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The Global Intifada Heats Up: A War on Jews is a War on Civilization
By: Mark Tapson
On the night of November 7, curiously only two days shy of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Europe was the scene of a fresh pogrom in which hundreds of antisemites targeted Jews for pre-meditated, coordinated violence in the streets of Amsterdam.
Groups of attackers – many of them masked, carrying Palestinian flags, and shouting pro-Palestinian slogans – emerged from hiding in alleys and train stations and hotels to ambush Israelis who were leaving a soccer match between the local Ajax team and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Shocking video footage – some taken by the perpetrators themselves – shows Israeli and Dutch Jews being chased and assaulted with knives, bats, boots, and in at least one instance, an automobile committing hit-and-run.
This was no garden-variety soccer hooliganism, as it was initially described by some disingenuous media outlets. The attacks reportedly were orchestrated in advance and carried out by members of the Dutch Moroccan and Dutch Turkish community. De Telegraaf reported that perpetrators used the messaging app Telegram to announce a “Jew hunt” ahead of the attacks, prompting some to travel from far outside Amsterdam to take part. Muslim cab drivers throughout the city reportedly helped coordinate the assaults.
“They knew everything,” said 30-year-old Shachar Bitton, a Maccabi fan. “They knew exactly where we stayed. They knew exactly which hotels, which street we were going to take. It was all well-organized, well-prepared.”
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) subsequently published an exposé highlighting the involvement of an organization called the Palestinian Community in the Netherlands (PGNL in Dutch). PGNL, which uses instant messaging apps to organize activism in the country, is connected to the Palestinian terror group Hamas. It is led by Syrian-born activist Ayman Nejmeh, a self-described former teacher with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNRWA members in Gaza have been exposed for aiding and abetting Hamas terrorists.
This has been a dark week for Jews:
– A large-scale, premeditated pogrom injured dozens of Jews in Amsterdam. Media figures have yet to stop justifying the attack.
– A Jewish student in Dublin was cornered in a bar bathroom by three men who, after asking if he was Jewish and… pic.twitter.com/67ItD2zT8r
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) November 10, 2024
There is another Hamas connection to the Amsterdam attackers. One Maccabi Tel Aviv fan testified that the attackers’ modus operandi resembled that of Hamas during the October 7th massacre, including the planning and the video documentation of the humiliation and violence. “It has nothing to do with the game or Maccabi,” he said, “but with the fact that we are Israelis and Jews – antisemitism at its peak.”
The Israelis and Dutch Jews reported being harassed and hunted for hours with no police intervention. The attackers “were waiting in groups at every corner and the moment they identified Jews they chased them,” one Israeli told local news. “It was Kristallnacht 2,” another said.
Kristallnacht 2. When Hamas-supporting activists from Sydney to London call for a global intifada to protest what they falsely label an Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, that is exactly what they want: another Kristallnacht. And ultimately, a final Holocaust.
Dutch leader Geert Wilders denounced the incident, writing on social media, in part, “A pogrom in the streets of #Amsterdam. We have become the Gaza of Europe. Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews.”
It didn’t end there. Rioting followed in the city in the days after the pogrom. Mobs of young men dressed in black, waving Palestine flags, and shouting, “Cancer Jews!” set fires, pelted cars and buses with rocks and missile fireworks.
The impact of the Amsterdam pogrom immediately rippled outward elsewhere in Europe. In France, which saw a 192% increase in antisemitic incidents during the first half of 2024, 4000 police officers and 1,600 stadium staff were deployed in advance of a France-Israel soccer match to prevent similar violence. In Belgium, police arrested a half dozen unidentified individuals on suspicion of conspiring to attack Jews in imitation of the Amsterdam attacks. These suspects too had plotted together using social media apps. In Berlin, a Jewish youth soccer team was “hunted down” by an Arab mob of youths and adults who reportedly wielded sticks and knives and shouted “Free Palestine” and “fucking Jews.”
