Unless we stand up for the rights of those who want to kill us, we’ll be next.
Daniel Greenfield | April 11, 2025
Muslim ban protest, London. By Neil Cummings – First they came for the muslims…, CC BY-SA 2.0
When immigration enforcement took Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-Algerian who had been part of a movement that had terrorized Columbia University, attacking Jewish students and faculty, along with employees and law enforcement, while promoting Hamas flyers, ‘Death to America’ stickers and the “total eradication of Western Civilization”, the impassioned leftist outrage poured forth.
The Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, came out entirely against it.
Liberal Jews who rallied for Khalil had to rationalize it by digging up that old chestnut, “First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist” until somewhere after the litany of all the socialists and other leftists, “they came for the Jews” and then finally for everyone else. Rather than a condemnation of antisemitism, it actually exploits the Holocaust to suggest that persecuting Communists is akin to racial and ethnic genocide.
There is also the minor point that when the Communists came to power, they killed Jews.
But the “First they came for Hamas, then they came for the Jews” wielded by many liberal Jews in defense of campus Hamas supporters is an even worse version of that one. The trouble with it is that Hamas already came for the Jews, not just in Israel, but at Columbia, UCLA and other college campuses. They might as well assert that “First they came for the Nazis, then the Jews”.
Alex Soros’ Bend the Arc rewrote the poem to argue that “after detaining immigrants, activists, and trans people, the Nazi regime in Germany came for Jews.” The ‘activists’ in this case are the ones who want to come for the Jews making the whole proposition at best a wash.
Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth contended in a New York Times op-ed titled ‘Trump’s Crusade Against Antisemitism Is Extremely Bad for the Jews’ that, “Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas; lists of those under government scrutiny; official proclamations full of bluster and bile — Jews have been here before, many times, and it does not end well for us.”
These amateur prophecies by a college president who a little over a week after Oct 7 was suggesting that “Muslim students on campus are feeling particularly vulnerable right now… they feel targeted as terrorist sympathizers or anti-Semites” and emphasizing ‘Islamophobia’ are unconvincing and also largely irrelevant in the face of the actual antisemitism here and now.
And yet the ominous warnings that fighting antisemitism will be bad for the Jews keep coming.
“Any Jew who thinks this is going to start and stop with a few ‘Palestinian’ activists is fooling themselves,” Amy Spitalnick, the former press secretary for the anti-Israel J Street group who now runs the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told the New York Times.
“The administration is rounding up people with no evidence of crimes or even of violating the standard of damage to foreign policy and national security they have cited,” David Saperstein, the former director of Reform’s Religious Action Center, told a Congressional hearing on antisemitism. “Antisemitism… thrives in authoritarian environments where civil liberties are curtailed, not in spaces of robust, protected democratic discourse.”
No one followed up by asking Saperstein what this implies about the state of college campuses.
“It may be pro-Palestinian protestors who are targeted and denied their rights today, but we don’t know who will be next. If we support the selective denial of protected speech and rights of others, even those with whom we strongly disagree, we fall into a dangerous trap that will only come at our own peril,” Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and a former foreign policy advisor to Kamala Harris, warned.
All this concern about “dangerous traps” and “it does not end well for us” seems to only pop up when Islamists and leftists actually face consequences for supporting Islamic terrorists, but did not seem to be an issue when the FBI, state governments and private activist groups, like the ones now targeting campus Hamas supporters, were coming after the Klu Klux Klan.
There were no lectures about the danger of criminalizing protest when it came to sending away elderly women for a dozen years for protesting outside abortion clinics. There were no poems about how “First they came for pro-life protesters and other people I actually disagreed with, then they came for me” because the Left is fine with locking up people for their views.
As long as their views are the ‘wrong views’ not merely views so extreme that, like Communists or Hamas supporters, they make liberals squeamish, but still convinced they have a point.
