|
Trending Topics
|
How Oct. 7 Impacted America
(New York Post) Liel Leibovitz - Oct. 7, 2023, is the day when many Americans woke up and realized, to our absolute horror, that we were living in a very different country than the one we had imagined. Before Israelis could even bury their 1,200 dead or attempt to rescue 240 hostages, before the IDF launched its operation in Gaza, thousands of our fellow Americans took to the streets - not to mourn the victims, but to cheer for their executioners. On college campuses, students gleefully waved the banners of Hamas and Hizbullah, terror groups with a long tradition of murdering Americans as well as Israelis. Daily life began to feel like that terrifying scene, early on in every zombie movie, when the folks who used to be friends and neighbors are suddenly infected by some brain-rotting virus that turns them all into ghouls. In the three years since, as Americans of good will have tried to make sense of the torrent of Jew-hatred suddenly flowing all around us, we've had to grapple with the truth that there was nothing sudden or spontaneous about this explosion of hate. Our institutions of higher education indoctrinated America's next generation of leaders with rank bigotry, and the inflamed ideology of those classrooms had seeped into newsrooms, boardrooms and everywhere else in public life. The second and more disturbing truth is that the real target of the hordes marching, posting, podcasting and protesting on behalf of "Palestine" was not Israel or Jews. Their real target was America. That's why the goons repeatedly seek to disrupt all-American occasions like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting ceremony; why they block roads, clog up airports and interrupt major-league baseball games. The writer, editor at large for Tablet, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.