Incidents like these are primarily the consequence of decades of misguided European policies encouraging mass immigration mostly from the Islamized cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. Unlike in America, which has been more successful so far at assimilating a much thinner stream of Muslim immigrants, European countries are now reaping the whirlwind of surging populations of Muslims who have no interest in assimilating to the Western host culture. Their aim, which they are increasingly bold enough to state openly, is the submission of that civilization to Islam, whether by demographics, conversion, force, or a combination thereof. And in every country in the world where Islam becomes dominant, Jewish and Christian populations are diminished or extinguished.
The Culture War on Jews
But it is not only a violent intifada that is heating up. A related culture war against the Jews is intensifying as well, and not only in Europe. Indeed, that is how the violence begins – by laying the groundwork for the demonization of Jews in the culture.
As reported by Frannie Block, in early October, communications consultant Melanie Notkin tried to place an advertisement for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book Israel Alone in Shelf Awareness, an American publishing industry publication which wields significant marketing influence for books vying for attention in bookstores.
Lévy is arguably France’s most notable public intellectual and a staunch apologist for Jews and Israel. His powerfully eloquent new book is about his personal reflections on Israel after the savage October 7th massacre there of more than 1200 Israeli citizens, tourists, and residents by the Palestinian terror group Hamas and their Palestinian supporters. Lévy writes that it was “an event whose shock waves and blast effect would change the course of all our lives – including my own.” The book is an important, clear-eyed testament to the impact of the evil unleashed on October 7.
Notkin was informed that her ad for Lévy’s book was approved and would run in Shelf Awareness’ weekly newsletter, which goes out to more than 600,000 readers. But two days later she was informed that the magazine was canceling the ad. Shelf Awareness publisher Matt Baldacci explained, “We have a responsibility to our 250 independent bookstore partners, and it’s our feeling that running that ad in their publications, for some of those partners, is going to cause them trouble that they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.” He added that he fully expected “customers will complain” too.
The conversation left Notkin “in shock.” She thought, if the word Israel is too hot a potato to have on the pages of your newsletter as a paid ad, when does it become the word Jew? When does it become a Jewish author? When does it become anything to do with anybody Jewish in America? When students say “We don’t want Zionists on our campus,” when a publication says “We don’t want an ad that says Israel on its title in our publication,” what does this say about the direction we’re headed in America?
Tablet magazine denounced the incident as “an act of breathtaking moral cowardice” and “the latest in a series of events illustrating how the literary world has turned so decisively against Zionism as to become broadly antisemitic.”
Indeed, it has. Frannie Block observed that the Lévy affair is only “the latest instance in a worrying trend of erasing Jewish writers and thinkers from intellectual spaces.” She noted that in September, for example, “the New York State Writers Institute canceled a literary panel at the University of Albany because other authors refused to share the stage with a ‘Zionist’ moderator. In August, a Brooklyn bookstore canceled a Jewish author’s book event because the rabbi he was scheduled to speak with was a ‘Zionist.’”
Back in January, a band of protesters from Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) disrupted a PEN America event in Los Angeles featuring actress Mayim Bialik, an outspoken supporter of Israel. At least one of the protesters had to be physically removed by security.
In a New York Times opinion piece titled, “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing,” James Kirchik related that a color-coded spreadsheet was published on X (formerly Twitter) in May classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. The post was viewed more than a million times in just a few days. The poster encouraged readers to boycott the works of Zionists. “A litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel,” Kirchik warned.
In yet another example, Tel Aviv-based literary scout Lucy Abrahams told Jewish News that she had had four different meetings in which people had balked at publishing anything to do with Jews or Israel, saying it was “not the moment” for such books.
