Last Thursday, Shlomo Noginski, a Chabad rabbi, was stabbed eight times outside a Jewish school in the Brighton neighbourhood of Boston, just across the River Charles from where I live. His attacker, 24-year-old Khaled Awad, may have tried to kidnap Noginski at gunpoint. When Noginski ran off, Awad chased him and stabbed him.
Noginski survived, miraculously. Awad is being held without bail. It turns out that he was recently charged with battery and theft in Florida and sent to a mental health facility. He entered the US from Egypt on a student visa in 2019, failed to stay enrolled, and remained in the country illegally. His ex-roommate at the University of Florida says that he was “violent” and “very much antisemitic”.
A few days earlier, in Winthrop, just east of Boston, a white supremacist stole a truck and shot to death two black people, one an Air Force veteran, the other a retired state trooper. The police have found “antisemitic and racist statements” on his computer. They suspect he was on his way to shoot up Winthrop’s synagogue, Temple Tiferet Israel.
Meanwhile, at our local finishing school, Harvard University, the student Jewish centre has been vandalised: smashed window, swastika painted on the door, Palestinian flag ziptied to the handle. Don’t worry. This is anti-Zionism, not antisemitism — just like they teach them at the university.
Harvard is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge is so strenuously PC that it posts no-parking notices in eight languages. In May, following the Israel-Hamas flare-up, a similar excess of piety led the city council to debate a motion for boycotting and divesting from Israel. A grassroots campaign recruited local residents to argue the case for Israel in the council chamber. The council adopted a substitute resolution which didn’t name Israel but which could be used later to assign it to the outer darkness.
Quinton Zondervan, the green-tech entrepreneur and first-term councillor who proposed the motion, reckons there are “parallels between Black liberation struggles in the US and Palestinian struggle in Israel”. An immigrant from Surinam, Zondervan is married to a Harvard professor and speaks several languages. He is especially fluent in the language of fatuous hypocrisy. He claims that “both antisemitism and Israeli apartheid are rooted in racism, and we must secure both to secure Palestinian and Jewish safety”.
We hear similar cant from congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, the local representative of The Squad, that group of young Democratic congresswomen whose chief adornment is Ilhan Omar. She was in the news too last week. Not for comparing the actions of the US and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban; that was the week before. This time, Omar told her Jewish colleagues in Congress that if they think comments like “Israel has hypnotised the world, may Allah awaken the people” might possibly be a tad antisemitic, that’s because, being Jews who support Israel, they haven’t been “equal partners for justice”.
In May, Pressley told the House of Representatives that “Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America — there is no acceptable form of resistance”. When a wave of street attacks on Jews broke out, Pressley washed her hands in an ‘All Lives Matter’ tweet: “I strongly condemn the rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia…The struggle for liberation and justice requires all of us to reject hate and division in any form.”
After the stabbing of Rabbi Noginsky, Pressley parped out the usual universalist nonsense: “Antisemitism is a clear and present threat to our communities.” But it isn’t.
Antisemitism is a threat to Jewish people. For left-wing Democrats like Pressley, it’s a strategy for getting out the vote and building community relations by scapegoating Israel. Like Pressley said, “liberation and justice” means rejecting “hate and division in any form”. What are more divisive and hateful than nationalism and capitalism, at both of which the Jews are too good by half? Pressley, by the way, is relatively moderate compared to the rest of the Squad. And the rest of the Square is relatively moderate compared to the attitudes of the Democratic left. Their obsession with Jews and Israel is eating into the party — with the consent of its leaders.
The plutocrats who run the Democratic Party have adopted the politics of race cynically, because they reckon it will give them a permanent majority. Imagine, if you can, a bland Labourite like Keir Starmer actively campaigning for a sinister racist like Jeremy Corbyn. Then imagine — and this is the difficult bit — 70 per cent of British Jews voting Labour anyway. This is what American Jews are doing.
If the turkeys keep voting for Christmas, we’re all going to get stuffed.
Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator’s World edition
