Yes, it could happen here

The atrocities of Hamas in the recent invasion of Israel have horrified and shocked the civilized world.  Yet, in a way, perhaps only half of that reaction is justified.  It is certainly horrifying to see these barbarians taking hostages, gang-raping women, massacring innocent partygoers, exulting over their bloody victims with vicious howls of Allahu akbar, butchering small children and the elderly, burning people to death, uploading video of their acts to the victims' social media to deepen the agony of their families, and so on -- but it should not be shocking.  These are Islamist fanatics, and we already know what they're like, and what they are.  They do that kind of thing because that is the kind of thing they do.  We should be outraged, yes, but not really surprised.

The more profound shock, to me, has been the reaction of so many people within the West itself.  As news and images of these hideous acts spread around the world, mobs in city after city took to the streets, not to protest the evil or show solidarity with the victims, but to celebrate the perpetrators.  Palestinian flags abounded.  Signs proclaimed the Hamas invasion a war of "liberation" and "decolonization", and Israel an "apartheid" state.  Chants of "from the river to the sea" exulted at the imagined total annihilation of Israel and its replacement by a regime of the kind of butchers and rapists and sadists we saw in action on October 7.  It is exactly as if the discovery of the Nazi death camps in 1945 had triggered mass demonstrations all over Europe and America with people waving swastika flags, declaring Germany the wronged victim of the war, and endorsing the Nazis' demands for Lebensraum and their denunciations of the "evil" Jews.

This phenomenon has been massive, and not at all subtle.  The march in London alone drew fifty thousand participants.  Demonstrators in Sydney, Australia, chanted "gas the Jews" and other explicitly anti-Semitic slogans.  In Berlin, someone has been going around marking places where Jewish people live with the Star of David.  An American congresswoman continued to display a Palestinian flag outside her office even after the horrors it represents came to light, while a senator spewed a sewer of lies and distortions trying to both-sides the attack.  Academics twisted reality beyond recognition to blame the victim.  There have been many other similarly disturbing reports, too many to keep track of.

After decades of idiots absurdly watering down the word "Nazi" by throwing it at anyone who disagreed with them, the actual, literal Nazis have shown up in force at last -- and they're largely people who identify with the left.  The situation on university campuses has been especially bad.  While a solid majority of Americans are pro-Israel, the young are significantly less so.

I hope it's mostly ignorance that is fueling this shocking hatred.  Since the Middle East was my area of specialization when I was in academia, and it's the part of the world I know the most about, the prevalence of misinformation about the whole Arab-Israeli conflict is very visible to me.  But I fear that it's something worse, especially since this neo-Nazi eruption is happening mostly among younger people.   It may be that, as the Holocaust passes out of living memory, the West's centuries-old traditional anti-Semitism, the madness of the pogroms and the blood libels, is re-emerging. I really never thought this could happen here.  But that's what they thought in Germany before 1933.

Nazi Germany redux?  Could that really be possible in the future of modern, enlightened America and Europe?  I honestly no longer feel confident that the answer is no.  We have just witnessed actual -- not hypothetical -- mass murder of Jews, followed by mass demonstrations glorifying the murderers, in the cities that make up the core of our civilization.  Never in my lifetime have I seen such naked, unashamed cheering for evil in the West, on such a large scale.  When right-wing extremists commit some outrage like Oklahoma City or January 6, it's common for the rank-and-file far-right to denounce the act as a "false flag", faked by their enemies -- however extreme their rhetoric, when they see its ugly implications in reality, they recoil from endorsing it.  These people are fully aware of what Hamas did, and with very few exceptions, they are not denying it.  They are celebrating it.  It's not much of a leap from there to literal endorsement of another Auschwitz.

I don't think that will happen.  But I can no longer say it's impossible, even here in the United States.  If so many people here have sunk this low in the decades since the defeat of the original Nazis, then one or two more generations, and.....

Israel was originally founded in part as a refuge -- a place where future Jews fleeing persecution would never be turned away, because it would be a Jewish country, guaranteeing at least one safe haven in the world.  The recent outpouring of venom by its enemies has reaffirmed that part of the necessity of its existence.

I don't want to end on that note.  If this hoary evil has suddenly raised its head again, it is nowhere near triumphant.  Civilization and decency are resisting it, and resisting forcefully.  I've already mentioned the Biden administration's strong support for Israel.  The UK leadership has been equally solid.  Celebrators of genocide in our universities are being forcefully rebuked, as are the both-sides propagandists of the MSM.  The majority is still sane.  The German government has made its stance clear, while the media there are exposing the cancer of anti-Semitism.

I'll give the last word to Eric Adams, the mayor of New York: