When you’re guided by fear, it’s hard to make the right moves. All you can see is what’s right in front of you. You can miss the bigger picture, the real enemies, the real opportunities.
With the recent violence against Jews in D.C. and Colorado, American Jews are filled with anxiety, and who can blame them? As Ruth Graham wrote in The New York Times, there’s “a sense that simply existing in public as a Jewish person is increasingly dangerous.”
But this anxiety has put us in a defensive crouch where we mostly raise our voices, condemn the violence and demand more security. That is important but not sufficient. If all we do is play defense, we only look weak. It’s not enough to call for an end to violence.
In any case, an end to violence, however desirable, is not realistic. Forget the cliché that “there’s no place for this kind of hate and violence in America.” Of course there is. In an open society, there always was and always will be.
Sure, we must try to reduce the hate speech in the hope that less violence will be triggered. But in a country where free speech is a sacred right, the hard truth is that not all hate speech qualifies as incitement that would violate the First Amendment.
And yes, we should also call out the media and college administrations who haven’t cracked down hard enough on the antisemitic speech and the harmful lies. But here again, it’s not clear that would deter the Jew-hating kooks, especially since much of the hate speech lives in the unfiltered sewer of social media.
None of this means, of course, that we shouldn’t fight to defend ourselves. By all means, let’s continue to correct the lies, beef up security and use every legal tool at our disposal to defend our rights.
But we can no longer settle for playing defense. That only makes us more vulnerable. To regain our mojo, we must find ways to go on the offense and put others on the defensive.
The definitive place to start is to go after Hamas, the genocidal murderers whose only mission is to murder Jews. If Jew-haters are cynically using Israel against the Jews, it’s time we truthfully use Hamas against the Jew-haters.
The truth is overwhelming.
Hamas is a terror army sworn to Israel’s destruction. It says so in its charter.
It is Hamas that started the war by violating a ceasefire, invading Israel, slaughtering 1200 people in cold blood and capturing 251 hostages.
Hamas did not invade “occupied territory.” They invaded a sovereign state with the specific intent to commit a genocide against Jews.
When Israel retaliated, instead of protecting its civilians, Hamas used its civilians as protection.
Instead of using billions in aid to help their people, Hamas used the money to build terror tunnels beneath their homes, schools and hospitals, adding insult to injury by stealing food shipments meant for their own civilians.
Most importantly, had Hamas not invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, there would have been no casualties on either side.
You get the idea: The most compelling and truthful way to go on the offense is to go after the murderous entity that is behind all the misery.
If Palestinians in Gaza are in an open prison, then Hamas are the wardens. Indeed if any entity deserves to be put on trial for war crimes against humanity and for its cruel detention and torture of hostages, it is Hamas.
It’s not only the Hamas war crimes and their torture of hostages that must be put on trial. We must also expose how Hamas manipulates the media and distorts reality with blatant lies to camouflage their own guilt.
From this day forward, every pro-Israel group must put Hamas on trial. Every Jewish demonstration, every Jewish condemnation, every Jewish response to an anti-Israel act must put the spotlight on the depravity of this terror entity.
Hamas must become the tattoo we brand on all Jew-haters who call to “Free Palestine” or “Globalize the Intifada.” These haters are not ordinary haters; post Oct. 7, they are endorsers of evil. The murderer in D.C. is a Hamas endorser. The flame-throwing Jew-hater in Colorado is a Hamas endorser. We can call them Jew-haters, but in the world we’re living in, it’s a lot more relevant and effective to call them Hamas lovers.
We’re in a war of words and ideas and in this war, the strongest ammunition we have comes directly from Hamas. Just as Jew-haters are relentless with their libelous accusations of “genocide,” we must be relentless with the truth that “Hamas stands for Jewish genocide.”
In short, it’s time for the pro-Israel community in America to fight the same existential war our Israeli brethren are fighting—against terror, whether from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis or Iran.
We must reframe our fight to focus on the unequivocal evil that confronts Israel. The call to “Put Hamas on Trial for War Crimes” is not only a call to justice. It’s also a sign that U.S. Jews are finally taking the fight to the enemy and rallying global allies to that fight.
That is what happens when we’re guided not by fear but by a will to fight evil for the benefit of humanity.
