Antisemitism is a Problem, Not an Excuse
Encouraging Hatred, Misplaced Blame, Consolidating Personal Based on Lies
June 1, 2025. Firebombs and a makeshift flamethrower greeted a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, resulting in multiple serious burn casualties among people, mostly Jews, gathered to show care for and to focus on the release of innocent Israeli hostages… hostages among many innocent Israelis brutally and mercilessly attacked by well-orchestrated Hamas militia in Israel, near the border with Gaza on… October 7, 2023. The aftermath: 54 thousand Gaza residents, a small minority representing actual Hamas fighters, have been slaughtered as Gaza has been subject to almost constant shelling and bombing from Israeli forces, as food and medical supplies are cut off leading to starvation and death from curable injuries. There is absolutely no justification for the terror, the killing, the bombing of innocents represented by either these horrific actions.
As unarmed Gaza residents face starvation and escalating attacks, the death toll mounts, children lose limbs… and their siblings and parents. Hospitals are gone. Schools are gone. Here in the US, attacks on synagogues, Jewish cultural centers and gatherings of Jews all over the United States have increased by 300%, 70% of our hate crimes target Jews and Jewish institutions; virtually all major Jewish sites are now protected by armed security guards. It is all so completely wrong.
In a May 27th editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert condemned current PM Bejamin Netanyahu’s continued assault against and starvation of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, as an unwinnable war against Hamas and filled with obvious “war crimes.” Olmert, as Jewish as you can be, can utter this truth in his own country, but even when such protests are peacefully mounted here in the United States, those whose voices are raised in protest against Israeli military excess in Gaza and in support of the innocent Palestinians facing historic misery in their homeland, are labeled “antisemitic.” Two wrongs do not make a right.
What really galls me is the Trump administration’s redefinition of “antisemitism” to be used as a convenient justification to silence peaceful protests, to treat anyone who decries the violence against Palestinians in Gaza as “antisemitic”… justifying and enabling Donald Trump’s self-elevating rise to be America’s new autocrat. To crush law firms, universities, cultural organizations and individuals who are inconveniently opposed to Trump and his policies. The State Department can cull through student visa applications, and any sign of sympathy or support for Palestinians is viewed, quite literally, as anti-American. Visas denied. Such students admitted who voice any sympathy or support for Palestinians: instant deportation, generally without a hearing.
Who am I to write this? I was born in Washington, D.C. of government parents, raised as a Protestant, with approximately 20% of my genetic heritage traceable to European Jews. When I was 12, my mother remarried a career US Foreign Service Officer, and we were posted to Beirut. Lebanon then was almost evenly divided between Maronite Catholics and Muslim sects (Sunni, Shiite, Druze, etc.). There were still Lebanese “refugee camps” for Palestinians displaced from their homeland more than a decade earlier; Palestinian refugees were clearly unwelcomed and kept at a distance with barbed wire in terrible living conditions. They were used as a major distraction, a rallying cry for manipulative politicians like Gamal Abul Nasser who desired to become the regional autocrat.
There are American constitutional rights at stake here, rights which often extend to anyone present in the country, citizen, resident or even a temporary visitor. But not to Donald Trump and his hand-puppet cabinet level “loyalists above the law” Department of Justice, Department of State and Homeland Security secretaries, who only ask how high to jump when their boss issues clearly unconstitutional orders, even denying orders from the US Supreme Court itself. So now I turn to excerpts from a terrific June 3rd article by Jonathan Weisman in The Morning, NY Times News Feed, noting the violent recent attacks on American Jewish institutions and people: “This is what a resurgence of violent antisemitism looks like.
“The attacks were also acts of anti-Zionism — a clear response to the war in Gaza. There is a useful distinction between the clear bigotry of Jew hatred and the political and historical debate over Zionism — the support for a Jewish state. But, partly in response to the Oct. 7 war, the categories are collapsing. Salvos against Israel are colliding with longstanding prejudice, sometimes with deadly effect… Today’s newsletter is about that collision…
“The Trump administration appears to believe any defense of Palestinian lives is evidence of Jew hatred. (As my colleague Tyler Pager put it last night [6/2], the president has lots to say about antisemitism and little to say about Jews.) It has used pro-Palestinian speech as a pretext for assaults on higher education, science funding, foreign students and immigrants.
“But attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli government a world away are collective punishment, and collective punishment is bigotry. This was not even a question when Muslims in America were attacked as retribution for the murderous actions of Al Qaeda on 9/11.
“What resistance, though, is permissible? For a story I wrote last year about when garden-variety criticism of Israel spills into antisemitism, I had fraught conversations with non-Jews and Jews, many of whom have felt frightened since Oct. 7, 2023. On campus and at protests, they hear the slogan ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ for instance. Intifada is the Arabic word for ‘uprising,’ and the term used to describe the often violent Palestinian resistance movements of the early 2000s and late 1980s.
“Meanwhile, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which for a century has been patrolling the dark worlds of bigotry, told me ‘there is no debate’: In his view, opposition to a Jewish State in the land of Jewish ancestry is antisemitism… But there is debate. Zionism has always been a political idea, debated fiercely by Jews from the start. Increasingly, young Jews on the left say they are skeptical. Are they antisemites?
“That debate aside, the violent antisemitism of the right, which manifested six and a half years ago in the slaughter at a Pittsburgh synagogue, has now been joined by antisemitic violence on the left.” My view is simple: as much as we abhor and need to stop attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, we cannot, must not, use antisemitism as justification for mass killings, autocratic repression and to redefine the “the rule of law,” and in this country, the Constitution itself.
I’m Peter Dekom, and too often Americans, particularly manipulative leaders seeking to enhance their own power, use “labels” to define whom they support and whom they hate… forgetting completely that we are all human beings, imperfect and with out own frailties, but “people” nonetheless.
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