An ancient and unique evil

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the monstrous crime that we have come to call simply "October 7" -- like September 11, the date has become the instantly-understood name of a specific historical event.  It's not my intent here to recount the details of the mass torture, rape, mutilation, live burning, and other atrocities the jihadists committed during that attack; the vital work of documenting those acts is being done on sites like this one, which exist to keep truth and memory alive.  Rather, I want to look at its proper historical context, which explains why the mass slaughter happened and, in a sense, what it was.

Hatred against Jews has infested the Christian and Islamic worlds for more than a millennium -- for as long, really, as Christianity and Islam have dominated large regions of the Earth. There are various views as to why this is so; arguably Jew-hatred is built right into the root belief systems of those religions (that "the Jews" as a group killed Jesus or opposed the rise of Muhammad) and cannot truly disappear until both religions themselves have finally passed from the scene.  But whatever the reason, the persistence and deep roots of anti-Semitism in those regions across time is indisputable.  It is the world's oldest, deadliest, and most despicable bigotry.

(To dispose of one silly red herring which some asshole is probably about to bring up:  the word "anti-Semitism" does not mean bigotry against Semitic people in general, it refers to bigotry against Jews specifically.  It is very common that words have actual meanings which do not perfectly fit their etymology.)

Jew-hatred has varied from place to place and era to era in the forms it takes and in its degree of virulence, but there is always a fundamental continuity; it is best looked upon as a tradition.  It runs through the persecutions and mass expulsions of the Dark Ages, polemics such as Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies (which substantially influenced the Nazi movement four hundred years later), the discriminatory laws pervasive in both Christian and Muslim countries for centuries, the pogroms of eastern Europe, the rise of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust itself, the mass expulsions of Jews from Arab countries when Israel was founded, the unending jihadist campaign to destroy Israel (long after other peoples who lost territory in the 1940s had accepted reality and moved on), the atrocities of October 7, and the naïve but profoundly evil and horrifying eruption of hatred against Israel and Jews on the campuses and streets of the West in the year since then.  None of these things can be understood except in the context of that tradition; none of them could have happened without it.

Even the Holocaust -- by far the largest and deadliest outbreak of the anti-Semitism mind virus -- is today sometimes subject to efforts to generic-ize it, to portray it as something that could have happened to anybody.  Rather than Jews, it might have targeted Unitarians or left-handed people or vegans, if Hitler had just happened to harbor an obsessive hatred of some other group.  It is common today for activists to cite the Holocaust, out of context and in a very trivialized way, to try to score some trite little point about present-day American politics.  All this grotesquely misreads what actually happened.  A civilized nation does not commit an atrocity of the magnitude of the Holocaust in a vacuum.  Generations of entrenched hatred specifically against Jews set the stage.  Nazi propaganda repeated and amplified lies and libels specifically against Jews which had been circulating for centuries.  Yes, the Nazis killed members of other groups as well, but the single-minded obsession with the annihilation of the Jewish people, to the point of constructing a huge industial system spanning half of Europe for that purpose, was fundamentally a continuation and culmination, with modern technology, of the same kind of thing that Jew-hating kings and priests and mobs had been doing sporadically for centuries.  The Holocaust was part of that long tradition of anti-Semitism, and it cannot be understood, or honestly discussed, without emphasizing that point front-and-center.

And yes, given the right conditions, something like that could happen elsewhere, anyplace where the tradition of anti-Semitism is entrenched -- which is part of why the outbreak of hatred on our campuses and streets since October 7 is so concerning.  As I've discussed on the blog, much of it does resemble the very early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany.  Another Holocaust will definitely happen if the jihadists someday succeed in defeating Israel and getting its population at their mercy; October 7 has made their intentions plain beyond dispute.  The ugly tradition of anti-Semitism is still very much alive, and even seems to be gaining new strength and respectability in our own time, as the Holocaust passes out of living memory.  Civilized people everywhere must be ready, always, to stand against it whenever it raises its head, even -- no, especially -- when it does so among those perceived as "on our own side".  But that means understanding accurately what it is, and not trivializing an ancient hatred against one specific people by turning it into something generic to be thrown at any ordinary politician who said some common garden thing you don't like.

October 7 did at least, in a certain way, free us of dangerous illusions.  It made the jihadists' aims and nature clear, for anyone to whom they had not already been clear.  The continued blithering by some Western politicians about ceasefires, a "two-state solution", and suchlike relics of dead-and-buried pre-October-7 thinking -- the same already-failed ideas that led to October 7 in the first place -- now sounds like surreal echoes from some faint and irrelevant alternate universe.  Like the original Nazi regime and ideology itself, jihadism cannot be negotiated or compromised with, only defeated.  Those of us who understand this have a duty to try to keep our leaders on track.

Appeasers talk about "ending" wars, realists talk about winning them.