They Always Come for the Jews First

But They Never Stop There

Say what you want about the “bad old days” in the 1950s, but America was stronger then because Americans stood up for the right things. Sometimes we were slow to get things right, but when the time came to act, Americans acted. People were brave back then in ways they are not brave today. As my grandmother used to say, people “didn’t take no guff.”

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and that “separate but equal” education was inherently unequal and unfair. The case is known as Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka. This Supreme Court ruling overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson rule that said it was legal to have separate public facilities for whites and Blacks, such as schools, providing the facilities were equal.

Like all landmark cases, Brown v. Board of Education involves actual people. The girl in question was Linda Brown, a little girl who was prohibited from stepping foot inside an all-white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Her father, Oliver Brown, filed the lawsuit arguing that Black schools were not equal to white schools, thus violating the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution mandating equal protection to all citizens. By the time Brown’s case wound its slow painstaking course all the way to the nine justices in Washington, D.C., four other lawsuits joined it and all were woven together into the case we call Brown v. Board of Education.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time was Fred Vinson (a Democrat), who had been quite vocal in his support of Plessy v. Ferguson. Right before Brown v. Board of Education came to the Supreme Court docket, Vinson died and was replaced by Earl Warren (a Republican). Warren wrote, “separate but equal as no place” in our school system.

The Supreme Court is useful in saying what should happen under our Constitution, but they’re pretty hopeless in mapping out the logistics of the transition. A series of legal battles ensued about how exactly a completely segregated public school system should be abruptly integrated, particularly in a nation where racists often held power and some states decided they were not going to comply. Arkansas held demonstrations to prevent Black students from entering the white school, which was their right under the Supreme Court. The then-governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus (a Democrat) was going to call out the National Guard to protect one white high school from a band of nine high school kids—who came to be known as the “Little Rock Nine.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (again, a Republican), called out the 101^st Airborne with Executive Order 10730. The racist protestors showed up in force: they rioted, screamed at the high school students, spat on them if they could, and generally made pigs of themselves. Eisenhower met with Faubus and got Faubus to call off the National Guard, but the mobs grew. The Little Rock Nine had to enter and exit the school by side and secret entrances under police protections, but enter and exist they did. When a large riot broke out, the police escorted the Little Rock Nine out of the school to safety. Here is old Orval, the man who ordered the National Guard to stand up to nine high school kids.

This messy story goes on, but in the end, schools were integrated, the riots stopped, and today it all seems like a bad dream, if it is remembered at all.

Which brings me to the antisemitic riots going on at our nation’s colleges. As Biden doles out more and more student loan forgiveness (an unconstitutional act), we taxpayers should be enraged to know that we are paying for the tuition of many of these super-privileged demonstrators who are shutting down campuses to demand universities divest from Israel. Tuition at some of these schools runs $70,000 to $90,000 a year. The kids who attend these schools aren’t the kids who grow up in inner-city apartments or small-town trailer parks. These aren’t the children of plumbers or electricians or truck drivers our nation depends on, these are the spawn of our super-elites. And they are demonstrating not just pro-Palestine but literally pro-HAMAS (designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization) and even more alarmingly, anti-Israel and anti-Jew.

The whole matter is the aftermath of an unprovoked October 7, 2023 attack by Gaza (HAMAS) on Israel. Numerous people, including innocent civilians at a music festival, children, and even babies, were slaughtered. There are horrific images of a naked body of an obviously viciously abused Jewish woman being driven through the streets while HAMAS thugs hit and spit on the body with contempt. Hostages were taken in the attack, many of whom are long dead. We don’t even know how many hostages were taken, who they were (some were/are Americans), and what has happened to them. It is thought HAMAS took at least 250 hostages in the initial attack. In November 2023, HAMAS released over 100 hostages as part of a four-day cease-fire deal. According to Israeli sources (and Israeli intelligence is very good at this sort of thing, much better than our own intelligence agencies), there are at least 130 more hostages, but a good number of them are likely no longer be alive. Some families have waited since October 7, 2023, with no news at all—were their relatives killed in the attack? Were they taken hostage? If they were hostages, where are they and are they still alive? No one knows, not even our vaunted Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It is thought—but cannot be confirmed—that there are at least 5 American hostages still in Gaza. Yet Biden is quick to party in Manhattan with Clinton and Obama and he recently yucked it up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in D.C. and then did an interview with the decrepit Howard Stern. Ironically, Stern—who is Jewish—speaks adoringly about Joe Biden.

