Since August 2017, Charlottesville has been synonymous with bigotry. Joe Biden claims the clashes inspired him to run for the Presidency. The Justice Department announced white supremacists are the most significant domestic threat. If you’re Jewish, this is where threats to you are coming from.

The infamous touch-light Neo-Nazi march through the University of Virginia Campus consisted of somewhere between 100 and 250 participants. As I pointed out at the time, the melee the next day with protesters arose from the mishandling of the situation by the authorities. The after-incident reports support this view. Still, Charlottesville remained the template for antisemitism.

This view now seems quaint. Instead of a few hundred, at best, marching to express anti-Jewish bigotry, we have thousands of students parading their antisemitism on our most prestigious campuses. Tens of thousands rallied against the existence of Israel in the nation’s capital. Instead of worrying about a small number of mental cases on the fringe, Jews now fear their neighbors, especially their children. 

The media focuses on reports of non-existent hospital bombings and mortality figures supplied by Hamas while hardly mentioning the 200+ hostages held by the terrorists. This oversight, even though many of the captives are American citizens, is puzzling.

Is it any wonder Jews no longer feel safe in the U.S.? The fear isn’t misplaced. Crimes against Jews are exploding. In New York, they’re up over 200%. Some Jewish students had to hide in a library for safety.

These demonstrators are on the left rather than the usual few misfits pictured on the right. How did this happen? What are we teaching our children? Some blame online apps, such as TIK-TOK, but if misinformation is flying around online, are the schools setting things straight or adding to the falsehoods? 

Much of Academia is pushing diversity, equality, and inclusion programs (DEI), but it seems it doesn’t include Jews. Of course, defending quotas on Asians at leading Universities up to the Supreme Court recalls quotas originated to exclude Jews. Applying harmful exemptions to others is easy. Using them for the next group is more manageable once you make dangerous exceptions to the out-of-favor. 

Whether it’s holding Jews or Asians to different admission standards or Israel to much higher standards of war conduct, these are forms of discrimination. No other country is held responsible for the deaths of civilians used as human shields. The Rule is clear: “It is prohibited to seize or to use the presence of persons protected by the Geneva Conventions as human shields to render military sites immune from enemy attacks or to prevent reprisals during an offensive (GCIV Arts. 28, 49; API Art. 51.7; APII Art.” Hamas puts civilians between the Israelis and themselves.

The present Gazan Al-Shifa Hospital circumstance is a case in point. We know Hamas has a command post under the Hospital. Patients and medical personnel serving to protect Hamas are a blatant violation. 

Yet Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sulivan, says we don’t want firefights in this Hospital. If the Administration is so concerned about the Hospital’s innocents, it could send in one of the hospital ships we have in the area to care for them. This action would allow the Israelis to occupy it and show the world the Hamas command structure beneath it. 

Revealing, in no uncertain terms, how Hamas uses civilians as human shields would place Israel higher in world opinion while discrediting Hamas. Why isn’t the Biden administration on board?

There are many theories of how Antisemitism has spread throughout our educational system. Still, now that it has reared its ugly head, we need to stop it in its tracks before we’d have a Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party in 1938 Germany.

The awakening of college alums and donors is a good start, but we must also look at what we teach K-12. The overwhelming pro-Hamas information online has to be challenged., but is this all part of a philosophy permeating the whole educational system? If so, exposing it along with those promoting it must start now. We don’t want to be raising little monsters.

The one thing we shouldn’t do is censor the proponents of bigotry. That’s not who we are. Make them defend their hateful ideas, but remove them only if they’re using their positions to censor or harm others. We must be the ones protecting free speech. 

It has been my experience that anti-semites are used to echo chambers rather than defending themselves before knowledgeable people. We must force them out into the open and defend the undeniable. A media interested in real journalism should’ve done this yeoman service, but that’s not the case. For instance, The New York Times boasts of being the Newspaper of Record but gets its information from terrorists. 

Many people in the U.S. feel something has gone wrong with many of our once-respected institutions, but our natural optimism wouldn’t let us believe the rot had gone so far. We now live with the shock of knowing it’s worse than almost anyone imagined. We are closer to midnight than we thought, making corrections, something we should’ve started yesterday.