(New York Times) Bret Stephens - The single-minded loathing of Israel is another expression of antisemitism. Somehow the types of excuses that are unthinkable when it comes to some minorities become "essential context" when it comes to Jews. After Israel experienced the equivalent of more than a dozen Sept. 11s on a single day, some progressives instantly cheered it as an act of justified "resistance." Antisemitism is a problem for democracy because hatred for Jews, whatever name or cause it travels under, is never a hatred for Jews only. It's a hatred for distinctiveness: Jews as Jews in Christian lands; Israel as a Jewish state in Muslim lands. Authoritarians seek uniformity. Jews represent difference. America has been good to Jews since 1655, when the Dutch West India Company rebuked Peter Stuyvesant for refusing trade permits to some Jewish newcomers in what was then New Amsterdam. But if there's one lesson of Jewish history, it's that nothing good stays - and why we still say, at the end of every Passover Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem."
2023-12-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive