It’s truly shocking to see on college campuses such vicious anti-Semitism and support for Hamas’s brutal, violent attack on Israel—in which Hamas barbarians murdered, tortured, raped, and beheaded men, women, and children, including babies.
But it is not surprising. Given the Marxist, socialist training camps that our universities have become, especially “elite” schools like Harvard Law School, where the editor of its law review was videotaped verbally and physically assaulting a Jewish student on campus, what else would anyone expect?
As Prof. Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago accurately says, the “neo-Marxist faculty” who have taken over these institutions strongly support “militant Muslims.” That support is reflected in many of the anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian student organizations like “Students for Justice in Palestine” that want Israelis exterminated and have come out in full support of the sadistic terrorism of Hamas.
“This is the most hostile environment Jewish students have ever faced in America,” Lipson says. He’s right.
But for those who know American history, all of this has happened before. These pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic groups, many of which are organized by ethnic Palestinians, are just like the infamous German American Bund of the 1930s. As the Holocaust Museum explains, the Bund was “an organization of ethnic Germans living in the United States” that supported Nazi Germany and was “fueled by antisemitism.” Sound familiar?
The German American Bund (the word in German means ”federation”) “carried out active propaganda for its causes, published magazines and brochures, organized demonstrations, and maintained a number of youth camps run like Hitler Youth camps.”
Again, doesn’t this sound familiar? Just look at the propaganda being put out by pro-Hamas groups at college campuses all over the country; their support for a terrorist organization; and the anti-Israeli, anti-Jew hatred being spread by students and professors. Or at the Stanford instructor who labelled his Jewish students as “colonizers,” said the Hamas terrorists were “freedom fighters, and blamed Hamas’s murderous attack on “Zionists.” Or the Chicago professor who called all Israelis “pigs,” “savages,” and “irredeemable excrement” who should “rot in hell.”
Blaming the Jews for everything that has gone wrong in Gaza? We’ve seen that before, too.
Hamas’s tyrannical rule over Gaza sounds remarkably like the 1930s in Nazi Germany. An executive summary of a U.S. State Department report notes that Hamas, which exercises dictatorial control over Gaza, uses its “military wing to crack down on internal dissent.” The report lists the “significant human rights” abuses of Hamas in Gaza including:
arbitrary killings by Hamas personnel; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by Hamas personnel; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including violence, threats of violence, arbitrary arrests or prosecutions of journalists, censorship, and criminalization of libel and slander; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious government corruption; lack of investigation of and accountability for gender-based violence; crimes, violence, and threats of violence motivated by antisemitism; unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers; crimes involving violence and threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and the worst forms of child labor.
If we didn’t know this was from a 2022 State Department report, we would think it was a 1939 State Department report about Nazi Germany.
And speaking of 1939, in February of that year, the German American Bund held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, attended by 20,000 people. This was six years after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. The pogroms against German Jews and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis were well-known. Concentration camps in which the Nazis were imprisoning political opponents, union leaders, and many others had been running since 1934. And Germany had already invaded and annexed Austria and the Czech Republic.
These so-called Americans of the Bund knew what brutish thugs the Nazis were. Yet they supported them anyway until the U.S. entered World War II, when the organization was outlawed by the government. The American, pro-Hamas cohorts know what Hamas is doing and has done both internally in Gaza and in its relentless terrorist attacks, and yet they actively support this cruel organization that the State Department in 1997 classified as a terrorist organization. Hamas killers even wore bodycams to record their terrible, heartless deeds of inhumanity, so none of its American supporters can claim ignorance of their barbarism.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the Berkeley Law School says that “never” in his life has he “seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks” that erupted after the Hamas attack on Israel.
The fact that it is happening again in America and that we have active organizations, just like the German American Bund, should scare us. We have to stamp this out now before it spreads even further and gets out of control like a wildfire.
That starts with school administrators, the media, government officials, Hollywood, and others no longer making excuses for the vocal supporters of Hamas. They should be criticized, condemned, and prosecuted when they engage in violence and threats, and made to suffer the personal and professional consequences of what they are doing, including losing jobs.
If they were members of the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan, that would be happening. Purveyors of Jew hatred and supporters of terrorist groups like Hamas are no different.
Hans von Spakovsky and Mike Gonzalez on November 7, 2023
