Days of Remembrance and Remembrance Forgotten
This past week, America commemorated Days of Remembrance, when the nation reflects upon the horrors of the Holocaust. This year's commemoration occurred when many naïve and gullible students and their dimwitted and jaundiced professors seemed to be celebrating their own forgetfulness or, perhaps, what they had never learned. They tolerated and condoned Hamas's determination to pick up where the Nazis left off in their anti-Semitic lust nearly 100 years ago. It is the disgrace of our time.
The toll suffered by Israelis on October 7 was horrific. Relative to size, it was the equivalent of nearly 40,0000 Americans being murdered in one day by one enemy. And the retaliatory toll and damage to life, limb, and structure in Gaza as Israel pursues the Hamas murderers is also horrific, just as Hamas intended it to be.
An astounding eruption of campus anti-Semitism began to surface as soon as word spread of the Hamas massacre on October 7. By the time the sun set on that infamous day, students at Harvard University issued their own infamous and intellectually pornographic screed holding "the Israeli regime" entirely responsible for the unfolding violence.
Within hours of the October 7 massacre, from-the-river-to-the-sea genocidal rallies began spreading on college campuses and other communities in celebration of the carnage of October 7. It was reminiscent of the anti-Semitic excesses that exploded at Austrian and German universities in the early 1930s. It was and is no less repugnant and no less sick and no less representative of things to come when the inmates take over the asylum with the acquiescence, if not the urging, of those in charge.
It was, as the Urban Dictionary might describe it, intellectual pornography, so sick in its rationalization of the blame on the victims, so rabidly partisan, so contemptuous to the essential elements of truth, and so articulated to excite the believer in the crudest possible way. It plays to arguments so shallow they can only occur in the privacy of one's own head without mortifying embarrassment. It is the intellectual version of pornography.
And yes, Harvard University students really issued a statement holding "the Israeli regime" entirely responsible for the murder, rape, and mutilation of over 1200 Israeli men, women, and children and, reportedly, even two fetuses. "Today's events did not occur in a vacuum," read the repugnant statement released by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and 33 other Harvard student organizations. Let that sink in. To the Harvard elite, blame is laid at the feet of the victims. No 1930's Nazi could have said it better. To the Harvard elite, it was Kristallnacht, a Pogrom for which the victims were to be blamed. That's the logic of the Ivy League education for which parents spend over $80,000 a year. Within hours of the October 7 massacre, from-the-river-to-the-sea rallies began spreading on college campuses and other communities in celebration of the carnage. It was, indeed, reminiscent of the anti-Semitic excesses that exploded at Austrian and German universities in the early 1930s. It was pure evil then, and it is pure evil today.
Indeed, the anti-Semitic events in our country and on American campuses on October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. You have to be carefully taught. Anti-Semitic incidences on that very day soared throughout the United States. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 732 campus-based anti-Semitic acts beginning October 7 and continuing to the end of 2023 alone – a 1,062% increase over the same period a year earlier.
Tragically, it's an old story. When good people stay silent and do nothing when facing evil, the resulting void will invariably be dominated by evil or stupid people who seize the moment. History bears this out in all times past and up to this moment. It is how the worst of humanity prevails repeatedly when good people remain silent and do nothing when confronted with evil.
In an inaugural address 157 years ago at the University of St. Andrews, John Stuart Mill stated: "Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.
It is tempting for some to rationalize that the student rallies and encampments were and are serving a legitimate cause. Some probably are. Most are not. Peace Now and Two States for Two Peoples are movements evident in Israel for years. Many Israelis and Palestinians are active in these movements. As I have written before, I met with Palestinians and Israelis in Israel and on the West Bank who sought peaceful co-existence during the first Intifada.
More recently, Arab nations and Israel have begun to work toward normalizing relations, which is really why Hamas struck in its bloody hit-and-run operation of October 7. Peace between Arabs, especially Palestinians and Israelis, is anathema to Hamas. It is forbidden in the Hamas charter, and that is why the rampage took place on October 7. To stop any movement toward peace between these peoples destined to live close to one another, that alone is why the academy got it all so wrong in America on October 7, 2023. It is precisely why the academy got it so wrong in 1930 in Austria and Germany. The academy in America had a choice on October 7. It could have condemned the abject evil for what it was or embraced the Austria-Germany Nazi model of 1930. It made a terribly wrong choice.
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It is right to denounce the protestors’ oversimplifications that blame “the Israeli regime” for the violence of October 7. That narrative omits centuries of persecution from the charge of deicide, to the blood libel, to Nazi genocide, and more. Furthermore, the population of Israel is not “the Israeli regime.” Indeed, many Jews and Palestinians, for generations, have fostered mutual understanding through groups such as Peace Now, Two States for Two Peoples, the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, or the inter-religious swim team that trains in Jerusalem at the YMCA.
By the same token, it is wrong to smear all higher education, “the academy,” for its toleration or its puzzlement over how to handle the protestors, whether students, faculty, or even some outsiders. In this country, and especially in our institutions of higher learning, we welcome questions, integrate new facts, and explore anomalies. We would decapitate ourselves if we accepted the slur that $80,000 tuition-based institutions are essentially neo-Nazi think tanks. It is no accident that John Stuart Mill launched his protest that we must speak out against evil from a university. Where else is such freedom permitted? We cannot allow the excesses of an outspoken minority become a self-inflicted assault on our own universities. It is there we teach our youth to think outside the box, to discover facts, to create new syntheses. There will be tension. Do not blow up the laboratory.
Say it Loud!!!! I cannot understand why so few are saying anything online, in person, etc. It's as though its not happening. Have we learned nothing???