Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Monday and Tuesday marked the 88th anniversary of something called Kristallnacht that occurred in November of 1938 in Nazi Germany.
What was it? It translates as Crystal Night, or the Night of the Broken Glass. And what it was was a pre-planned massive demonstration against Jewish shop owners in Vienna, Austria, that had been part now of the Third Reich due to the Anschluss, as well as Berlin and the major cities, but mostly in Berlin and Vienna.
And what happened? A 17-year-old Polish Jewish teenager had killed a German ambassador in France. That was what they were waiting for, any excuse. And out poured the SS and the SA and all of the shock troops of the Third Reich. Up to that point, Hitler had been very, very careful not to scare away Western support—he had had the Olympics in ’36—about what his ultimate plans for Jews were. But he felt at this point, 1938, given his successes, diplomatic, that it was time to be overt.
And what was that? What happened? People poured out in the streets from the Nazi Party, and they terrorized synagogues and shops. They deliberately identified Jews. They killed hundreds of Jews. They injured them. They put thousands in camps. And they destroyed their businesses. When the owners who had survived and filed claims, they even stole their insurance money.
So from that point on, there was no going back. That was a straight linear road to Auschwitz and Treblinka years later.
Okay, so that was an odious moment in Western civilization. And what are we doing as I speak? Today, there is a Philadelphia bike ride that’s organized by a lot of leftist groups and mostly, to be honest, socialist Islamicist groups. And they want to ride their bikes through the streets of downtown Philadelphia, and they want to identify Jewish stores and mostly restaurants. And then they’re going to demonstrate, harass, point them out, and who knows what level of violence will occur unless there’s sufficient law enforcement. They have no idea whether the owners of these restaurants are pro or against Israel. It has nothing to do with—it has everything to do with they’re Jewish.
Now, why are they doing this? They’re doing this because we have lowered the bar on what is acceptable.
Take Mr. Abdul El-Sayed. He’s the new senator-elect from Michigan. [The uncle of] Hasan Piker, [who he campaigned with], ran an ad, and it said in the ad that Jews were responsible, i.e., Zionists and Israel were responsible for the price hikes on bananas and food products, eggs and things.
Think about that. Because of aid to Israel, about three and a half billion. Three and a half billion to Israel, which will cease entirely at the end of the year, is one percent of the foreign aid budget. It is one-twentieth of one percent of the federal budget. That is a complete lie, complete lie, that that minuscule amount has anything to do with inflation. And they know it.
Hasan Piker recently said he’s the new guru, the fixer, the new James Carville of the Democratic Party. What did he say? He said if Jews want to support Israel as a group—and there’s no evidence that they do, because I think you could argue that the majority of Jews in the last midterm election, even after these anti-Semitic incidents, voted for candidates that could not be pro-Israel. They wouldn’t—if they were pro-Israel in this election, they were done for most part. But nevertheless, he said if Jews support Israel, they’re gonna be targeted, and this is what happens.
So if you elect a senator who has an ad and he won’t disavow it, and it’s clearly antisemitic, and you have the guru of the party, the young party, the socialist Islamic’s base, say that Jews were gonna be targeted, what do you expect will happen? And now we’re out in the open.
Let me just finish by reminding people that the reason that we support Israel, it’s the only consensual society. It’s the only democracy in the entire 500-million-person Middle East. Let me ask all of you who are saying, “Free Palestine, free Gaza.” It’s mostly about Gaza.
Gaza, after 2005, had no Israelis. They wouldn’t allow Jews to live there. There are two million Arab citizens inside Israel. If Jews wanted to become citizens of Gaza, they couldn’t do it. It was an apartheid state. It was an Arab-only state. Israel had no presence in Gaza. It was supplying its power, much of its fuel, much of its water, much of its trade.
If you go to Gaza and looked at the so-called fence that was breached on Oct. 7, it’s not as impressive as the Egyptian fence. In other words, if Gaza was being oppressed by Jews, why did Egypt have a greater barrier between Gaza and Egypt than Israel did between Gaza and—why were there 20,000 people coming across and making three times the wage that they could in Gaza until Oct. 7?
Another thing, just as a thought experiment. Let’s say any of the people who are on the bikes this weekend pointing out Jewish stores and saying, “Free Palestine,” I challenge you to do two things.
One, go to any Arab country and stand on the street and say, “I am a Muslim and I renounce Islam, and I am a citizen of Kuwait, of Egypt, of Syria, of Saudi Arabia, and I detest the government, and I say they’re corrupt.” And see what happens to you.
One of three things will happen immediately. Either a mob will kill you, or you will be put in jail, or, worse, you will be exiled.
Try the same thing in Israel. Go to Israel and say, “I hate the Netanyahu government, and I’m a Jew who am ashamed, and I’m going to be an apostate and become a Muslim.” What’s gonna happen to you? Nothing. Nothing. It’s a free society.
I’ll finish with this. There’s a hit show called “Fauda.” It’s about the Israeli intelligence services battling radical Palestinians. And the reason that it’s either the first or second rated show in places like Egypt and the Gulf States and Jordan, throughout the 500-million-person Middle East, is that it doesn’t show Palestinian terrorists and the people who support them as completely evil, and it doesn’t show the Israelis as saints or perfect people. In other words, it tries to explore why the Palestinians are killing innocent Israelis and why the Israelis react in the way they do. Don’t listen to me. Listen to the 500-million-person Middle East that likes what they see, and they’re fascinated by it. Why? Because they could not film that anywhere in an Arab country.
If you said to the Arab world, “Make a picture about the Israeli-Palestinian fight,” what would they do? It would be completely censored, and it would be one view only, and it would resemble what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza learn every day in their schools. But the reason that “Fauda” is very popular is it’s a product of a free, self-critical society.
And the idea now that we hate Jews, and we hate a democratic Israel, and we have not just a desire to go out and target stores in Philadelphia, we have a desire to do it on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, one of the most reprehensible and shameful episodes in the West.
And so warped have we become that we take a moral travesty of the past and we celebrate it by repeating it, if we could, in the present.
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