Weimar America

We may be headed for a 1930s nightmare

  By Victor Davis Hanson December 4, 2023 @ American Greatness

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase?

Sometimes the anti-Semitic hatred reaches Orwellian levels of absurdity. A British reporter asked an Israeli official whether his country valued life less than Hamas did because it had agreed to Hamas’s demand to release three convicted terrorists in exchange for one Israeli captive. The media fawned over a released disfigured Gazan terrorist—without mentioning that her injuries came from a car bomb she exploded in hopes of killing Jews.

The media is further emboldened by the Biden administration. When asked about the outbreak of anti-Semitism across the U.S.—nearly 60 percent of hate crimes are committed against Jews, who make up 2.5 percent of the population—Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed them with the false claim that the White House “had not seen any credible threats” to Jews. And then she claimed that the real danger to American residents was Islamophobia and threats to Arab-Americans. Hate crime and interracial crime statistics do not support Jean-Pierre’s assertions, which prompts the question of why she made them in the first place.

Note that almost all the violence in demonstrations over the current war comes from the pro-Hamas side that shouts “river to the sea” genocidal threats, swarms the Capitol rotunda and the White House wall, disrupts traffic, occupies bridges at peak traffic, defaces private and public property, shouts down speakers on campus, harasses passers-by, and often battles the police. One wonders whether, should the U.S. military be forced to try to rescue American captives, the demonstrators would cheer for the American troops or Hamas hostage-takers.

Abroad, the world has gone even crazier.

The United Nations has appointed Iran—a theocratic, terrorist-supporting government that kills dissidents and takes hostages—as the chair nation of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum. What a cruel joke.

But what would one expect from the UN when its secretary-general, António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, a former Portuguese socialist politician, condemns the Israeli response to October 7, but rarely, if ever, the Hamas mass killing of civilians that prompted it. Right after the mass killing Guterres opined, “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.” According to the secretary-general’s logic, I suppose, Pearl Harbor, the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not happen in a vacuum either.

When told that an Irish citizen hostage was freed by Hamas, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar declared that the “lost” child was finally “found.” In other words, he wished to hide the obvious fact that a terrorist organization had kidnapped an Irish citizen child, held her hostage for 50 days, and released her only when Israel gave up convicted terrorists to obtain her release.

Our domestic political leadership is not helping the situation.

Just days after October 7, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along with the foreign minister of the now often hostile Turkish government, were calling for a cease-fire to prevent an Israeli response.

When the Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israeli cities went off course and damaged a Gaza hospital (leading to the fake story that Israel bombed the hospital), President Biden joked, “You got to learn to shoot straight.” Did Biden mean that, had the terrorists only launched a successful terrorist rocket into Jewish neighborhoods, there would have been no ensuing controversies?

Biden later apologized for doubting fatality figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas—a terrorist organization that has lied about the hospital “bombing,” denied it had tunnels under hospitals, denied that it had engaged in mass rape in Israel, and has supplied no proof of its civilian casualty numbers. Has Hamas released figures of how many of its terrorists were killed, and does it separate those numbers from lost “civilians?” And so are there really vast new cemeteries in Gaza to handle the 15,000 graves for those who, Hamas asserts, were killed?

What explains the collective madness?