A Big Progressive Fail |
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........