Can you imagine President Carter (who faced an Iranian hostage crisis of his own), partying and fundraising and visiting shock-jocks for a radio show while hostages were being held? Yet Biden to my knowledge has never publicly addressed the American hostages in Gaza. Most Americans do not even know there are Americans or any other hostages in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the progressive left has decided that Israel was the aggressor on October 7 and that Palestine is the victim. Never mind that Palestine (HAMAS) launched the attack. The real criminal in this equation is Israel. This has caused leftists who could not find Palestine on a map to start marching, protesting, impeding traffic, and demonstrating. This has led the PRIDE people to come out in force for HAMAS, which is ironic, since HAMAS is not particularly supportive of the PRIDE agenda. Our progressive sweethearts in Congress (Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortex, Pressley, Bowman and others) have all literally rallied around the Palestinian flag and demanded sanctions against Israel. Israel must be punished for the crime of allowing itself to be attacked.

No one seems to remember that there are still hostages and some of them are Americans. Israel is still at fault and must be punished. HAMAS must be celebrated.

At Columbia University in New York (where Obama once studied, allegedly, although no one ever saw him there) student protestors have barricaded buildings, flown Palestinian flags, and essentially shut down the school. Same thing is going on at Harvard and other Poison Ivy League schools and miscellaneous high-dollar universities around the country. Alan Dershowitz has commented that these are organized, externally funded, and choreographed protests rather than organic political demonstrations, and they sure look like that. Students suddenly had pup tents to camp out on campus, preprinted signs were available, the crowds had plenty of food and water. The protestors want, in part, that their universities divest from Israel which is a complicated way to say that Israel should be canceled. Columbia University, as an example, has simply closed down. Classes, if they are held at all, are going to take place on Zoom. Similar things have occurred the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, and California State Polytechnic. This list is not exhaustive.

The alarming thing in all of this is that Jewish students are being harassed. A lawsuit was just filed by a student against the trustees of Columbia University saying that the pro-Palestine demonstrators are using or threatening violence against Jewish students, intimidating, bullying, and harassing Jewish students Jewish students and faculty. The violent acts alleged are: punching, shoving, spitting, impeding access of Jewish students and faculty from access to classes and movement around campus, along with verbal harassment, including calls for death.

Just so you don’t think this is histrionic, one of the most frequently used verbal assaults is the chant, “Death to the Jews.” Columbia student Khymani James has stated on social media earlier this year, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” adding “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The New York Times reported that students at Jewish Theological Seminary, a school affiliated with Columbia University in New York, report being fearful about even being on campus and band together with non-Jews in large groups for protection.

Remember the old musical Cabaret, where the Hitler Youth sing, “Tomorrow belongs to me!” That’s just what Columbia University protestors are cheering, saying, “The world belongs to the people, and the future belongs to us!” Has a real Third Reich vibe.

A student at the University of California at Santa Barbara says that the school’s multicultural center now bears sign that reads, “Zionists Not Allowed.” When Jewish protestors at Columbia went out among the pro-Palestine groups and held up an Israeli flag amid the protestors, the pro-Palestinian crowd held up large black sheets to make sure no one could see them and then they changed, “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” Sounds like when jubilant Nazis burned down the Reichstag.

Apologists for the pro-Palestine protestors claim they are not antisemitic—oh, no, far from it—they are specifically anti-Zionist. Yet this distinction is a difficult one to parse and many Jewish people consider Zionism part of their ethnic, cultural, and religious identity. Some non-Jewish people are Zionists but are rarely the target of the wrath of these protestors. Conversely, there are small groups of Jews who are not Zionists—many in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community not only oppose Zionism, they don’t even recognize the nation of Israel. This is a curious and tiny minority who feel that Israel should exist as a nation only when God supernaturally returns the Jewish people to Israel. They argue that the current state of Israel is a political entity, borne of human effort and therefore illegitimate. This is not a large movement and these ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists are not particularly politically active or even politically visible.

