Words fail and analysis becomes trite. Indeed, we must guard against the paralysis of analysis. Colleyville brought back images of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, of Charlie Hebdo, Hypermarché Cacher, Jewish school shootings, and so many other slaughters of the Jew in our era. Thankfully, the worst didn’t happen in Colleyville. But it is necessary to state the truths that are still so sadly true. And they are hard and inconvenient truths because they will give little comfort to those who cry out for understanding, brotherhood, and ask “why?”
Anti-Semitic acts are becoming more frequent and more horrific. The reality is that anti-Semitic acts in the United States and Canada outnumber anti-Islamic acts by a two to one margin.
Malik Akram, the aspiring Jihadi who invaded Beth Israel Synagogue on the Sabbath, had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. She is such a bloodthirsty Islamist that her nickname—which she takes pride in—is “Lady Al-Qaeda.” She is imprisoned near Fort Worth, not far from Colleyville. During the hostage-taking, Akram was heard on livestream yelling, “America only cares about Jewish lives.”
Anti-Semitic acts are becoming more frequent and more horrific. With all the politically correct talk against Islamophobia, the reality is that anti-Semitic acts in the United States and Canada outnumber anti-Islamic acts by a two to one margin according to the Anti-Defamation League and the League for Human Rights. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose by nearly 50 percent last year and nearly 30 percent in Canada. Unprecedented spikes in modern times. We will constantly be fighting this scourge. And not just from Jihadi Islamists.
Whenever people look to blame others for their own failed lives, they demonize the Jew. It will always be so. We live in the post-Holocaust era, and we must learn its hard and bitter lessons. The idea of the destruction of the Jewish people reached its zenith in a nation considered the most cultured of its time, with the most integrated and assimilated Jewish population in history. Germany. Mankind will not cross the Jordan. If it happened there, it can truly happen anywhere. And it is.
The next time you hear Palestinians chanting “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea,” remember that this is a call for genocide first mouthed by Nasser in 1967 in those words as a promise to “drive the Jews into the sea.”
Let us not politicize Malik’s attempted slaughters. Race hatred will always spark into race murder when the simmering nightcrawlers lurking in the underbelly of society draw validation from a public discourse that is filled with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called words of “nullification and interposition,” meant to sow division and discord between groups and communities for political advantage. That was Malik’s background in Britain. These were the kinds of Islamist invective he was nurtured in and that is flooding the world like locusts.
The Jihadis have allies in their goal of finishing what Hitler started. From the Nazis of Charlottesville to the Louis Farrakhans calling Jews “termites.” The Jihadis have allies. And the next time you hear Palestinians chanting “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea,” remember that this is a call for genocide first mouthed by Nasser in 1967 in those words as a promise to “drive the Jews into the sea.” These very people who deny the first Holocaust are salivating—and planning—for a second.
Their overwhelming psychological problem is a bloodlust to kill Jews. We don’t have to bend over backward to understand why. We just have to stop them before they do.
We all have a responsibility to fight this. It Is not up to the other guy. And it will not help to turn our streets and institutions into armed camps with armed guards. It is up to us to fight these people ourselves every day and in a thousand little ways whenever we see them rear their ugly heads. We are all soldiers. It is not easy. There is no guarantee of success. But it must be done. Most important, we must not shield our young people—particularly if we are Jewish—from this ugliness but rather inform them that this is the reality of the world, and they too must marshal a resolve to fight. They must have no expectation of “normalcy.” Without this effort, our standing as free people has little meaning.And as you read this, please refrain from the usual hand-wringing that so many—especially far too many Jews—engage in about Akram and others of his ilk having “psychological problems.” Their overwhelming psychological problem is a bloodlust to kill Jews. We don’t have to bend over backward to understand why. We just have to stop them before they do. And by the quickest and most direct means possible. The latter is perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all. But it is the reality of our dystopian times.