Don’t look away from the cause of the antisemitism epidemic

As shocking incidents pile up and surveys show prejudice growing, the way woke ideology grants a permission slip for Jew-hatred cannot be ignored.

By  Jonathan S. Tobin  01-10-2024

We could look at it as just another day in New York, where protests on behalf of one cause or another have been part of the culture of the place for more than a century. But the organized effort to snarl traffic with demonstrations blocking a tunnel and three major bridges by people chanting support for the killing of Jews ought to be treated as more than just another day in Gotham.

The answer as to why this is happening is linked to recent controversies about college presidents who had trouble deciding whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews violates their academic institutions’ rules of conduct. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, there has been an epidemic of antisemitic incidents throughout North America. Jewish businesses and even Jewish neighborhoods have been targeted for boycotts or harassment. Jewish students are harassed and heckled with vicious antisemitic taunts, most recently during a high school basketball game.

The people committing these antisemitic actions are not right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan—groups that Jews have long feared and whose existence was highlighted by the 2017 “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Va., as well as the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019. Instead, so-called “progressives” are the ones engaged in behavior that seeks, at the very least, to silence and drive Jews from the public square unless they are prepared to join with those opposing efforts to defeat genocidal anti-Jewish terrorists.

Peaceful protest or domestic terrorism?

While The New York Times referred to it as a “pro-Palestinian protest,” those who shut down the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, as well as the Holland Tunnel, on Jan. 8— effectively preventing vehicular access to Lower Manhattan during rush hour on a Monday morning—were doing more than demonstrating support for a cause or inconveniencing tens of thousands of people. They were effectively holding a city hostage and creating circumstances that might have led to the loss of life had there been an emergency of any sort during the two hours they blocked these arteries on which the city’s economy and normal life depend.

That, in of itself, ought to dictate that those involved—125 of them were arrested by the New York Police Department, which struggled to regain control of the situation for hours—would be subject to serious punishment. But there is an aggravating factor that also ought to be taken into account.

They and their apologists claim that they are only doing this to show New Yorkers what Gazans are allegedly experiencing during the war begun by Hamas by the Oct. 7 atrocities. While blocking traffic, they were also voicing chants that were a thinly veiled call for more terrorist attacks on Jews, both in Israel and around the world.

That ought to mean that such protests would be treated as hate crimes or at least prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Unfortunately, it’s likely those involved will—like those involved in other recent protests in what they themselves describe as an effort to “flood” various sites, a reference to the “Al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas gave its orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping—get the usual slap on the wrist that weary city officials have given to most demonstrators in recent memory.

Much like the crowds that participated in the “mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020, the antisemitic traffic disruptors will likely get off scot-free. In the Black Lives Matter riots, many of those who assaulted cops, destroyed property and looted stores went largely unpunished. Indeed, the Times referred to what happened at the bridges and the tunnel as “peaceful.”

Prejudicial double standards

But just imagine if three New York City bridges and a tunnel were similarly shut down by MAGA red-cap-wearing supporters of former President Donald Trump, protesting efforts to prosecute or throw him off the 2024 presidential ballot. They would almost certainly be labeled as “insurrectionists” and deemed by the U.S. Department of Justice to be “domestic terrorists” whose tactics were a threat of civil disorder not to be tolerated. And the treatment they’d get from authorities would be harsh.

But because endangering New Yorkers while calling for the death of Jews is treated by the chattering classes as merely exercising free speech about a topic on which reasonable people ought to agree to disagree, the protesters will likely be free to terrorize some other thoroughfare as soon as they like.

Similar incidents have happened elsewhere in the country, with highways blocked and businesses that the “pro-Palestinians” associate with the Jewish community subjected to harassment with few, if any, repercussions for those engaged in this conduct.

In Toronto, Canada, “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were even less subtle about their antisemitism. They have been blocking traffic on a highway bridge in a Jewish neighborhood, causing not just inconvenience but creating an atmosphere of intimidation for its residents. Yet rather than throw these people in jail, the police brought them coffee and doughnuts in a vain effort to “manage” the situation rather than restore public order.