October 7 is a day that will live in infamy as the most horrific terrorist attack in the history of the Jewish State.
Thousands of Israelis were murdered, raped, tortured and held hostage. Ten percent of the members of an Israeli kibbutz, Kfar Asar, were massacred.
Some 260 young Israelis partying at a music festival were shot dead. Babies were slaughtered, burned and beheaded.
The ONLY morally acceptable response to such incomprehensible terror is overwhelming outrage at the limitless barbarity of Hamas.
While most of the civilized world, led by President Biden, rightly recoiled in horror at Hamas and condemned its terrorism immediately and unequivocally, Israel’s ideological enemies here in the United States found cause for celebration in seeing the Jews dead.
Rep. Ritchie Torres speaks out against Democratic Socialists’ push for anti-Semitism. Erik Thomas/NY Post
Let us imagine, for a moment, the inconsolable pain of a Jewish mother whose baby has been slaughtered to death. Could you imagine anything more callous and cruel than saying to that grieving mother: you deserved it? You and your people brought terror upon yourselves.
Those were the shocking sentiments of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), who wasted no time in holding a hate rally romanticizing Hamas terrorism as “resistance.”
The DSA was not the only one that blamed the victims of terrorism and not the terrorists themselves.
Something is rotten in the state of America. When our country’s institutional leaders cannot condemn with moral clarity the cold-blooded murder of Israeli children and civilians, one must ask: what kind of society are we becoming?
What does the silence, indifference, and cowardice (on the part of these so-called leaders) tell us about the depth of anti-Semitism in America and the reckoning that is required?
The time has come to confront not only the symptoms but also the disease: a social-democratic industrial complex that indoctrinates young Americans with an anti-Israel hatred so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Anti-Israel extremism, given a veneer of widespread respectability in law schools and legislatures, is aided and abetted by the sheer cowardice of so-called “leaders,” from public officials to college and university presidents.
Days of silence were often followed by words of cowardice, if there were any words at all.
Northwestern University, for example, said it had no plans to “publish a statement officially declaring a university position.” Imagine that: a university that doesn’t bother to take a position on an anti-Jewish pogrom. Have we learned nothing from the long and ugly history of anti-Semitism?
There is nothing accidental about the disregard for Israeli life that was revealed after October 7. The dehumanization of Israeli victims is an inevitable consequence of the hyperbolic and systematic demonization of Israel itself.
Anti-Israel hate and hysteria have been allowed to fester freely in academia, social media, the political arena, and elsewhere. It has been propagated by Astroturf activists and academics, amplified by its enablers in elected officials, and subsidized by government and civil society.
When people are made to believe the most dangerous lies about Israel: that Israel is the root of all evil on earth; that it is a “75-year occupation” that must be erased from the map from “the river to the sea”; that Israelis are not civilians but settlers who can be targets of the “resistance”; that the Israelis are committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and harvesting their organs and using the blood of their children; that Israel is always the aggressor and Hamas is always the resister: when you tell so many lies and incite so much hatred, what do you think will happen?
How do you think believers who internalize these lies will respond to the savage slaughter of Israelis? This is a moral monstrosity made in America, and one that America must undo.
The anti-Israel hatred that increasingly grips the American mind is a demon that must be exorcised from our body politic. Because America cannot remain a decent society for long if the next generation of Americans is made to be indifferent to the barbaric slaughter of Israeli civilians and children.
I, for one, support Israel in its attempt to defend itself. Despite the deep pain of the present, Israel will emerge from everything better and stronger than ever.
It will survive the pernicious lies and the dangerous demagogues who tell them. It will survive the extremism of DSA and BDS. It will survive the terrorism of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel will live on… for the next 75 years and more. Resilience is the DNA and destiny of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. It always has been and always will be. I’m as sure of that as anything else. I am Israel Jai.
Ritchie Torres is a Democratic congressman representing the Bronx.
Categories: Trending
Source: vtt.edu.vn