In the months since Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, the world has taken an ominous turn. First, anti-Israel demonstrators began openly avowing their support for Hamas. Then came the targeting of Jews who had nothing to do with Israel, amid claims that they were supporters of “genocide.” And now we see the targeting of Jews just because they are Jews: in one Brooklyn high school, it’s shouts of “Heil Hitler.” At UC Berkeley, a protester screamed “Jew, you Jew, you Jew” at a Jewish student and spat in his face. This is the America that the left has made.
The New York Post reported Saturday that students at Origins High School in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn have a new hero: Adolf Hitler. The school “has become a haven for Hitler-loving hooligans who terrorize Jewish teachers and classmates.” Remember, this is not Berlin in 1933; it’s New York City in 2024.
The Jew-hatred at Origins High has been out in the open since just a few weeks after Oct. 7. On Oct. 26, “40 to 50 teens marched through Origins HS in Sheepshead Bay waving a Palestinian flag and chanting ‘Death to Israel!’ and ‘Kill the Jews!,” according to Origins staffers. A teacher at this National Socialist high school, Danielle Kaminsky, said “I live in fear of going to work every day,” and it’s easy to see why.
One student “painted a mustache on his face to look like Hitler, and banged on classroom doors. When someone opened, he clicked his heels and raised his arm in the Nazi gesture.”
This was, said the Post, shown in “security footage,” yet New York City’s Department of Education is in full denial mode, saying: “There is currently no evidence that these claims are true, but we are investigating the claims.”
Meanwhile, “three swastikas in one week were drawn on teachers’ walls and other objects,” and one student told Kaminsky, who is known to be Jewish, “I wish you were killed.” Another called her “a dirty Jew” and said that he wished that Hitler had “hit more Jews.” Inevitably, the door of Kaminsky’s classroom was decorated with “drawings of the Palestinian flag and notes saying ‘Free Palestine.’”
Another student wrote Kaminsky a note that was limpid in its simplicity, saying simply: “Die.” These students “have so far faced no serious discipline under interim acting principal Dara Kammerman, who has done little beyond contacting parents in an effort to practice ‘restorative justice.’” Yeah, that’ll fix everything.
Meanwhile, across the continent at the University of California, Berkeley, the situation is much the same. The Algemeiner reported last Tuesday that “a mob of hundreds pro-Palestinian students and non-students” forced the shutdown of an event featuring IDF soldier Ran Bar-Yoshafat, “forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protestors overwhelmed campus police.” The enraged mob “stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process.”
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One of the Jewish students recounted: “You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face. Some woman — then she spit at me. Another Jewish student, Shaya Keyvanfar, said: “Once the doors were closed, the protesters somehow found a side door and pushed it open, and a few of them managed to get in, and once they did, they tried to open the door for the rest of them. It was really scary. They were pounding on the windows outside — they broke one — they spit at my sister and others. They called someone a dirty Jew. It was eerie.”
The Israeli soldier added: “I just felt really bad for these kids because they were scared. Girls were crying from being attacked, and I think the kid that was spat on was just so shocked. I don’t think the students anticipated so many people being violent, they thought they would just chant outside.”
Berkeley’s Dan Mogulof vowed strong action, calling the whole thing a “black mark” on the far-left university’s already considerably tarnished reputation. He said that he “understands now that we are in new territory.”
I wonder, however, if he really does. We aren’t in new territory. We are in territory that is quite familiar to anyone who knows the history of Europe, and of Germany in particular, from 1919 to 1945.
We are witnessing an ugly and ominous recrudescence of an extremely evil chapter in human history. At this point, it can still be stopped. Before too long, if it isn’t stopped, it will play out to its horrific end, an end we have seen before.
