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It's been a disquieting time for well-meaning liberals who have been suddenly confronted with the realization that their own side is rife with fanatics and haters.
The explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling on campuses and the streets after October 7 has shaken left-of-center people who didn't know, or want to know, who their allies were.
The long-standing presumption of progressives has been that their own side is identified with righteousness -- with tolerance, reason and the finest of American traditions -- while conservatives are hateful troglodytes who aren't just wrong, but ill-intentioned.
The various -isms and -phobias were allegedly the exclusive province of the Right, including anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jews was for people carrying tiki torches at the University of Virginia, for white nationalists obsessed with the so-called Great Replacement Theory, for David Duke.
There's no doubt that there are neo-Nazis and right-wing Jew-haters, who deserve to be ostracized and are, in some cases, truly dangerous.
But they are marginalized. They don't have tenured positions at prestigious universities. They aren't capable of mustering sizable crowds on campuses and in cities across America. They aren't organizing morally repugnant statements that engender wide-ranging debate in the political mainstream.
No, that's what the Left's haters do.
All that's missing from some of the pro-Gaza rallies are the torches and the high-and-tight haircuts. But the underlying sentiment is closely related. The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us"; the pro-Gaza protestors chant, "Free Palestine from the river to the sea."
For both, the Jews are a malignant force. For both, there is a favored population over and above the Jews (white Europeans for the neo-Nazis; Arabs for the Hamas sympathizers). For both, the Jews must be fiercely resisted. The white nationalists must fight not to be replaced by the Jews allegedly conspiring against their demographic interests, while the Free Palestine activists want to use any means necessary to literally replace the Jews living in Israel.
Progressive beliefs about the geography of hatred in the U.S. have also been exploded. Red America is supposed to be backward and intolerant, and Blue America open-minded and welcoming. It's not true. It wasn't some rural area no one heard of that had to warn Jews to stay away from a kosher dining hall, but Cornell University, a member of the Ivy League in good standing ensconced in deep blue Ithaca, New York.
The arc of history is not bending toward justice in this context, by the way. Thanks in large part to their miseducation in institutions overwhelmingly run by progressives, young people are more inclined to anti-Israel opinions than their elders. If they've been taught to hate the West, is it any surprise that they hate the West?