And then there is the recent pledge signed by almost 400 authors to boycott Israeli publishers, book festivals, and literary agencies that they claim are “complicit in the ongoing occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine” by not condemning Israel’s role in the war in Gaza. Such literary notables as Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, as well as Jewish writers like Judith Butler and Naomi Klein, are among the signatories to the letter, which one prominent agent warned amounts to a “cultural ban of all Israeli voices.”
The letter claims that Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza “is the biggest war on children this century.” It goes on to state, in part,
We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.
We will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not co-operate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are complicit in violating Palestinian rights.
Author and journalist Lionel Shriver wrote that the boycott “seeks to go well beyond the signatories and intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals.”
Author Phyllis Chesler wrote on her Substack account that the letter “is disgusting, shameful, and frankly, both tedious and heartbreaking.” It reveals, she wrote, the “gang, horde, and tribal groupthink” that characterizes the glitterati: “They are all ‘woke’ left-wingers, conformists, cowards, ignorant about the issues they presume to confront.”
On her own Substack page, British journalist Melanie Phillips blasted “these much-garlanded authors and hangers-on” for their “totalitarian impulse to crush all dissent”: After all, given the current tsunami of hatred and insanity directed at the Jewish people throughout the west, they may well have thought they were merely going along with the overwhelmingly accepted narrative in “progressive” circles — in other words, anyone whose opinion was worth bothering about — that Israel should be shunned as a pariah because of the war in Gaza…)
Let’s remind ourselves against whom Israel is currently fighting: genocidal enemies who carried out the worst single set of atrocities against the Jews since the Holocaust and who openly declare their aim to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. Instead of supporting the resistance to such evil, Rooney, Roy, [Hannah] Rosen and their fellow signatories are actively pumping out the propaganda lies being invented to promote that unspeakable cause.
Writing at Commentary, Seth Mandel slammed the boycott letter as in essence “the institution of a global loyalty oath for Jews”:
You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.
The boycotting and ostracization of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish polemicists, by contrast, is virtually unheard of. For example, National Book Award-winning black author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent work is The Message, in which he fulminates against what he calls the Israeli occupation of Palestine and compares it to the Jim Crow South. In a NY Mag interview he confessed, astonishingly, that he empathized with the Hamas sadists who ravaged the victims of October 7:
What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison, and I had a little sister who had leukemia and needed treatment but couldn’t get it because my dad or my mom couldn’t get the right pass out? You know what I mean? What would I do if my brother had been shot for getting too close to the barrier? What would I do if my uncle had been shot because he’s a fisherman and he went too far out? And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I’d be the person that says, ‘Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this’? Would that have been me?”
Bernard-Henri Lévy cannot secure advertising for a book that simply has the word “Israel” in the title. But Coates can get away with saying he envisions himself rampaging alongside the moral monsters of October 7 because he gives literary legitimacy to progressive causes such as slavery reparations and the demonization of Israel.
The Kinderfada Revolution
The cultural assault on Jews doesn’t stop with the literary world, of course. Jew hatred is metastasizing in the field of education too, because the Jew-haters in America know as well as those in Gaza that sowing the seeds for the forever war against the Jews begins with the indoctrination of children as early as possible, to mold impressionable young minds to uncritically absorb progressive biases including the erasure of Israel from the map.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that college campuses both in America and abroad are hotbeds of rabid antisemitic protests and encampments, and even the physical intimidation of Jewish students, especially since the October 7 attack. In the most recent example, An anti-Israel student group at Columbia University staged a counter-Memorial Day protest on November 11 to celebrate what it called “martyrs day” in honor of “those martyred by the Israel-US war machine.” Presumably this includes former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7 terror barbarity, who was eliminated last month by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
But journalist Abigail Shrier has written about what she calls “the kinderfada revolution” taking root well before students enter our institutions of higher education, in America’s K-12 schools: a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to turn American children against Israel. She writes that her investigation “convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families.”
Activist-led organizations supply instructional materials, she explains, which present “distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel,” and they have become even more pervasive since the October 7 terrorism. Indeed, there is now no subject – art, English, math, physics – that is free of anti-Israel activism. Much of it is included in online curricula that are p
assword-protected to avoid parental oversight.