The same universities who once advocated so passionately for diversity, equity, and inclusion are now demanding Jews get out. These once-respected institutions at one time sought to allow diverse ethnicities on campus, but today they demand Jews leave. They speak out for “safe spaces” and freak out if somebody like Matt Walsh shows up on campus since he challenges some of their pro-trans orthodoxy, yet they are now saying things that would make Hitler applaud. There is so much in these actions that is reminiscent of the Third Reich, that Alan Dershowitz, who taught at Harvard for 50 years, says that Harvard is now “Mein Kampus.”

A Jewish professor named Shai Davidai at Columbia University was told he could no longer enter the campus because of “safety concerns.” Professor Davidai was trying to organize a nonviolent “stand up to terrorism” protest at the university, so authorities there deactivated his keycard and told him he could stay home. When Professor Davidai—who is employed by the university— inquired about this, he was told that the university could not protect his safety because he was Jewish. “This is 1938,” the Professor Davidai observed, adding he only wanted to organize a peaceful sit-in to represent the other point of view. Instead, he was told that, being a Jew, he was undesirable and should get out.

It is very telling that the pro-Palestinian protestors have pretty much free range of these campuses, but a counter-protest organized as a sit-in by a Jewish professor was deemed a security threat that could only be quelled by expelling the Jew.

These two stories—Brown v. Board of Education and the pro-Palestine rallies at college campuses— are related, because they illustrate the progressive cowardice of our nation, specifically the craven Democrat party in power. At issue is not the right to protest which is enshrined in our Constitution. These pro-Palestine activities in our cities and universities often exceed the bounds of protests to become riots. Certainly, if January 6 was an “insurrection,” these pro-Palestine events are dangerous and seditious riots.

Real protestors march around and hold up signs; they don’t shut down universities or business and they don’t threaten to kill people. They do not impede traffic. They do not demand deaths of individuals (that’s terrorism, when a political cause considers civilians fair game). These are terrorist riots, at least some of them. But the real issue is that they have so quickly devolved from protesting the Israeli response to an attack by HAMAS into a personal attack on specific Jews. What began as pro-Palestine quickly became anti-Jew. Antisemitism opposes all things Jewish, including culture and politics and organizations; anti-Jew is the targeted attack on individual people for the sole “crime” of being Jewish.

While many Jewish students and faculty are understandably reticent to speak out, there are Jewish students and faculty who have reported being bullied, harassed, insulted, and blocked from attending classes in the wake of these terrorist riots. Some have been asked to stay off campus, allegedly for their own safety. It is funny how the rioters demand Jews get off campus and the university is quick to comply, saying it’s for the sake of “safety.”

We didn’t do that in the 1950s with school desegregation. In the wake of Brown v. The Board of Education, we sent the military to Little Rock, Arkansas, to assure that some Black high school students could attend classes at a white high school. The governor of Arkansas first foolishly sent out the National Guard to keep nine high school kids out, and President Eisenhower, a military man by trade and mindset, sent out the 101^st Airborne Division. (The lesson here: don’t bring out the National Guard when you’re having a fight with a World War II general.)

Was this scary? I can hardly imagine how terrifying school must have been for the Little Rock Nine, but they attended. The stupid racist rioters came out in force, but the military made sure that the Supreme Court decision was honored. It took the military and many days, but the Supreme Court decision was upheld. Eisenhower did not back down, and God love him for that. Today, schools in America are integrated and no one thinks much what drama took place to get us to this point.

Now they’re coming after the Jews. It’s the same playbook but with the Jews cast as the villains. The riots are allegedly about a political event half a world away, but the people who are being roughed up and asked to get off campus are Jews. Jews who have every right to be on campus, to go to class, to attend the schools where they pay their tuition or the places where they work. And the people wanting the Jews ousted from campus likely know nothing about Middle Eastern politics. (It doesn’t matter—it was never about Middle Eastern politics!)

They come for the Jews first. But they never stop there.

We need to remember the bold spirit of fairness and law that was embodied by President Eisenhower when he sent out an elite military unit to make sure nine kids got safely in and out of high school. That’s the kind of response we need here. We need to protect the rights of all students on campus, including Jewish students who are doing nothing more than going about their business. Protestors who could keep kids out of their rightful school based on racial animus are the same type of people who are demanding Jewish students leave classes or even the campuses right now.

We have to show them who’s boss, and it’s not them.