The Patriot Post® · Hide Your Jewishness for Safety's Sake?

In what can only be described as yet another capitulation to mob violence by Democrats and the Biden administration, White House “Jewish engagement director” Aaron Keyak has warned Jews that they should remove faith-identifying items from their clothing due to an escalation of anti-Semitic attacks and physical assaults.

“It pains me to say this, but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah [head covering] and hide your magen david [Jewish Star of David]. (Obviously, if you can, ask your rabbi first.),” he said on May 21.

Moreover, when Keyak received the well-deserved blowback that anyone capitulating to mob violence should engender, he doubled down four days later: “It’s important that those who wear kippot don’t feel more pressure to put our lives in unnecessary actual danger — especially when actions are attempting to be grounded in halach [the body of Jewish law]. Given the rise in Jew hatred and antisemitic attacks, we must stand with all Jews.”

Stand? Cower is more like it, courtesy of an administration disproportionately obsessed with white supremacy, and a Democrat Party that remains highly tolerant, if not wholly accommodating, to the increasing anti-Semitism among its supporters — and in its ranks.

And despite the administration’s obsession, columnist Robert Spencer illuminates wholly inconvenient truths about exactly who is attacking Jews:

In New York City, a Muslim mob screaming “Allahu akbar” attacked a Jewish man in midtown Manhattan. Also in Manhattan, Palestinians threatened violence and screamed anti-Semitic slurs at Jews. One threw a mini-firebomb. Pro-jihad protesters stormed a restaurant and spat on Jewish patrons; one of the thugs threw a bottle. A Muslim, Waseem Awawdeh, was arrested for viciously beating a Jew in Times Square.

In Los Angeles, Palestinian protesters asked people dining at the Sushi Fumi restaurant if they were Jewish, and proceeded to attack them with knives. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, two cars festooned with Palestinian flags chased a Jewish man down a street as he was leaving his synagogue.

In Florida, a van also bearing a Palestinian flag and emblazoned with the slogan “Hitler was Right” drove past a pro-Israel demonstration.

In Skokie, Illinois, a pro-jihad vandal wearing an Arab headdress smashed a synagogue window and left a Palestine flag and a pro-jihad sign inside.

None of this should be remotely surprising. Ever since 2012, when the effort to reinstate the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital into the party’s platform during the Democrat National Convention was met with a loud chorus of boos, Democrat anti-Semitism has been increasingly impossible to hide. The recent attacks by Hamas against Israel brought that anti-Semitism to the forefront, courtesy of “Squad” members such as Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who insisted that Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu should be held responsible for “war crimes”; Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who stated, “We must stand against efforts to silence legitimate dissent and accountability for illegal Israeli government actions”; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who asserted that America “should not be rubber-stamping weapons sales to the Israeli government as they deploy our resources to target international media outlets, schools, hospitals, humanitarian missions and civilian sites for bombing.”

Where was Keyak then? Nowhere to be found.

Again, this should surprise no one. As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker astutely notes, “woke” anti-Semitism has taken root in a party where “the rhetoric of some leading leftist Democrats has helped nourish resentments and prejudices.”

He is even more dismayed by the Democrats’ attempt to alter reality so that it squares with their contemptible agenda. “It takes extraordinary intellectual flexibility to represent the Jewish people, especially those in Israel, as part of some grand global historical pattern of white-supremacist aggression, but these ascendant protagonists of modern progressivism are used to such gymnastics,” he adds. “As long as the narrative can be sculpted to fit the larger objective, it will do.”

Keyak is equally invested in intellectual gymnastics. In September 2020, he blamed former President Donald Trump for anti-Semitism in the United States, saying, “We know that Donald Trump’s use of antisemitic tropes has emboldened all those who hate Jews.”

And how did Trump “embolden” Jew-haters? By doing what Democrats booed in 2012, and keeping a U.S. promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. By creating an entirely new Middle East paradigm with the brokering of deals known as the “Abraham Accords” that normalized relations between Israel and four Arab/Muslim nations, while making it clear that Palestinians would no longer be accommodated for their longstanding historical intransigence. By cutting off more than $200 million in aid to Palestinians purportedly used to provide aid to Gaza and the West Bank, but inevitably used to abet Hamas terrorism. And by making it clear that his administration’s support for the Jewish State was unequivocal and unwavering.

All of it infuriates Democrat mental gymnasts and their contemptible effort to view everything through a prism of systemic racism. Columnist Liel Leibovitz notes the inherent consequences of such rank propagandizing. “Seeing everything and everywhere through the same racially tinged lens applied to American politics isn’t just intellectually dishonest and morally ruinous,” he writes. “It also puts real American Jews in real danger: If, after all, you believe that Tel Aviv is just another Ferguson or that dead Hamas terrorists are only so many more George Floyds, why not respond to Israel’s attempts at self-defense by taking a page from the BLM playbook? And why not beat up men in yarmulkes the way you would anyone wearing uniform and a badge? It all makes perfect sense.”

Columnist Joel Pollak makes even more sense. “The only thing you should conceal (legally) is your firearm,” he argued. “Second Amendment protects the First. We are not Europe.”

Europe? When the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League (ADL) finds more than 17,000 tweets using variations of the phrase, “Hitler was right” between May 7 and May 14, 2021, and Keyak himself has a track record of supporting gun control, being like Europe is the least of our worries.

Enough obfuscation: Americans must understand that anti-Semitism and the Critical Race Theory being rammed down their collective throats are two sides of the same progressive coin. They must understand that every totalitarian effort, from Hitler to Stalin and Mao, and everything in between, has always been about first fostering division — followed by dehumanization — as a prerequisite for establishing “social utopia.” And for those deemed “the other,” be they the Jews, the bourgeoisie, Donald Trump supporters, or simply people who express disagreement with the prevailing dogma, all manner of retribution is presented as eminently justifiable, even when it precipitates a trip to gulag.

Or the gas chamber.