For almost all of my life, I have been humbly, on my knees, grateful to be a Jew in America. After 6,000 years of persecution and murder in Europe, the United States of America beckoned as the ultimate refuge for the Jewish people on this planet.

There have been many genocides against Jews. They stretched from Russia to Spain. They even included horror shows against Jews in that most civilized of nations, England, although Scotland has no record of ever having suffered an anti-Jewish murder spree.

But the United States of America has never had a mass murder epidemic against Jews. In fact, North America has had the first Jewish vice president, Jewish treasury secretary, even the first Jewish secretary of war. All of these exalted posts were held in the Confederate States of America, and all were held by a man who did not want the job and left it as soon as he could. This was Judah Benjamin, in many ways the most remarkable Jew since biblical times. He started life as a dirt-poor small-town lawyer and ended it as the most distinguished professor of Trusts and Estates in English jurisprudence.

But there has never been a march against Jews in the big or even the small cities of America. Instead, Jews worked quietly alongside Christians throughout the continental nation. Basically, although there was severe discrimination against Jews in neighborhoods and occupations and schools, there were no screams for the deaths of Jews anywhere in America.

That all changed in October of 2023. After the most grisly, vile, disgusting mass murder, rape, torture that this world has seen in decades, perpetrated by a sick entity called Hamas, Jews and other persons of good will in America called for the eradication of Hamas and other entities promising war crimes and crimes against Jewish humanity.

In response, there were mass demonstrations of up to 100,000 madmen and women in cities and towns with signs and “cheers” and posters calling for still more anti-human acts against Jews in America and everywhere else Jews could be found.

Jews were beaten, stabbed, even murdered in major population centers of our great nation. This shining city on a hill is no longer a safe place for Jews. Of course, there have always been isolated incidents of anti-Semitic baiting and beating. I have been the victim of some very few of them in my home state of Maryland. But massive Jew-hating “aktions” and jeers were unknown until 2023.

Now, in response to the worst anti-Jewish violence in peacetime in the West, we have promises and threats of far worse to come.

The Sturmabteilung has come to Main Street. These are evil days. Time to arm up, my fellow Jews. This is exactly how Nazism started, and they did not have unlimited funds from petro-powers to push them far down the road. Time to stop being the weak victim in history and play another set of roles. We have been warned.

READ MORE from Ben Stein:

Is This the End of Days?

What We Did Not Expect From Hamas & Co.

They Are Coming for All of Israel