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It has been one year since Hamas breached the peace and invaded Israel—raping, mutilating and murdering more than 1,200 souls and taking more than 250 hostages, half of them women and children. Since then, politicians and protestors have pressured Israel for an immediate cease fire.
Hamas is evil and wicked, but its leaders are clever. Clever enough to maximize Palestinian civilian deaths through their use of human shields and launching rockets from schools, hospitals and mosques. Clever enough to enlist employees of the United Nations and international news outlets in their nefarious activities. And clever enough to convince leaders of Western countries that they want peace and that a cease-fire decision is solely in Israeli hands.
However, there will be no peace until Israel’s enemies give up any hope whatsoever that Israel and its citizens (Jews, Muslims, Druze and Christian) are going anywhere. To achieve that requires the complete and total defeat of Iran and its proxies. Yet too few have the courage to see this situation as it is. And in the place of this clarity, the often-latent but never-defeated disease of antisemitism has exploded.
Hatred of Jews has hurt my family: My children have been targets of Jew hatred; my youngest son’s Jewish school has had to fortify its facility and hire additional security personnel; my daughter was visiting friends and nearly stayed the night on Oct. 6 at Kfar Aza, one of the villages near Gaza that you have read about in the news; and we have personally lost a loved one to Hamas terror.
Antisemitism is an insidious, shifting, polymorphous disease that has existed for thousands of years. Claims of deicide, racial inferiority, dual loyalty and blood libels led to pogrom after pogrom in Europe and the Middle East. Today, the fulfilled right of the Jewish people to a nation-state in their ancestral homeland is often the cudgel used by civilization’s enemies.
Since the Iranian-backed attempted genocide of Israelis on Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents are up 360% across the United States and 700% on college campuses. Protests honoring Hamas and demonizing Israel abound. Applying a double standard, the world holds Israel guilty even when she is the victim of terrorism. That double standard is Jew hatred.
Just ask some of the Jew-hating professors at elite colleges, one of whom has called Oct. 7 “glorious” and faces no censure. Ask yourself why there were anti-Israel protests before any post-Oct. 7 Israeli military response. Ask yourself why society, maniacally focused on Israel, seems to care so little about the suffering of Muslims around the world, including the Myanmar Rohingya, Chinese Uighurs, Sudanese, Mauritanian Haratins and many others. Ask yourself how society would react to the terrible things said if you substituted the word “Black” or “gay” for “Jew.” Jews are the last group of people for which it is socially acceptable to degrade, discriminate, target and hate.
Oct. 7 changed the course of not just Jewish history but your history, as well. Oct. 7 is a call upon you to acknowledge the truth that this is a fight not just between Hamas and Israel but between all of Iran’s proxies and the Western world. Oct. 7 is a call upon you to act.
Condemn Iran, its proxies and its terroristic methods. Condemn the double standard applied solely to Israel, the only nation-state of the Jewish people. Condemn the mistreatment, discriminatory behavior and violent targeting of Jewish college students. Condemn America’s addiction to de-escalation (it didn’t work for Chamberlain, and it won’t work for us).
Condemn the antisemitic intersectionality that demonizes and excludes Jews from participating in social movements fighting for the rights of other minority communities. Condemn the abject rejection of critical thinking in favor of feel-good cancel culture and identity politics. Condemn the equivocation between the sovereign state, imperfect as it is, of Israel and the terrorist states and organizations of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
It is time for all freedom-loving citizens to get on the right side of history as we fight this existential battle with evildoers who hate America, Americans and everything we stand for. Don’t allow America to fall back asleep. Now is the time.•
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Maurer is the founder of Heron Capital and the executive chairman of Arcamed.
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And if one of the candidates for President is choosing the wrong/opposite side of history, what then?