A Shift Among the Anti-Semites’ Liberal Enablers

By Abe Greenwald

Liberals won’t admit it yet, but they’re starting to realize that they went too far in excusing or supporting the Jew-hating, terrorist-supporting mobs that have populated American campuses and streets for almost two years. We can glean the early hints of their epiphany in the liberal lifestyle guide known as the New York Times.

In the wake of back-to-back anti-Semitic terrorist attacks in which both perpetrators echoed the mob’s anti-Semitic slogans, you can currently find at the Times two pieces implying that Donald Trump—who’s currently dug-in on a war against anti-Semitism—is an anti-Semite. As I said, they’re not admitting any mistakes yet; that comes later. This is the first phase of liberal regret: deflection mode.

Liberals cannot now plausibly write that 20 months of demonstrations in every American city by keffiyeh-clad protesters chanting “Globalize the intifada” has nothing to do with terrorists who’ve just brought the intifada to American cities. Nor can they argue, given that the terrorist in Colorado had overstayed his visa, that illegal-immigration concerns are merely a Republican moral panic. So, they are, instead, trying to switch the public’s focus to Trump.  

Yesterday, at the Times, Tyler Pager wrote that “Trump has been surprisingly slow, or conspicuously quiet, in responding to a string of high-profile attacks against American Jews.” And today, Peter Baker digs deep into the old “Trump, Bigotry” files to pull out claims like “As a younger man, Mr. Trump kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed, according to his first wife,” and “People who have known Mr. Trump going back to his days in real estate in New York said he has long subscribed to Jewish stereotypes.”

Two young Israeli embassy staffers were murdered, and 12 Coloradans were torched with a flamethrower, and the Times wants to quote a late, spurned ex-wife and remind readers that the president can sometimes be a bit like Archie Bunker. That’s all they can come up with for now. But, in time, I suspect, we will start to see some liberals defensively yet loftily reconsider their support for the campus hordes “in light of recent tragedies.”  

It's not surprising that it takes tragedy to finally change liberal minds. In fact, that’s usually the way it works. Liberals tend to come to their ideas through a process of secular faith—faith that they are doing the right thing. This faith makes it hard to disabuse them of such ideas through reasoned argument. Only real-world events can do that.

We’ve seen it recently enough. Liberals abandoned police-defunding after violent crime spiked as a result. They distanced themselves from supporting biological-male participation in female sports beginning with the Lia Thomas debacle and the circulation of viral clips showing female athletes getting thrashed by biological males on the field. And they’ve gone fairly quiet on “gender-affirming” medical intervention for minors now that accurate research has documented the varied horrors it entails.

But they must first let their bad ideas play out, because their faith dictates that such ideas have to be right. The thorough debunking usually takes a few years. Which is why I say that liberals and conservatives generally live in different time zones. Liberals wake up to realities that conservatives understood two years earlier. So given the current trajectory of anti-Semitic violence in the U.S., and considering that we’re a few months away from the second anniversary of October 7, 2023, things seem to be on track.

It's going to be very well and good for those liberals who will make a big show of admitting they got things wrong. This is what an honest and responsible media does, don’t you know? But for the dead Jews, it will be too late. And for them, we should neither forgive nor forget. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.