists in the private sector, have proven to be the most controversial aspect of his governorship with traditional free-market Reaganites — they explain a lot of the opposition to DeSantis among the conservative pundit class — and I’ve disagreed, myself, with some of those moves. But the fight over the best tactics with which to address the problem is one worth having within the conservative movement, and we can’t have that fight without facing squarely the diagnosis. . . .
The nature of the populist faction creates a particular challenge for anyone trying to give them a seat at the table: This is a faction that tends to demand absolute control and that has many irresponsible characteristics, the worst of which are fed eagerly by Trump. Nobody in Republican politics — not even Brian Kemp — has managed as adroitly as DeSantis to form something that looks like a functioning and responsible governing fusion of conservatism with MAGA populism.
Shout-Outs
John Murawski, at RealClearInvestigations: The Costs and Logistics of Plugging In EVs Are About to Become Supercharged
Nicole Gelinas, at City Journal: An Adult on Campus, Finally
Matthew Rosenberg & Maria Abi-Habib, at the New York Times: As Gazans Scrounge for Food and Water, Hamas Sits on a Rich Trove of Supplies
Chris Matthews, at MarketWatch: U.S. fiscal deficit a ‘more serious problem than ever before,’ says Larry Summers
CODA
This question could go in a thousand directions, but: What’s the perfect use of a song in a movie? For me, it’s Wes Anderson’s use of the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” at the beginning of The Darjeeling Limited. The opening chords bring order to chaos, forcing Adrien Brody and Bill Murray into slow motion as they hustle to catch their train outside a crowded station (one of them makes it). It’s a sweet moment, then it’s gone.
What about you? What’s the perfect music/movie combo, in your mind? Send in your picks for sharing with this newsletter list: jberger@nationalreview.com.
Thanks for reading.