The West has failed its Jewish communities.

Western countries must snap out of their parasympathetic freeze before things get even uglier. Jews are always the first, but never the last. Everyone should be rightly scared.

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-west-has-failed-its-jewish-communities

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There was a moment when resurgent global antisemitism could have been constrained.

It was right after the October 7th attacks when baying street mobs were calling for Jewish blood before Israel had even responded militarily. West leaders froze and missed it.

A key lesson from the aftermath of Nazism in Europe was that such movements must be stopped early, before they spread. This has been forgotten or abandoned. It has gotten so bad that synagogues have been set on fire, or attempted to be set on fire, in Tunisia, Germany, Canada, Armenia, the United States, Russia, Poland, and France.

To be sure, the rise in antisemitism was underway for some time. Research from American Jewish Committee shows that antisemitism was well up in 2023 even before the October 7th attacks unleashed a tsunami of hatred.

Western leaders’ responses have been anemic. They have condemned antisemitism but done next-to-nothing. Most annoying were condemnations of antisemitism along with “Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry blah blah blah.” Lumping them together makes it look like all minorities are equal victims of hate crimes, when it is usually Islamists committing hate crimes against Jews.

Many leaders have fueled the antisemitism for political gain. Politicians quickly realized that the votes, especially for Left-leaning governments, were among the Islamists and their Far-Left allies. They rushed to make statements and adopt policies that legitimized Hamas’ despicable actions. Every ounce of support they offered emboldened the antisemites, telling them that their racist tactics were acceptable and effective.

In the United States, home to six million Jews and the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, things are better than elsewhere, but still worrying.

A quarter of U.S. Jews report being targets of antisemitic attacks in the past year, according to a survey from American Jewish Committee. The survey showed two-thirds of American Jews feel less secure than they did a year ago. Half of American Jews reported changing their behavior to avoid antisemitism.

Studies on people’s attitudes bear this out. About a quarter of Americans agree with at least six anti-Jewish tropes, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Fully 42 percent of Americans report having friends or family who dislike Jews, or find it socially acceptable for a close family member to support the terror group Hamas.

American Jews are facing problems they had heard about only from their grandparents. Jews who appear outwardly Jewish, wear a kippah, or have Jewish names, are frightened. They feel not enough is being done. Hate speech has been normalized, police have failed to protect Jewish students, and it took ages to disperse mobs calling for “intifada” and genocide across U.S. universities, often with faculty support.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, increasingly pliant to the Democratic Party’s Leftist base, has not helped. His public criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — including his signing off on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for Netanyahu to resign — has fed the Palestinian lies that Israel is engaged in war crimes and wantonly killing civilians in Gaza.

This has fed the anti-Israel frenzy, and being anti-Israel is just antisemitism’s latest designer wear. It also shows the Biden Administration is weak and vulnerable to pressure. His willingness to sacrifice Israel’s security and the safety of American Jews to woo Muslim voters in swing states Michigan and Wisconsin has been cynical and morally repellent.

In Britain, which will be the first English-speaking country to fall, 11 antisemitic incidents are reported daily. That is the highest in 40 years and up 589 percent year-over-year, according to the Community Security Trust, part of The Henry Jackson Society think tank. In the week after the October 7th attacks, of which Jews were the victims, antisemitic incidents soared 919 percent.

London police have arrested lone Jewish protestors in front of Jihadist masses, as if removing the victim from the crime scene would make the crime disappear. Contrary to popular opinion, resolving this does not start with education. It starts with law enforcement.

Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Rushi Sunak has spoken out against antisemitism, but his policies have worsened it. His foreign secretary, the smarmy former prime minister, David Cameron, has imposed sanctions against individual Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).

Questionably, he has not imposed them on Hamas, which launched the October 7th pogrom, or on the Palestinian Authority, which pays for the murder of Jews, or against Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Lebanon.

Antisemitism is entrenched in the United Kingdom’s political elite. The Labor Party, which will almost certainly come to power in a few weeks, is institutionally anti-Jewish. Its leader, Keir Starmer, may be trying to purge his party of antisemites, but that is like trying to remove fish the from the sea. Starmer has taken over from previous Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, a vile antisemite who built a party in his own image.

In France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations, antisemitism has surged. In the first quarter of this year, 366 antisemitic incidents were reported, up 300 percent on the same period in 2023. The French Education Ministry has reported that there have been 1,450 antisemitic incidents at French schools since October 7th. Jewish parents are sending their children to school without kippahs or a Star of David for fear they will be attacked.

French President Emmanuel Macron displayed a lack of leadership from the start. He failed to attend a 100,000-strong rally against antisemitism back in November in an act of gross moral abandonment. He had a chance to help stop it early and failed to take it.

Since then, hundreds of buildings have been marked with a blue Star of David in a sick move designed to replicate the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, the Nazis marked Jewish houses like this, resulting in boycotts, expulsion, and shipment to death camps across Europe.

Antisemitism in France is so rampant that — although French Jews number only 440,000 — they are three times likelier to experience an antisemitic attack than Jews in America, which number about six million.

In race-obsessed Australia, the government has shown a similar lack of leadership. The country’s leaders froze as mobs in front of the iconic Sydney Opera House engaged in a frenzied and menacing chant that sounded for all the world like “gas the Jews” — but which audio experts insist was “where’s the Jews.” Police stood and watched.

