Our Next Great Battle

Elias Rodriguez, a Chicago man, executed two people--employees of the Israeli Embassy when they attended the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. As Rodriguez pulled the trigger, he shouted, "Free, Free, Palestine."

Clearly, he must have felt compelled to do this because he believed every single Big Lie that has been broadcasted and recycled for at least the last sixty years in the West. Assuming his post at X/Twitter is not a fake, Rodriguez, a former member of The Party for Socialism and Liberation and a supporter of Black Lives Matter, posted a Manifesto there. According to The Jewish Voice, The Times of Israel, and The Forward, this Manifesto is in the name of "kyodo.leather" and is signed by a Elias Rodriguez. In it, he writes:

"The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification ... (it is) genocide. The Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force ... what more can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children....".

My God! He is repeating all the articles that I've read, over and over again, in The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and in Ha'aretz. Perhaps Rodriguez has read them all. I wonder whether he's also read Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and the Electronic Intifada?

Rodriguez no longer believes in non-violent demonstrations but favors "the morality of armed demonstration.... The (his) action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for whom the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

For at least the last quarter-century, and even earlier than that, the world had been advised about what was coming our way, about the nature of Islam, Jihad, terrorism and its penetration of the West both culturally and economically.

The scholar Bat Ye'or (1971, 2005) understood that the purposeful execution of two people at the D.C. Jewish Center on May 21st was not only bound to happen--but that such executions were already well underway. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the information, the warnings, the predictions, and the analyses of Islamist Jihad, Islamic gender and religious apartheid, and the true nature of Israel, were in our hands. I both read and was privileged to work with the following visionaries, journalists, and scholars, all of whom were condemned as racist Islamophobes and conservatives.

I am thinking of Jean Raspail (1973), Steven Emerson (1995), Oriana Fallaci (2001, 2004), Daniel Pipes (2002), Alan Dershowitz (2003), Irshad Manjie (2003), Paul Berman (2003, 2010), Pierre Rehov (2004, 2006), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2004, 2006), Natan Sharansky (2004), Andrew Bostom (2005), Bruce Bawer (2006), Nonie Darwish (2006, 2008), Brigitte Gabriel (2006, 2008), Ibn Warraq (2007), Douglas Murray (2007), Robert Spencer (2008), Richard Landes (2008), Gloria Greenfield (2008, 2011), Wafa Sultan (2009), Abigail Esman (2010), Nancy Kobrin (2010), Charles Small (2013), Nidra Poller (2014). This is far from an exhaustive list.

Even I knew that the Western world had been saturated with incendiary Big-Lie propaganda against Israel and the Jews. Such ideas inevitably lead to attacks on Jews in Israel, and on Jews in the West on streets, in synagogues, at Jewish Centers, Jewish Museums, in restaurants, on trains, at nightclubs, and on college campuses in Jihad-like hordes.

This is one way of actualizing the chants to "globalize the Intifada."

I called for an Iron Dome against the propaganda at least fifteen years ago. I wrote and lectured about this. There were never any takers.

Now, when it is almost too late--really, when it is far too late--people are beginning to wake up. Americans, both Jews and Christians, as well as dissident Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus, are alarmed. Parents of college-age students are concerned; they are starting to advise their children not to attend Ivy League schools, where Jew hatred has long been protected under the banner of free speech and academic freedom; universities where they also hide their Jew hatred by insisting that their anti-Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.

As I claimed in 2002 and 2003, anti-Zionism is an essential part of the "new" antisemitism. Denying that this is so is tantamount to Holocaust denial.

What must be done when it is long past midnight?

Groups to support Jewish students on American campuses now exist.

For more than a quarter-century, organizations such as MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch, and HonestReporting have translated and analyzed the unbelievably filthy propaganda against Jews and Israel that exist in Arabic. Canary Mission identifies those in the academic and political worlds whose views are beyond hateful.

NGO Monitor identifies the left-wing and Islamic funding of both propaganda and terrorism.

Long may they continue to do so.

Newly formed groups within the professions (I am familiar with psychology groups) are banding together in various ways to fight the Jew hatred/antisemitism within their professions.

Last night, I was impressed by the press conference held by Washington D.C.'s mayor and chief of police and attended by Israel's ambassador to the United States, Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. President Trump personally called all those involved, beginning with the Israelis.

It is all not enough. Israel must be allowed to rid Gaza of Hamas, its rule, its weapons, its tyranny. Israel and the United States must stop Iran in every way possible. Paradoxically, while making economic deals with Qatar, the Trump Administration must stop Qatar, as well as Iran, from funding global terrorism.

Even that is long overdue and simply not enough.

The deprogramming of billions must get underway. And that may take a half-century. This is our next great battle.