The Flood of Hate
Terry H. Schwadron
Nov. 3, 2023
Even without personalized threats, emotions stirred by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are running high.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed again in congressional testimony what we all know: Hate crimes against Jews and Muslims are running high in the United States and abroad. We’ve seen Jews and Muslims students on college campuses threatened in groups and as individuals, we’ve witnessed a murder of a six-year-old Muslim, and hate speech and graffiti attacks on synagogues and mosques are running amok.
Individuals now fear random attacks, and local governments are deploying police to guard institutions. In the United States, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa, the pattern is clear: the number of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents has gone up since Oct. 7 by several hundred percent compared with the same period last year.
“This is not a time for panic, but it is a time for vigilance,” Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
But while there are fistfights and yelling around protest marches gathered in favor of one side or the other — or towards a ceasefire altogether in the Middle East — the real fear at the FBI is about so-called lone wolf suspects who are not part of any organization but may be inspired to lash out in reaction to the conflict.
Who Are the Haters?
Yes, Wray said, the FBI is watching for those who openly espouse support for Hamas terrorists, but those being arrested for physical violence are not necessarily connected directly with Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The arrest of a Nevada man for threatening to kill Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., a Jew, this week is a 42-year-old Las Vegas guy who referenced Hitler and called Rosen “subhuman,” rather than making an argument about Palestinian rights. The landlord charged in Illinois in the death of the six-year-old had no apparent ties to Israel or Gaza.
Wray noted that it is disturbing that threats against Jews are coming from people reflecting many types of extremists, from the far left to the far right, affiliated or not. Agency figures reflect that while Jews make up 2.4 percent of U.S. population, threats to Jews account for about 60 percent of religion-based hate crimes, the same levels that the Anti-Defamation League tracks.
We’ve seen it all before, of course. Islamophobia hit highs after Islamic terrorists struck U.S. targets on Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews have felt the whiplash of existential anti-Semitic pogroms over centuries. That there is a renewal of verbal and physical violence is linked to the timeliness of the current attacks against Israeli civilians and the retributive war inside Gaza, but the undercurrents of hate are far deeper.
We’ve recognized the same feelings in the Charlottesville, Va. torchlight marches among white supremacists, worried about the rising calls for Christian nationalism among evangelicals and many Republican politicians and lawmakers, reacted to academic leaders who may comment about the current war but are slower to make moves to protect individual students whose families are Jewish or Muslim. We still have people in this world who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.
Indeed, there are those who define their own ethnicity solely towards resisting those who would vow to kill them.
Politics versus Hate
Having grown up with a Holocaust survivor, I’ve seen plenty of anti-Jewish hate, whether as personal slight, ignorant bias, or resulting in violence If I see hate, I confront it, much less worried about my own survival, but for that of children and grandchildren who know and live by values of our family history.
I am mindful, however, this conflict this time have stirred emotions that need tempering with understanding that confuse weird politics of Middle East governments with values of Judaism or Islam. Even Israelis are split about what their government does in their name — up until there is an attack like the one Hamas launched.
The regional issues among Israel, Gaza, West Bank, and Arab neighbors are focused on land and security, with a healthy dose of occupation politics that has fueled continuing land grabs to form new Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. Attacking individual Jews or Muslims at Cornell or in Michigan, moving to censor opposing congress members, or shouting Nazi slogans are not acts that will solve any problem in that part of the world.
Hamas statements promote that they see Oct. 7 as a start, that they will seek to do it again; Israel’s statements are Hamas cannot be allowed to do so. Those seeking to “justify” war start from very different points of view and, in practice, make it more difficult to separate emotions about military actions from tribal actions against individuals. To Hamas, it does not matter that half of Israel or more oppose its own government policies; to those with the loudest voices for Israel do not seek to distinguish civilians from fighters.
Here’s the bottom line: I will welcome protest of government policies — those of this country, of Israel, or of Palestinian causes. I will resist calls for the deaths of Jews and Muslims. If you cannot or do not scope out the difference, you don’t understand the questions at hand. We need to push back on statements and actions that are simply about spreading hate for The Other.
Indeed, even among those standing up now for Israel as democratic ally, there is no recognition that promoting the United States as a “Christian nation” is offensive, or that having lawmakers and presidential candidates chumming with white supremacists at dinner is at odds with promoting their support for a Jewish state.
If your upbringing has committed you to expanding human rights, to seeing progressive causes as challenging centers of power in the name of equal access to housing, jobs, and success, no matter how outrageous the terrorist provocation, it is difficult to square those feelings with war actions that deny water, food, and medicine to civilians.
Few feelings about how war is conducted explain away hatred for The other.
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