This is how a pogrom starts

When Hamas terrorists blasted into Israel on Oct. 7 from Gaza, slaughtering more than 1,400 men, women and children from more than 30 different countries, the cascade of events to follow was depressingly predictable. So predictable, in fact, that it’s impossible Hamas didn’t know how this was going to play out.

Given Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netenyahu’s right-wing, war-hawk platform, it’s a given that the Israeli response would be thunderous. Indeed, Israel was only a week away from a transformative agreement with Saudi Arabia, and it’s clear Hamas — backed by the despotic regime of Iran — timed the attack in order to derail those fruitful negotiations that would have only further solidified peace around the Middle East.

And to that end, the Hamas political objective was successful as talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel have stalled. Sadly, Hamas cares not a whit for the population they were elected in 2006 to govern following the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip — the Palestinian population of more than 2 million people in that region.

Shortly after the election in 2006 — which saw a number of Fatah leaders also elected (Fatah is the governing body of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank) — Hamas staged a bloody coup to depose their local competition in a civil war in 2007 and seized complete control over Gaza. And since then, despite billions of dollars in assistance funneling into Gaza yearly from around the globe — Hamas has focused only on their war machine, sacrificing any intentions of nation-building at the altar of hate for their neighbors to the north and east (despite the fact that Egypt also blockades Gaza to the south).

But regardless of the contemporary political history in Gaza, what’s far more sobering is the unabashed anti-Semitic run-amok on our own shores. Since Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League is tracking a nearly 400% surge of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States as compared to the same time frame in 2022. Physical assaults on people simply for wearing a yarmulke and walking on the sidewalk. People beaten for wearing a star of David around their neck. Calls to “kill all the Jews!.” Within the last 26 hours of writing this column, Jewish students were locked in a library on campus at Cooper Union college for their own protection from a “pro-Palestinian” rally occuring on the grounds. Threats deemed credible enough to shut down the Kosher dining hall at Cornell, driving Jewish students to hide in their dorm rooms.

Abroad, a synagogue in Berlin was firebombed with molotov cocktails. A crowd of hundreds of Muslim aggressors stormed the Dagestan airport in Russia, looking to lynch any Israeli Jews onboard a plane landing that had taken off from Tel Aviv airport in Israel. In France — with the third largest population of Jews in the world after the U.S. and Israel, entire neighborhoods are all but shut-off completely as reports of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults targeting Jews are up more than 500%.

So much of this can be directly attributed to the incredibly egregious and performative escalation of rhetoric online where hatred for Jews has become a daily trending topic on all platforms. Where the progressive left once banged a steady drumbeat of “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism!” mantras, they’ve all but completely abandoned that stance, sinking into a gross display of base hatred for Jews regardless of where they live or any connection they may have to Israel.

This is how a pogrom starts.

This is how a Holocaust starts.