On Tuesday, Joe Biden went hard after antisemitism on the right, on a day of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance , with ample linkages to the disgusting support for awful Hamas behavior coming out of the University Left. Jennifer Rubin at WaPo, as an Orthodox Jew who abandoned conservatism, takes this on as well. They both talk about the awful and growing links between antisemitism and threats to democracy.
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Opinion
Biden’s Holocaust speech highlights antisemitism’s threat to democracy.
Conspiratorial hate undermines our essential values.
In an ocean of denial, equivocation, rationalization and outright ignorance about the surge in antisemitism, President Biden rose to the occasion to deliver a bracing speech on Tuesday for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance at the nation’s Capitol. It was fitting to locate the speech there, rather than at the museum itself, to emphasize that antisemitism threatens not only Jews but also the American experiment.
Too many progressive commentators have spent time insisting the threats, harassment and grotesque hate speech directed at Jewish students on college campuses is not “as bad” as what we saw in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. This is not a contest between which “side” is more antisemitic. We do not grade antisemitism on a curve. Whenever, and for whatever reason, people call for American Jews to “go back to Poland,” call to wipe out the only Jewish state on the planet or declare that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” the toxic stench of antisemitism threatens the lives of Jews, and, as Biden put it, demands “our continued vigilance — and outspokenness.”
Biden, his voice rising in anger, denounced amnesia about both the Holocaust and Oct. 7. “Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence. ... It must stop...”
He echoed many American Jews’ anguish that only seven months after the attack, “people are already forgetting ... that Hamas unleashed this terror, that it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis, that it was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages.” Biden assured the audience, “I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
As a Jew, I don’t yet know how to think this all through, but it is clear that extremism on BOTH SIDES has come for us. I am at least glad (and proud) that our president is taking all of this on, including the links to antidemocratic hate coming out of the growing antisemitism.
Now, I am no fan of how Netanyahu is handling all of this, but I understand his rage. There is certainly a painful irony that the massive violence permeated by Hamas has given them growing political advantages in the US and around the world.
Now what?