Evil, Not Ignorance, Produces Antisemitism – And That’s The Key To Combatting It

For decades, governments, Jewish organizations and other institutions have pushed education about antisemitism and particularly the Holocaust to combat the oldest hatred.

This approach has failed. Decades of societal education have failed to reduce antisemitism's worst manifestations.

Waves of harassment, intimidation and violent attacks against Jews, their property, and their institutions in the U.S. and Europe over the last two decades, and particularly since the Palestinians' October 7, 2023 pogrom that murdered 1,200 Israelis, establish this beyond any reasonable doubt.

This failure should not be a surprise.

The goal of education is to address ignorance. But ignorance does not produce antisemitism.

If ignorance produced antisemitism, institutions that are full of highly educated people, well-versed in the history of antisemitism, like Ivy League universities, would not have long histories of virulent anti-Jewish actions.

Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in the 1920s pursued rules to limit the number of Jewish students admitted.

As Holocaust historian Rafael Medoff has detailed, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler in the 1930s invited Nazi Germany's ambassador to speak on campus and had Columbia participate in the 550th anniversary celebration of the University of Heidelberg – after that it had adopted a Nazi curriculum, dismissed Jewish faculty and hosted the burning of Jewish authors' books.

More recently, 179 Columbia professors in October 2023 signed a letter asserting that the Palestinians' mass murder on “October 7, 2023 … represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years.” (In addition to the disgustingly twisted characterization of the Palestinians' campaign of atrocities, it should be noted that the last Israeli soldier left Gaza in 2005.)

Many U.S. and European government institutions, also full of highly educated people, further confirm that ignorance is not the problem: They discriminate against Jews; fail to protect Jews' civil rights; attempt to prevent Israel from defending itself; and pursue boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions to isolate and strangle it economically and culturally.

Instead, as with most crime, it is evil that produces antisemitism.

Recognizing this fact points to the key to more effectively combatting it: Attack it with the strongest tools used to fight crime and other behavior produced by evil.

For harassment, intimidation, and violence against Jews and damage to their property and institutions, this means prosecuting, convicting, incarcerating and fining perpetrators to the fullest extent authorized by law.

For abridgement of civil rights, this means lawsuits by victims for damages and injunctive relief and government enforcement actions.

It also means not arresting but then dismissing charges, and not applying but then rescinding employment and educational discipline, as has happened with almost all the violent antisemitic offenders at Columbia and other university campuses. This appeasement is worse than insufficient. It sends the message that antisemitic misconduct is acceptable and encourages more of it.

Steps to preempt the development of antisemitism also must be redoubled. Parents, other family members, friends, schools, and other civil institutions must devote far more effort to sharply emphasizing to children the difference between right and wrong and the consequences of each. Children must be taught at an early age that it is wrong to hate people who look different, have different beliefs, or live their lives differently.

The critical point is to punish perpetrators of antisemitic misconduct and stop turning the other cheek.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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