The Big Teaching Moment

Commentary

We are at a big teaching moment, if not the biggest teaching moment, in the history of our country since the Civil War.

This should … emphasis on should … be most obvious to Jewish Americans for reasons I don’t have to explain immediately.

But it should also be affecting everyone since the record untold millions of unvetted migrants freely crossing our southern border—more in October than ever—from more than 150 countries has now alarmed even FBI Director Christopher Wray.

For the first time, he’s seriously warning of an immediate threat of terrorism not committed by his favorite bogeymen: domestic “white supremacists” (Let me know when you see one.).

Mr. Wray, although reluctant to say so out loud, was obviously referring to the flow of migrants from Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and China, among others—all enemies of America, and few of whom, if any, can now be located.

As for Jewish Americans, on Nov. 2, they received the following news as expressed by the Daily Caller Foundation:

“There is no sugar-coating this one and Lord knows we can’t explain it, but the Biden administration chose this time in history to PROUDLY announce its ‘first-ever National Strategy to counter Islamophobia.’

“Yes, as the hatred for Jews in America is at a shocking all-time high, with death threats, violence, and pure evil being paraded out in the open, THIS is the response the administration had chosen.

No, this is not a joke.”

Evidently not.

What has occurred and continues on so many U.S. college and university campuses from Cornell to Harvard to Columbia, Penn, and Yale (virtually all Ivies) to Tulane and Drexel and so forth hasn’t had any effect on the Biden administration.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the ongoing pro-Hamas marches in our streets.

“Burn, baby, burn!” takes on a new connotation.

As with the three Japanese monkeys, the administration doesn’t see or hear the evil and they certainly don’t speak about it.

But it gets worse.

President Biden—the man, if you recall, who former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called wrong on foreign policy for decades, and that was before his current “deficit”—has called for Israel and Hamas to “pause” their war.

This, allegedly, would allow for hostage negotiations and other “humanitarian” needs such as fuel and food for Gaza but, in reality, it’s an absolute gift to Hamas, giving the terrorists a chance to regroup, rearm, and fight on.

Hamas has made it clear, both through its repeated actions and even recent pronouncements by its leadership on Lebanese television that their “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” is only the beginning. They intend to keep doing this until they achieve their constantly chanted “From the river to the sea …” goal, meaning the end of Israel and the genocidal extinction of Jews wherever they can find them.

Even Hillary Clinton has already criticized Biden’s call for a “pause.”

She knows, as most of us do, that the only way to defeat Hamas is really to defeat them, as the U.S. did with Japan and Germany in World War II when it took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the firestorm in Dresden caused by Allied bombers, to get the job done with collateral damage dwarfing anything happening now.

President Biden, in his daily dithering and zeal to keep the Muslim vote in Michigan, has clearly missed, or doesn’t care about, the overriding message of the Holocaust, brutal as it is:

When someone says he wants to kill you, believe him.

It seems he would prefer that Hamas survive to fight, and cook babies alive, something Hitler never thought of. And be assured, they will.

Okay. Enough.

This is going to be a long newsletter. I apologize for that and for the long lead-up to my title—The Big Teaching Moment—but here we are.

The teaching moment is for all, but especially for Jewish Americans who have consistently voted at least two-thirds for Democrats with seemingly blind obedience.

You would imagine that people who think of themselves as intelligent and educated wouldn’t be party-line voters, but they largely are, identifying as “liberals” and “progressives” when those terms are as outmoded as the horse and buggy. “Reactionaries” might be more appropriate. (I don’t want to go through, yet again, the racism of Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger to make my point.)

Actually, they are victims of what Belgian professor of clinical psychology Mattias Desmet calls “mass formation psychosis,” something akin to brainwashing, although his particulars are well worth studying.

Moreover, this movement of Jews to the left, wrong-headed as it might be now, began centuries ago in a justifiable response to oppression by higher authorities (kings, etc.) and not just relatively recently in the days of Comrade Trotsky. However, that should be no excuse for where we are currently.

The time has come—indeed it came quite a while ago, if you read history (FDR and so forth)—to wake up to contemporary reality, to understand who their friends really are.

Speaking for myself, I have come to love my evangelical Christian friends who are frequently greater supporters of Israel than many Jews. (I have had several ask me about the reason for that as if I had a definitive answer.)

Some of my fellow Jews, however, have surprising optimism, seeing Oct. 7 at least somewhat positively as that long-desired teaching moment.

At the recent Republican Jewish Coalition conference, among the first speakers was Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), one of the two Republican Jews in Congress.

“Three weeks ago,” he opened his speech, “Jews went to sleep progressives and woke up conservatives!”

The statement, intended as a quip, was well-received by an audience of more than 1,000, including me.

But is it true? One would hope so, but none other than renowned talk radio host Dennis Prager of Prager U thinks otherwise. He told a caller to his show that perhaps 2 percent of Jewish progressives would change their views. (It could be that Dennis was having a bad day. We all do.)

Still—wise fellow that he is—he has a point. Change is incredibly difficult for these people, as it is for many, as their entire self-images, not to mention friendships, jobs, and so forth are tied into the moribund, virtue-signaling diktats of supposed social justice.

They like to demonstrate they are good by what they say, even if the results are far from what they proclaim and are actually bad. (I referred to that as moral narcissism in a book some years ago.)

They are unlikely to do anything but hunker down and hide from the dreadful present reality until it’s over and they can resume their lives with, they hope, little aftereffects.

And yet, as the Torah and Talmud scholar Hillel the Elder wrote thousands of years ago, “If not now, when?”

It could be never, or it could be now that people will begin to open to change in a variety of areas. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from alone in the litany of world ills, although it dominates the news at this moment.

The same Jews who have preached even-handedness to people who seek to kill them are usually the ones who stood by while the U.S. cities where most of them live—in the case of New York, a city that they largely created—have turned into the most repugnant hellholes of crime and homelessness under constant Democrat rule.

I find it hard to fathom how they rationalize that, how they explain it to themselves—if they even bother. Most that I have talked to don’t.

But it isn’t too late for them to face the situation they have helped put us in and respond honestly, not by the usual virtue-signaling blinded by moral narcissism.

I have a somewhat more optimistic view of the possibility of change than Mr. Prager. “If not now, when,” to repeat Hillel. Maybe they’ll pay attention to their ancestors or, failing that, to this other one from their youths: The whole world is watching.