Progressive-led teachers unions seem focused not on reversing the downward slide of American K-12 public schools into complete incompetence, but on organizing anti-Israel opposition. Activist educators, both in class and on social media, promote the grotesque, demonstrably false narrative that Israel is waging a genocide against the Palestinian people. This results in growing anger and resentment among students directed at their Jewish peers, who have been suffering increased incidents of bigotry and violence. Shrier cites a shocking catalog of antisemitic bullying to which Jewish students and parents are subjected.
“We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Nicole Neily, founder of Parents Defending Education, told Shrier. but “this had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time.”
Neily’s organization has discovered that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms. “This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” she said. A Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified also told Shrier that in the past year, she’s been astonished by the volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids. “We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she said.
Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, told Shrier, “I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions.”
Indeed. The first step is the eradication of Israel and Jews, but the end game is a war on the West.
The War on the West
A war on Jews is a war on civilization. The West was born out of the Judeo-Christian monotheism and morality that endowed every individual with dignity and the unalienable rights that were later enshrined in the American Constitution; and the West will die when Judaism and Christianity are effectively wiped out through a combination of factors: younger generations drifting from religious belief and toward the self-deification of humanity; the ongoing political and cultural marginalization of Christianity; and surging Jew-hatred (the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights EUFRA reports a 400% increase in European antisemitic activity since October 7, 2023). All of these factors are currently afflicting the Western world, and the civilizational decline is evident all around us.
In the wake of Hamas’ terror atrocities last year, David Hazony, editor of Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, wrote in a rousing article that “Jews everywhere must now come to see themselves as being in a state of war” with the “infinite evil” of the antisemites whose aim is the eradication of “every Jewish man, woman, and child on earth.”
Hazony correctly adds, “Western civilization itself is under attack; this is not just the Jews’ war. But Jews must lead by example… We are the ones who must draw the red lines and send out the call to arms for all those who value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Echoing Hazony, Rabbi Michael Barklay wrote that the abovementioned Amsterdam pogrom “demonstrates that Western Civilization is being destroyed in a cultural and religious war that has been waged against it by Islam.” He adds, “The essence of Western civilization is based in the Judeo-Christian values and texts, and that is demonstrated in the choices we make. We choose life over death; peace over war; democracy over authoritarianism.” The aim of our enemies, he says, is the antithesis of choosing life. Their attacks, hatred, and desire to destroy Israel become clear as one of the initial steps in this war. It becomes evident that while Israel is the frontline and first battlefield for the preservation of the West, their larger goals involve quickly moving through Europe and the United States.
In Israel Alone, Bernard-Henri Lévy argues that Jew-hatred “remains within history’s heart like an unbreakable kernel of night.” Of the atrocities committed on 10/7, he writes, “Evil was there. Pure evil, plain-faced, gratuitous, senseless. Evil for nothing and no reason; evil raw and unadorned.”
From propagandized classrooms in Oakland to street violence in Amsterdam, this “evil raw and unadorned” is on the march throughout the West, led by what author and activist David Horowitz calls “the unholy alliance” of Islamists and the radical Left. Their advance can only be repelled by a determined “holy alliance” of Christians and Jews, waging resistance on every front to preserve civilization over barbarism, freedom over submission, and good over evil. (docemetproductions.com)
Mark Tapson is a writer, screenwriter, culture critic, and political commentator. The Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he has written nearly a thousand articles about the intersection of culture and politics for FrontPage Magazine, Breitbart News, PJ Media, National Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. Among the numerous films Mark has worked on are The Path to 9/11 and the award-winning documentary Jihad in America: The Grand Deception. Mark is also the host of The Right Take podcast and the author of a forthcoming book on the war on masculinity. Follow him at his Substack page, Culture Warrior.
