Every day is a Charlottesville now, but hardly anyone notices.
The small central Virginia city is a metonymy for the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally that created national shock waves and rocked the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
The antisemitic rhetoric and menacing nature of that event — in a different, left-wing form — are being replicated all over the country in openly hateful pro-Hamas protests.
Outside the White House recently, anti-Israel protestors wore terrorist headbands; chanted for Hamas and Hezbollah to “kill another solider now,” and “kill another Zionist now” and vandalized statues.
A few days later, a mob showed up outside a New York City exhibit memorializing the 10/7 terror attack on the Nova music festival. They waved Hezbollah and Hamas flags, and held up banners saying, “Long live October 7th,” and “The Zionists are not Jews and not humans.”
Meanwhile, at UCLA, a mob set up an encampment and assaulted an independent journalist and rabbi.
And on it goes. In New York City, the townhouse of the Jewish president of the Brooklyn Museum was splashed with red paint and emblazoned with an upside down red triangle, another Hamas symbol.
The Unite the Right rally featured brawls between the white nationalists and counterprotesters, and a homicide when one enraged member of the alt-right rammed into counterdemonstrators with his car. The mayhem at the pro-Hamas rallies hasn’t reached that level, but the content and conduct are broadly the same as the “tiki torch” march on the grounds of the University of Virginia the night before the main Charlottesville rally.
The pro-Hamas slogans aren’t any better than the infamous “Jews won’t replace us” chant of the tiki-torchers, and, in fact, are more openly genocidal and violent. And there are the same angry confrontations with bystanders and threatening behavior.
Yes, there have been denunciations of the pro-Hamas protests, including from the White House and even Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the hideous protest outside the NYC music-festival exhibit was too much even for her).
Still, there’s not the same sense of national crisis as there’d be if white supremacists were showing up all over the country and agitating against Jews and vandalizing property. Can you imagine the headlines and nightly news reports? Nor is there the same overwhelming media drumbeat condemning anyone associated with the protesters or their worldview.
Instead, because not all Jew hatred, political extremism and support for terrorism are viewed the same, the pro-Hamas protests are more or less background noise. While the White House has distanced itself from the excesses, it has also clearly shifted its Israel policy to try to accommodate the pro-Hamas protestors.
The anti-Israel agitation is like Charlottesville — if that event spawned disruptions all over the country and succeeded in shifting national policy in its direction, rather than discrediting its own odious cause.
Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review