Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.

Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.”

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You don’t understand anti-Semitism?

You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.

Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.

In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.

This difference issue finally led to Zionism and the desire to create a national homeland for the Jewish people where they would be the majority and would not constantly have to answer to others who regarded them as “the other.” The allies took it upon themselves to do this in the wake of WW2, but certain of the Jews, who had fought on the Allied side, mostly those militants known as Irgun, decided that this wasn’t happening fast enough and resorted to their own campaign of terror against the British Mandate even before the war was over, blowing up British police stations. Prior to that and during the war they did in fact ambush and murder Arabs. Finally, the British decided to turn the problem over to the United Nations, which of course could do little, and that’s when Israel comes into being.

You know the rest. Israel started to achieve great things, from growing orchards of apples and exporting juice we drink here in the US to formulating the antibiotic “Z-pack” that relieves all kinds of infections. Meantime the Arab nations relied on oil and not much else. Israel also repeatedly threw back Arab attempts to destroy it, and quite sensibly refused to allow those Arabs who had walked out of Israel in 1948, rejecting it and expecting the Arab states to wipe it out, to return with their murderous motives.

The Arabs hate the Jews partly because their own scriptures tell them to hate them, partly because the Jews have achieved the democratic success they just can’t seem to master, partly because they resent the fact that their own days of empire are over, and because the Jews defeated the only post-WWII attempt to bring that empire back in the form of the United Arab Republic, which didn’t last.

So the Arabs, especially the Palestinian Arabs who no one else wants any part of, claim the mantle of the oppressed and cry “oppressor!” against Israel. They justify murder and terror saying that is the only way they can make their voices heard. Understandably, the Israelis have no use for this and retaliate with the one thing that enemy understands: force.

This only ends one way.

In the meantime, the last generation of U.S. college students have been fed a steady diet of oppressed=good, oppressor=bad, people of color=good, white people=bad. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that they grab right onto this theme in the wake of Black Lives Matter, and have made it the latest, greatest popular thing and an excuse to basically throw everything else aside and make general nuisances of themselves.

College life as originally envisioned was disciplined and difficult. You were there to learn a subject, maybe a profession, and learn how to function in society. The only folks learning how to be soldiers were those on ROTC scholarships. Few envision it that way any more except the engineering and premed students.

To the rest, at its most harmless it is about getting drunk or getting stoned and getting as much sex as you can; at its worst college is about becoming a destructive activist for the latest leftist cause and throwing any kind of rules to the curb. Why spend hours in the library and go to bed by 11 when instead you can be smashing windows, blocking roads, hitting strangers over the head and feeling justified for doing it? Why try to weigh the pros and cons of different ideas and try to make a persuasive case, when it is so much easier to believe, act on your beliefs, and decide that those who don’t share them need to convert, leave, or die, and that it doesn’t matter much which?

The thing is, these beliefs and attitudes are nothing new. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only things that change are the names and the faces. Tyrants always want the same thing by the same means, but in every age they put a new face on the alleged goals. It’s always about pressing down their will on someone else, by whatever means necessary and giving any reason, or no reason, for doing it.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that anti-Semitism, something we thought went permanently into the dustbin of history after the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed for public view, has come full circle and is now becoming trendy again. It never really went away. Anti-Semitism just became the province of Muslim extremists and racists in the mold of the KK, and nwow it’s going mainstream again.

It also shouldn’t come completely as a surprise that this nation has gotten to the point where one party is resorting to the same tactics it decried a century and more ago in other countries (read up on the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920) and justifying it. The idea of simply removing a political opponent from the ballot or locking someone thought politically dangerous up on unsupported charges never went away, but there were just enough honest people on both sides of the aisle to say “No, we don’t do that here,” and make it stick. Now apparently not only many current leaders but most of the rising generation think it’s perfectly ok to adopt these tactics, if you hate the other side enough or think it is enough of a threat

An old Chinese insult disguised as a pleasantry is “May you live in interesting times.” I think we’re about to head into the most interesting times in a quarter century in the coming year. Cross your fingers, or pray if you are so inclined, that we come out of it with our country and ourselves relatively intact.

That’s all from this neck of the woods. See you in 2024.