It serves me right: in planning a second part on this topic, I never suspected that the Left’s embrace of anti-Semitism, fact-free excuses for Hamas, and rationalizations against Israel defending itself would metastasize the way it has. I can’t possibly cover all the significant examples now; there are too many. But I’ll do the best I can with some recent low-lights…

• This is what indoctrination in woke victim mentality has wrought: a Harvard Harris Poll shows that a slight majority of 18-24-year-olds, just under half 25-34-year-olds, believe that Hamas’s terror attack is justified. 51% of the rising generation told the pollsters that the the October 7 attacks on civilians, children, babies and hostages “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.”
• Say what you will about Trump (or Nikki Haley), we can be confident of how he would have reacted to this: United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres,  said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” as he referenced “56 years of suffocating occupation” for the Palestinian people. Israel has demanded his removal. New York Sun got it right, saying,

  “The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual. We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that.  There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.”

The US should withhold any payments or funding for the United Nations until he resigns or is replaced.

• “Enemies of the people.” Having quickly announced that Israel had bombed a hospital, The New York Times issued an “Editor’s Note” conceding the paper could have been more careful, saying,“The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”

Many U.S. news sources rushed to report the fake claim by Hamas that Israel targeted a hospital and killed 500, but most have had the decency to admit they botched it. The Times, however, couldn’t quite do that. The Times went on to say it was investigating further, and that the “contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible.”

Lawyer Scott Greenfield’s disgusted reaction: “Plausible? On the one side, there’s the claim of Hamas, a terrorist group that had just raped, kidnapped, murdered and beheaded women, children and the elderly, and had a bit of a public relations problem on their hands, claiming Israel bombed a hospital when it turned out that the hospital was never bombed, but only a courtyard parking lot, and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any claim Hamas made. On the other, United States and Israeli intelligence. Plausible? What the New York Times is relying on to salvage its disgraced integrity is a shift in the burden of proof. Hamas having initially claimed it was Israel, and the NYT having bought the story because it was a major piece of outrage click bait and it gave rise, for the first time, to a substantive basis to claim an equivalence between Hamas’ terrorism and Israel’s response. NYT readers desperately wanted something hard to blame on Israel so they wouldn’t feel stupid trying to equate raping and murdering with the effort to eradicate a terrorist group that used its own people’s babies as shields. NYT reporters too.”

Bingo.

• Score one for Gov. DeSantis: DeSantis ordered the chancellor of the State University System of Florida to deactivate the “Students for Justice in Palestine” group after it sent out a “toolkit” inviting members to aid Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel. Florida law makes it felony to “knowingly provide material support … to a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
• This:

Skokie, of course, is a predominantly Jewish community where the Nazis famously marched in 1977. Another commentator, witnessing the attacks on Jews this week, wrote, “This is being Pro-Israel in 2023.”

• Another “open letter“: Academics, writers, and and other activists pledged their “solidarity” with the “Palestinian resistance,” saying, “We are writers who unequivocally stand with Palestine and its fight for liberation against the illegal occupation of ‘Israel’ and the violent settler colonial apartheid state.” It called upon Americans to “stand in firm, vocal, and unwavering solidarity with Palestinian resistance against their occupation until liberation” by “amplifying Palestinian voices in a time of mass disinformation and silencing; and by openly discussing the occupation in your workplace, home, on social media, in your work.” Activists should  “urge the literary organizations and institutions that you carry affiliation with to take an unwavering public stance in solidarity with Palestinian liberation in your workplace and online.” The group called for a boycott against  “Zionist literary organizations” including PEN America.

In reaction, conservative activist and investigative journalist Christopher Rufo commented,“Our academic institutions have been deranged. Our professors are now openly calling for blood.” Well, an astounding number of them are, at least. This is how you get the mobs of pro-Hamas supporters at the Ivy League schools and others.

• I have a lot more, but I’ll close with this: Contrarian iconoclast comedian Dave Chappelle, venturing into areas he knows little about (and not for the first time) decided it would be hilarious to announce at a Boston appearance that Israel was committing war crimes,  and that the US was guilty of aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians. (Maybe Chappelle felt he needed to get back on the good side of the Left after it excoriated him for ridiculing the “T’s” in LGTBQ. ) While some in the audience applauded and shouted “Free Palestine!”—signature significance for a reflex idiot— others walked out of the show.  One witness told the Daily Mail, “The audience was cheering Chappelle on during his tirade. I was sick….We walked out and met up with many other Jews leaving the show. Never in my life have I felt so unsafe and so fearful of what I was witnessing.”

Later,  Chappelle’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that he “denies being in Boston.”

Added: Jim Treacher writes on substack, “In the last two weeks, we’ve seen dentists and doctors and lawyers and bankers and cartoonists and government bureaucrats fired for their outspoken anti-Semitism. Only one profession keeps getting away with it: journalists.”