Consider the vastly differing treatment of J6 and BLM rioters or the entire system of suppressing ‘misinformation’ advocated by the same people who now worry about the “free speech” of foreign nationals calling for “Death to America” or cheering on the Oct 7 massacres. If only campus Hamas supporters had said something truly dangerous like “Masks don’t work” or “Trump won the 2020 election” that would classify them as urgent threats to democracy.
The Left is not defending campus Hamas supporters because they genuinely believe in free speech and the right to protest even for those who, as Sen. Schumer and the more ‘moderate’ Jewish liberals say, have “abhorrent” views. If they did, the last ten years would have looked very different. When they encounter someone whose views they truly abhor, they don’t rally for them, sign statements demanding their release or even bother talking about “due process”.
Talking about how deplorable they find Khalil’s views is a facade for normalizing the abnormal to their base of Jewish liberals by selling it as a “Nazis marching in Skokie” moment. But when was the last time Schumer or the JDCA rallied for Nazis in Skokie or in Charlottesville?
After over a year of unpunished antisemitic harassment of Jews from UCLA to Columbia, the Trump administration is cracking down on campus antisemitism as no one had done before.
And Jewish Liberals and Democrats are warning that the crackdown will endanger Jews.
But it’s much too late for that because Jews have already been ‘endangered’. Jewish professors and students have left campuses. Jews have been assaulted in front of synagogues and Holocaust museums with very little in the way of consequences. Not all that long ago, I watched Jewish community members in Los Angeles being beaten by a mob of terrorist supporters in keffiyehs while the LAPD watched and did nothing. Jewish students at UCLA were assaulted while campus security refused to intervene, CNN hunted down the few Jews who were willing to stand up to the pro-terrorist mob and the LA Board of Supervisors paid the legal bills of the mob.
It’s a little too late to warn us about the dreadful consequences for Jews that might arise from Hamas supporters being deported. The consequences of their presence is far worse than their absence. Violent bigots have always existed, but this particular set has the support of much of the liberal establishment along with a good deal of its liberal Jewish organizational contingent.
Some American Jews are still willing to believe something as abysmally suicidal as the notion that unless they rally for the civil rights of those who want to kill them, they may be next, but growing numbers are waking up to the fact that they’ve been sold out by the Schumers, Spitalnicks, Sapersteins and Soifers who aren’t standing up for them, but for the antisemitic Left.
Man, it’s starting to come back to me, all the places they tore down. There was a Taco Bell, a huge Fairway supermarket, meat and fishpacking plants a diner that had been there since the late 19th century! The Cotton Club. Not the original one. Such a tragic loss and all for some snootty antisemitism factory that excludes residents? I remember the protests in the late ’70s against the Triga Reactor. Columbia actually set up a nuclear reactor in the middle of Harlem for “research.”
What a toxic institution. I actually went there for a couple of semesters. Hated it. Left.
Another omission:
https://slippedisc.com/2025/04/will-the-met-now-normalise-netrebko/
I was a tenant’s rights and anti-gentrification activist in West Harlem/Morningside Heights in the ’80s and ’90s and here is what I advocate:
We were all opposed – we lost by the way – to Columbia being able to invoke the legal doctrine of Eminent Domain – which was put in place after the Civil War to enable the railroad to be built by making legal the seizing of private land by the government for public purposes with reimbursement of the owners at market rates – which had been modified to now include areas declared “blighted” and then transferred from one business to another, in this case Columbia – and affirmed as legal by the Supreme Court. The key justice was Justice Souter, and activists tried to satirically declare his home in Virginia or somewhere, blighted and have the government blight it and impose Eminent Domain to draw attention to the issue. This is the background to my argument.
So, now from 125th Street to 133rd Street and from Amsterdam Avenue to the Hudson River, business and residential buildings were razed and replaced with new gigantic Columbia University buildings that non-Columbia persons are barred from entering except for early voting a week before elections. There were automobile repair shops, a car wash, a gas station, a McDonalds with free parking around the corner from the highway and in front of the subway, a great car pooling spot for musicians playing out of town, a storage place, restaurants.
