Victor Davis Hanson is an educator, a commentator…and, to me, the most worthwhile political opinion writer in the country.
Here is the beginning of his latest piece, titled “Slouching toward open season on Jews”;
Jews celebrating Hanukkah were just slaughtered by Muslim gunmen on an Australian beach, in an imitation of the October 7 massacres.
An inert Europe is canceling Christmas celebrations out of fear of threats of violence from Muslim minorities. In the West, when an Islamist shoots a Jew, politicians often offer two bizarre remedies: gun control or a task force to tackle Islamophobia.
Yet, our political class rarely offers data on the overwhelming preponderance of targeting Jews rather than Muslims, much less the vast disparity in Jewish-on-Muslim versus Muslim-on-Jewish violence.
To catalog all the recent violence against Jews in the Western world would fill a book.
We know the causes. Anemic Western leaders — politicians, college presidents, media grandees, and celebrities — fear Muslim terrorism, growing Muslim voters, and their own growing antisemitic campus constituencies.
So, they never call out antisemitic violence other than with nauseating nothings like, “Such violence has no place here.” Or “We condemn such violence in the utmost terms.” Or “This is not who we are.”
The prime minister of Australia — a country that produced some of the most heroic soldiers of World War I and II and still is a bulwark of the West in the Pacific — goes through a series of linguistic contortions daily to avoid identifying the threat to Jews and how to stop it. He talks as if guns were animate and murdered Jews without the aid of radical Islamic killers.
So nothing much follows in the West, and Jews are becoming the hunted. The attacks will increase because there is no foreseeable force to combat them.
Mr. Hanson continues, and the rest of his article is just as clear, just as intelligent and just as unsettlingly accurate as what you just read.
Thank you, Victor Davis Hanson, for speaking (writing) truth to…power, ignorance and lack of commitment on the part of leaders, who should be addressing this worldwide scourge but are too scared/complicit to do so…
…which guarantees that it will continue and grow, until they wake up. If ever.
These are scary times. I only wish more people realized as much.
