October 7th should have been the warning against genocidal Jew hatred, but we saw the opposite happen on October 8th among Progressives. Hatred for Israel and Jews blew up on campuses and communities.

Hamas was celebrated and its virulent death cult ideology, was adopted by Progressives. It was no longer safe to be a Jew on campus.

Movements I was once a part of, that knew nothing about the Middle East and Islamism gobbled up poisonous Anti-Zionist ideology that has been circulating in progressive spaces for decades.

Political Islam’s feverish mission to destroy Israel the Jew was christened on elite college campuses and spilled out into the streets. Jews were threatened and “death to Zionists” was normalized.

I don’t have to enumerate the number of event spaces and synagogues here in the USA and all over the West being attacked. I don’t have to mention speaking Hebrew in public can be dangerous. I don’t have to count the number of Jews who have been assaulted and murdered outside Israel for being Jews in public since October 7.

I saw it coming decades ago, before the mayor of New York’s buddy Linda Sarsour’s 2017’s “Zionists can’t be feminists” statement. It was shocking back then, in 1981, at a Jewish Feminist Conference, and it was the first time I felt unsafe as a Jew in America.

I will never forget the moment she yelled out at me from the audience. I had just read my essay from the anthology “Nice Jewish Girls” – I spoke about being an Egyptian-Iraqi Jew who grew up stateless and the importance of Israel, however imperfect.

She screamed, “If one Palestinian has to die for Israel to exist it should not (exist)!” Too many faces I knew in the room of several hundred progressive mostly Jewish women and their partners agreed with her. No one called her crazy or at least misguided?

The woman was a Jew, a feminist, and a psychotherapist in the LGBTQ community. We lived in the same city, went to the same parties, workshops, grocery stores. I began to dread seeing those faces I knew who felt Israel should not exist in my San Francisco neighborhood.

“They’re the fringe” I was reassured by friends who lived in New York, “it’s not like that on the East Coast,” they said. Today Hamas sympathizer Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York City.

Today, progressives of my time are joined by two younger generations of progressives who treat the euphemistic chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” as if a Jew free Palestine is a harmless slogan. In Arabic the chant is quite clear – it has nothing to do with freedom, just about being Jew Free.

For too many in progressive circles anti-zionism is a modern requirement, normalizing old fashioned antisemitism. And too many allies who are not Israel the Jew haters are unwilling to speak up and lose friends.

I am still able to be shocked at all this. I suppose that is a blessing. It means I still have hope – It was after October 7th, and I had recently returned from Israel, part of an LGBTQ mission to witness the Kfar Aza and the Nova killing fields.

Her reaction was something I never imagined, be it leftist, progressive, the guilty “white” person she saw herself as, whatever!

She responded to my upset of the brutality, the barbarism of the rapes, what I saw of the massacre at Kfar Aza, with a detached “men do that in war.”

I snapped, mentioning the horrors committed. She could not look at me, complained of a stomach ache, and called it an evening.

Palestinianism which demands a Jew Free Israel and vows many more October 7’s and 9/11’s are just fine in this growing circle of young progressives who have turned what was once about civil rights and human dignity into a bad dream.

Decades before the Women Life Freedom movement, feminists argued amongst ourselves about the oppression of women under Islamic regimes. Many were like hands off, it’s not oppression, “It’s cultural,” women who “burned their bras” in the Seventies argued. They set the stage for the young ones today not on the streets protesting the hellish crimes against women in Iran.

Now tens of thousands of mostly young Iranians have been massacred in the past months, hung and shot in the face, blinded, for protesting the Regime. And these Progressives, Feminists and Queer women and men who care so much about Hamas and “Palestine” are silent. To come out against the Iranian Terror Regime is Islamophobic. No “progressive” including Mamdani, mayor of NYC, will condemn the murderous Regime.

In what world do they justify this silence? In the same world they justify Hamas.

And with the same ignorance and prejudice that they see Israelis as “white” and Palestinians as “brown” when that is not what you see in Israel, Jordan, or Palestinian territory. Or most of the Middle East for that matter.

I know my background as an Egyptian-Iraqi Jew who grew up stateless for twenty years in Japan waiting for immigration to the United States because my parents were persecuted and kicked out of their countries for being Jews, was so different from my group of friends, but I expected much more from at least the people I knew, the people I have known.

We have a long history pre and post Holocaust extermination, of being kicked out of one country after another. My parents’ native lands are Jew Free today. And I am wildly grateful for those who want to understand.

Recently one lesbian feminist at a table of people I was not close to but have known for decades heard what I was saying – she understood Israel for the first time in a new way; “Oh, so Jews have been living for centuries under psychotic landlords!”

She was a breath of fresh air in a very polluted environment, so appreciated after hearing another friend say; “I listened to you and your family history out of respect but…”

But what? It’s an inconvenient truth that gets in the way of Palestinianism? Of some fear of being blackmailed as “Islamophobic” by understanding what happens to people, to women, girls, Jews, gays, lesbians, and yes, Christians and all minorities under Islamism?

Fear of being labeled Islamophobic (no one is telling anyone to be prejudiced against Muslims), and selfishness and moral confusion fuels my former friends and the new generation of keffiah-clad mobs.

The insanity of focusing on hating Israel and ignoring the Iranian people including thousands of young Muslim women and men who are being slaughtered, raped, hung, tortured, for wanting the same freedoms these progressives have.

Palestinianism/Jew-Israel hatred is so much easier to embrace, it is only about one thing, one hatred, one genocidal mission.

The hypocrisy is out of bounds.

I am not surprised but I am stunned by the massive ignorance of these new believers in need of a cause, using the street as their churches to pray us away at our Pro-Israel events. To bully us away. To scare us into silence. The community I once belonged to had a slogan during the AIDS crisis, the slogan was coined by a Jew, “Silence is Death.”

It’s been quite a ride, and while the behavior of what passes as progressive today is deeply disappointing, enraging, and disgusting, there is something to be said about being free from illusion.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)