Not sure if I ever mentioned that about 10 or 15 years ago, at a restaurant in the neighborhood, a drunken pro-Fakestinian – I later learned – student from New Zealand – came over to my table – interrupting a first date – and began screaming at me, “Americans ought to be gassed.”
I knew there was no help to be had from the police of Homeland Security anymore but I went around asking for help from the bartender, the server, the bouncer – it was a bar restaurant – nobody would help me and I wound up barricading myself in the bathroom. I have no idea what became of my date.
Here’s what I propose: Columbia University, Barnard College, and especially the Union Theological Seminary, which this lunatic was a student of, should be declared blighted, eminent domain should be applied, they should be torn down, and replaced with – you guessed it:
A storage place, a McDonalds, garages, a car wash, a Dominican restaurant, a driving school, a gas station, and low rent rent stabilized residential housing with bodegas.
Great article only I’d add one more thing. The original poem was nonsense written by a former Nazi – a founding Nazi member, at that – who reinvented himself after the war, not an innocent bystander who kept silent. And, that’s not how it happened. The only reason they came for the Communists first in Germany, was that their vote in the Reichstag was the only thing standing in the way of the Enabling Act of 1933 which made Hitler legal dictator under the terms of the Weimar Constitution. So, after the Reichstag building burns down, Hitler accuses the Communists without evidence, and gets President Von Hindenburg to declare a national emergency and an executive order, The Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties so Hitler could have all of his opponents in the Reichstag arrested and unable to vote against his becoming dictator. Declaration of National Emergencies is the way democracies are usually destroyed from the top as we had the tiniest taste of during the Covid debacle and before after passage of the Patriot Act which nobody in the Congress read before voting for it. And the Nazis welcomed former Communists into their ranks with open arms.
“The “Slippery Slope” Fallacy (also called “The Camel’s Nose Fallacy”) is a non sequitur in which the speaker argues that, once the first step is undertaken, a second or third step will inevitably follow, much like the way one step on a slippery incline will cause a person to fall and slide all the way to the bottom.”
Logical Fallacies Handlist:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-jeffersoncc-englishcomp2kscopexmaster/chapter/logical-fallacies-handlist/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9CSlippery%20Slope%E2%80%9D%20Fallacy%20(,the%20way%20to%20the%20bottom.
@fquigley
It’s back.
Peloni..
Please retrieve comment
Mahmoud Khalil has no right to enter America and carry on in the leading University an Antisemitism propaganda. Just as followers of Islam do the same thing in Ireland. Nor in a double score of other countries. Leon Trotsky before his assassination in 1940 defended the right of Jews to own their Homeland as a defence against Jew Hatred…in the context of his warning of clear indication of the Holocaust (from 1937 on he was continually stressing that reality)
Trotsky was the undisputed real representation of the left, of the very real socialist agenda in society and people must not be allowed to distort history.
As a friend of mine once said, “Man has an unlimited capacity for stupidity”.
I look at this stupidity as documented above, and at the same time I’m aware of an article in Yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, which had the top military guys kvetching about how hard it may be to get rid of Hamas… permanently. This, possibly in view of the the “fact” that Hamas has somehow managed to recruit another 25000 members to replace the ones killed by Israel since Oct 7.
Be that as it may (or may not), I could think of at least a couple of strategies that could be quite effective in getting rid of the “next 25000” but whatever strategy is used, has to be implemented energetically. Could it be that there is some “passive leftism” floating around in the IDF and IAF? This could explain said kvetching quite well… “This would be too hard for us to implement, so we’ll just walk away from it…”
Perhaps this “25000” should be regarded as relative rookies in the art of murder and warfare, and that this should make life somewhat easier for the IDF if implemented immediately. We should also keep in mind the number of Israeli servicemen and women killed during this latest 1-1/2 year operation. This is called “respect”. Kvetching doesn’t earn respect…