Many of the most egregious petitions and protests against Israel occurred even before Israel responded to the Hamas barbarity of Oct. 7. Student groups, lawyers’ groups, Black Lives Matter groups, labor unions, and other hard left, woke progressives praised Hamas for its rapes, beheadings and murders just hours after they occurred. It would be as if these groups increased their support for Nazism following Kristallnacht in 1938, when 91 Jews were killed in Germany and many synagogues and Jewish stores destroyed.
The actual mass murders of Oct. 7, bad as they were, are not the new Kristallnacht. That is what Hamas is and does. No one should have been surprised by the extent of their brutality. What is most disturbing is the widespread reaction to these murders by so many that, like Kristallnacht, demonstrates the depths of Jewish hatred and signals that the worst may be yet to come.
Now that Israel has begun its justified military response to the war declared by Hamas, matters have gotten even worse. But we must never forget how bad they already were before Israel fired a single shot. Israel was blamed by bigots worldwide for causing the deaths, beheadings and rapes of its own people.
There was an expression in pre-World War II antisemitic Poland, that “If something is wrong, the Jews must be behind it.” Modern day antisemites apply that finger pointing even to the victimization of Jews themselves: if Hamas murders Jews, it must be the fault of the nation state of the Jewish people. Now that Israel is defending its citizens against terrorists who use human shields, the blame-the-Jews mantra has gotten even more extreme.
Hamas is winning the information war even as it loses the ground war. Hamas leaders must be thinking that the Oct. 7 mass murders were a great success. They have generated anti-Israel resolutions by the United Nations, by university professors, by lawyers groups, by labor unions and by many other left wing organizations. Terrorism works. Barbarism succeeds. Rapes are rewarded. Beheadings are accepted. As long as the victims are Jews who brought it on themselves!
Columbia students and professors have deemed the Hamas war crimes to be appropriate “military” actions, justified by the occupation of the Gaza Strip that ended in 2005. The National Lawyers Guild refused to condemn Hamas, nor has the United Nations and other international bodies. Hamas is deemed the “victim” of Israeli crimes.
The “success” of the murderous rampage of Oct. 7 will inevitably encourage other such “successes,” since a success tends to be emulated, not only by the group that achieved it, but by others. So, if the international community and anti-Israel protesters continue to deliver a message of success to Hamas, their brutal tactics will be coming to a theatre near you.
For years I have argued that the root cause of terrorism is that it works! It is rewarded rather than punished. My book, “Why Terrorism Works,” documented this phenomenon. The reaction to the Hamas barbarism of Oct. 7 is just another example of this tragic reality. But it adds a bizarre dimension. The more barbaric the terrorism, the more it is rewarded. There has been increased support for Hamas following its worst instance of mass terrorism — more than there ever was before.
Such terrorism will only increase — in scope, intensity, and barbarity — if it continues to be rewarded as it is now.
I doubt that many of the ignorant, bigoted students who are marching and shouting in praise of Hamas understand that they will have blood on their hands as Hamas relies on their continuing support to justify more and bloodier terrorism. They should realize that they are on the wrong side of history, of morality, and of law. They are the modern-day version of the students in Munich and Berlin who started by burning books and ended by burning babies. They are the contemporary version of Hitler Youth, without the swastikas.
Students have been on the forefront of some of the most horrible blood baths of history, from Hitlerism to Stalinism to support for the ayatollahs. These bigoted ignoramuses may think they are different. So did their predecessors. Both were wrong.
Kristallnacht was a wake-up call that too many, including too many Jews, slept through. The world, and especially the Jews, cannot afford to sleep through another wake-up call that is occurring right before our eyes. “Never again” has become “again and again and again.” We must fight back against the new fascism of the hard left if we are to prevent the new Kristallnacht from becoming a prelude to a new Holocaust.
Dershowitz is the author most recently of “Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.”