The country’s media spent days discussing what they were chanting, as if these thugs would somehow be exonerated if only they had called for Jewish blood in an acceptable way.

One in five Australian Jews report having experienced anti-Semitism since October 7th, according to polling of 7,600 Jewish Australian Jews.¹ This figure rises to a shocking two thirds among Jewish students at Australian universities, which are hotbeds of Far-Left radicalism.

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s pedestrian prime minister, made the obligatory condemnations, but neither he, nor state police, acted robustly enough. He should have said immediately that Australia would deport any non-citizens involved. Police should have broken the rally up, arrested those involved for inciting violence, and set a precedent of zero tolerance.

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, a Left-wing hack straight from Central Casting, made things worse by criticizing Israel based on provable Hamas lies, babbling about a two-state solution that most Israelis and Palestinians do not want, and rewarding terror with talk of recognizing a Palestinian state. This told the Jihadists clearly that their approach was working.

In Canada, which is barely still the West, the government lived down to the country’s antisemitic history. B’nai Canada, the country’s oldest Jewish human rights organization, reports that antisemitic incidents in Canada rose 109 percent in 2023, with most happening after October 7th. In Toronto, home to Canada’s biggest Jewish population, attacks on Jews make up 56 percent of hate crimes, despite Jews being only four percent of the population.

The report does not capture 2024 statistics, but the list of attacks on the Jewish community reads like something out of Germany in the 1930s. A Toronto deli has been firebombed, synagogues set ablaze, shots have been fired at a Jewish school, and Jewish-owned bookstores have been vandalized, as have Jewish businesses and homes.

Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response has been pathetic. In response to the above, he has managed to publish three whole tweets denouncing antisemitism. He has decided that he needs the Muslim vote to stay in power. His policies cynically reflect this.

In a craven surrender to Jihadism, he has tried to weaken Israel by banning military exports to the world’s only Jewish state in the middle of an existential war. This showed protestors that the government was weak and could be bullied.

Argentina, home to South America’s largest Jewish community, is the odd country in my list. The country’s new libertarian Right-wing president, Javier Milei, is hugely supportive of Israel and seems enamored by Judaism itself, being moved to tears at the Wailing Wall on a recent trip to the Holy Land. He plans to move Argentina’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

While Milei’s condemnation of Hamas and antisemitism has been magnificent, his strident support for Israel has many Argentinean Jews worrying that they will face a backlash. There have been bomb scares at the AMIA building, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that was bombed in 1994, killing 85 people and injuring 300. Security at synagogues has been strengthened, while children at well-known Jewish schools have been told not to wear their uniforms to avoid being attacked.

Argentinian President Javier Milei at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (photo: The Western Wall Jewish Heritage Foundation)

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It is important to understand how the West got so lost and abandoned its values and basic sense of right and wrong.

Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, “The End of History,” is often quoted for him saying that the West’s defeat of communism in the Cold War meant that liberal democracy was the political endgame. That, however, is not how he ended the book. He ended with a bleak hypothesis that without an alternative system to contrast its merits and superiorities, and to sharpen its advantages, a deformed liberalism would emerge.

That looks like where we are at. The West has become so self-absorbed and so liberal that it accepts anything, including the unacceptable. That is the deformity. Nazis are demanding free speech, Jihadists are calling for genocide, and Woke Leftists are pushing a Marxist agenda.

It is a panoply of dark forces. The barbarians are through the gates, inside the parliaments, the universities, the media, and many other institutions.

It is not too late to turn things around. The West must begin by stopping stupid things. It must not allow its own values and paradigms — free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship — to be weaponized against it.

Freedom of speech has always been conceptually difficult. There are usually some restrictions, such as defamation and inciting violence. Some countries include hate speech and racial vilification in those restrictions, but governments have been too cowardly to enforce the law for fear of losing votes. It is as if Jewish victims do not matter.

Jihadists and their deranged Far-Left allies, neither of whom supports free speech when it comes to things they do not like (such as criticism of Islam or mis-gendering), defend their calls for the genocide of Jews under the banner of free expression.

Many Western governments looked stunned. They act as though these extremists have checkmated them with some brilliant argument. They have not. It is simple: Allowing people to agitate publicly for genocide is a stupid thing for a society to do.

Likewise, freedom of assembly. The extremists have claimed this right somehow extends to them being allowed to take over private property, university campuses, and to disrupt the lives of everyone else. These people can group, but allowing them to be so disruptive, especially when inciting violence, is just stupid.

Freedom of worship is also a fundamental right, but that does not mean that people can harm others in the practice of their beliefs. People may believe in a Caliphate, but trying to impose one is sedition. Again, it is outright moronic to give Jihadists the run of the land.

The West has so little self-confidence that it believes that arresting genocide-chanting Jihadists and communists will cause liberalism to collapse. This is backwards. Liberalism will collapse if extremists are allowed to hijack Western states.

Apologists will say that these protestors are only a minority. That is true, but it takes nothing like majority support to hijack a state.

Only seven-to-10 percent of Germans were Nazi party members. About one-in-three Germans voted for the Nazis in the 1933 elections. Meanwhile, Islamists hijacked Iran and turned it into an Islamic Republic in 1979 by taking over the state’s organs, not by winning a popular vote.

Jews are rightly scared. Everyone else should be, too.

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1. Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Melbourne’s Monash University and community organization JCA Sydney