In the years just before World War II, inspired by the meteoric rise of Nazi power, antisemitism peaked in America. Historian Jonathan Sarna reported there were more than 120 organizations dedicated to promoting anti-Jewish hatred and that, in 1938, a poll found that 20 percent of Americans were in favor of driving the Jews out of America.
Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience numbered in the tens of millions, defended the Kristallnacht pogroms against German Jews as being a proper defense against what he wildly claimed was the Jewish slaughter of millions of Germans. Fritz Kuhn led a rally of his Nazi-inspired German American Bund in Madison Square Garden, replete with stormtrooper uniforms, Nazi salutes, and more than 20,000 people in attendance. Even when Hitler had swallowed Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, terror-bombing the civilians in its cities, Coughlin broadcast his plan to organize “an army of peace” to march on Washington to protest changing the neutrality laws — a move that would have allowed America to aid European democracies that were soon to be scythed down by the Nazi blitzkrieg. He claimed Jews were trying to get America involved in a bloodbath. (READ MORE: Biden is Deaf to His ‘Better Angels’)
America never got the chance to choose war with Hitler — Hitler declared war on us first, on Dec. 10, 1941, in solidarity with his Japanese allies. Then in January, at Wannsee, the Nazis finalized their plans for the methodical extermination of Europe’s Jews.
After three and a half years of bloody struggle, we and our allies destroyed the Nazi regime. General Eisenhower made sure that tens of thousands of American troops saw first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps with their piles of dead, unburied Jews and the skeletal survivors. Americans’ souls were seared by the utter obscenity of this and all racial hatred. Americans turned away from antisemitism and state-sponsored racial discrimination against black Americans, which had so stained their souls.
This was memorable moral progress. My father grew up getting beaten up by schoolkids whose parents belonged to the German American Bund; I grew up in the ’60s when all that was a distant memory, my religious freedom was respected, and civil rights had been affirmed and enforced for all Americans.
So many of us thought this was a permanent achievement. The sudden wave of antisemitism that exploded across America, exhilarated by Hamas’ orgy of murder, kidnapping, and rape has shown to a dismayed America that hate is back.
It did not come from nowhere. It took a supremely skilled politician to turn around the national ethos and start to make America hate again.
Americans Ignored Obama’s Ties to Antisemites
When young Barack Obama was looking for his path in life, Pastor Jeremiah Wright played a major role in helping him get past the doper lifestyle. As the Guardian put it in 2008, “Wright officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptised his daughters, and was the Illinois senator’s spiritual guide for decades.” Obama even used a Wright phrase from a sermon, “the audacity of hope,” in his address to the DNC in 2004 and as the title of one of his books.
That 2004 convention speech was brilliant. Obama seemed to be pointing the way toward a sane world in which America finally retired race as a leading issue in our country. Soaring language painted a picture of the America most of us dreamed of, an America united beyond hatred, fulfilling the promise of our Founders. In his first Inaugural Address, Obama seemed to understand our founding the way Abraham Lincoln had: The Fathers of this country fully expected slavery to die out as a government based on the principle of human equality established itself in the world. (READ MORE: Colleges Must Stop Admitting Foreign Students for Two Years)
Obama painted himself as a uniter. Jews supported him in Illinois. But when word of Pastor Wright’s angry and racially charged rhetoric surfaced in the primary campaign of 2008, many began to doubt Obama’s real stance.
It was not just that Wright called for God to damn America in one of his most infamous sermons. It was his intense anti-Israel stance and, worse, his association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who was addicted to using vicious antisemitism as an emotional driver of his leadership. Wright publicly associated himself with Farrakhan, giving wider legitimacy to his Jew hatred in the eyes of Wright’s church and the larger black community. Now, a disciple of Wright was aspiring for the presidency, which would give unheard-of legitimacy to the Farrakhan brand of Jew hatred with which Wright had unabashedly associated himself.
Obama got past this crisis not by admitting any wrong at all in his long association with the hateful Wright, or by admitting any wrong on his part. He did not ask for the forgiveness that Americans so easily give to those honest enough to admit their errors. Instead, he cast his preacher under his campaign bus and lectured Americans mildly about American racism.
Because he was a good speaker, and because America wanted to have a historic figure in their midst (the figure Obama was sculpturing himself to be) – Americans dropped their suspicions.
As the title of a 2015 piece in the Atlantic put it, “Jeremiah Wright Is Still Angry at Barack Obama.” Obama showed far more loyalty to his own aspirations than to the man who mentored him and helped him forward. Hate is hateful towards its own.
From Wright’s embrace of hatred as a motive force, Obama learned both a positive and a negative lesson. Positive: Hate moves people and can be used to great political advantage. Negative: When you use hate, you must disguise it much better than Jeremiah Wright did.
You’ve got to introduce it by stealth.
Hate Won Out During Obama’s Administration
When Obama spoke to the nation in 2009 at his inauguration, he told Americans what he knew they wanted to hear. He spoke words with which almost all Americans agreed: “Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.” He endorsed, in broad terms, the fight against that terror that sought to impose itself on others in the Middle East and beyond. He seemed to liberal Democratic supporters of Israel such as Alan Dershowitz to be a true ally. (READ MORE: Protest Much? An Academic Reckoning Is Overdue.)
But by the end of Obama’s eight years, the seemingly infinite promise of January 2009 was gone. Racial tensions were at a pitch not seen since the LA riots of the early ’90s. Instead of reconciliation, race had become a supreme category for the government and its allies in the universities and the media. It seemed to anyone not caught up in the sweeping change in the ethos wrought by the Obama crew that the only problem with American racism is that it had been that it had not been employed against the right group of people.
To the horror of the older generation of Jewish liberal Democrats, a stealthy policy had emerged that, step by step, undermined the quarantine into which we had confined the terrorist mullahs of Iran. Obama took the lead in treating Israel’s prime minister with undisguised contempt, letting him into the White House only through the service entrance, like an English lord putting a tradesman in his place. He slowly but surely whittled away at the Israel alliance, bit by bit, until he enabled an understanding with Iran that guaranteed them — not forthrightly, but clearly enough — a nuclear bomb in another decade. As his last act as president, Obama directed that the U.S. allow the UN Security Council to pass a resolution proclaiming that Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, was an Islamic holy site to which Israel had no claim.
In the wake of the exterminationist attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, those nurtured in the culture on which Obama has left this indelible mark showed the hate that seethes at its core. We could see for ourselves what all dealers in hate know: Hate is thrilling, motivating, and self-legitimating.
Obama’s more disciplined lesson of concealing hatred has not rubbed off. For that, we should be thankful. For the violent hatred suddenly on display seemingly everywhere in this country has shocked those who still have a grounding in the old America, before its ideals were used as mere plausible cover for this terrible, concealed agenda.
The people see the late and half-hearted effort of the suddenly worried Biden crew to re-establish a non-threatening appearance. But Obama’s masterful ability to conceal hate is a rare talent. No one has that level of skill in the Biden bunch, who daily appear more and more empty of moral purpose or diplomatic skill.
It may well be too late. Biden has been exposed as rudderless, unable to make even the most elementary moral distinction between the orgiastic butchers of Gaza and an organized and steadfast democratic ally who has maintained political freedom even in the face of 80 years of constant existential threat. (Just compare Israel to Ukraine, where elections and habeas corpus have been suspended to deal with its crisis.)
Without the Obama magic, hate stands exposed as just that — hate.
Hate does not define America. Americans increasingly realize that it is up to them to make that clear. They will not shrink from the task.