Trumpzism is a euphemism for racism of all kinds including the rise of antisemitism

A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Bret Stephens.

If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in Gaza. It was something altogether darker.

“Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night,” the newspaper reported, referring to the Tel Aviv club. “Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or ‘Jew Hunt.’”

Jew hunt:✡️ Grotesque as the phrase is, it can no longer surprise.

• It is what the graffiti on a wall in an Oslo metro station promises: “Hitler started it. We finis[h]ed it.”
• It is a wave of antisemitic hate crimes in Chicago, including “anti-Semitic flyers with rat-poison like pellets” found in Lincoln Park, in April, 
• A Jewish man shot while walking to his synagogue in West Rogers Park, in October;
• And two Jewish students at DePaul University assaulted by masked men last Wednesday.

It is a long succession of assaults — sometimes with sucker punches, other times with cars, more recently with an attempted child abduction — against Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

It is the alleged gang rape near Paris in June of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by teenage boys “uttering death threats and antisemitic remarks,” according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

It is the arson attack on Monday on an Amsterdam tram — a follow-up to last week’s mayhem — with rioters in black yelling “Kanker Joden” — “cancer Jews.”

It is what a Hamas terrorist was doing on Oct. 7, 2023: “Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew. I just killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed 10.”

Notice what these attackers aren’t saying. They aren’t expressing themselves in the faddish language of anti-Zionism. They aren’t denouncing Israeli policy or speaking up for Palestinian rights. They aren’t trying to make careful distinctions between Jews and Israelis. They are, like generations of pogromists before them, simply out to get the Jews — a reminder, if one was needed, of the truth often attributed to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

A great deal of attention has also been paid to some Israeli fans who pulled down a Palestinian flag, vandalized a taxi and, in Hebrew, chanted ugly anti-Arab phrases. There’s no excuse for any of that. But rowdy English soccer fans in Germany have been known to celebrate German war casualties. Somehow it doesn’t lead to a frenzy of organized violence.

Nor does it add any light to provide the “context” of the war in Gaza as a way of trying to understand what happened in Amsterdam. No decent person would explain anti-Asian attacks in the United States by observing that attackers might be angry about, say, China’s human-rights abuses or its biosafety standards.

Yet so many supposedly decent people are quick to try to account for the evil that is done to Jews through reference to the evil (as they see it) that Jews do to others. As Leon Wieseltier pointed out years ago, this type of reasoning is not an explanation for antisemitism. It’s the essence of antisemitism.

Antisemitism in Europe has reached the point where the future of many of its Jewish communities is seriously in doubt. I’m not sure most Europeans understand what a civilizational catastrophe this represents — albeit less for Europe’s Jews, most of whom will find other places to go and thrive, than for Europe itself. The fate of societies that become “Judenfrei” — free of Jews — has not, historically, been a happy one.

The United States is still a long way from this point, thanks to a larger and more politically confident Jewish community, along with a national culture that traditionally has generally admired Jews. But that culture is also under growing threat today, whether from Hamas’s fellow travelers in the Ivy League and the publishing world; Louis Farrakhan’s admirers in the Black community; or the alt-right inveighing, with a sinister wink, against “globalists” and “neocons.”

Americans (and not just Jews) should beware: If we stay on this path, the Jew hunt of Amsterdam may be upon us, too, and sooner than we think.

Obviously no herd immunity in COVID infected Netherlands

Wait! I thought the Netherlands COVID public health pundits predicted "herd immunity"?

Dickens Festival The Netherlands- cancelled!

"...here we are again, with no Christmas spirit in our empty (Netherlands) restaurants and a maximum of four guests a day..."

Echo report published in The New York Times by Senay Boztas*:

AMSTERDAM — Since 5 a.m. on Sunday, bars, restaurants, museums, schools, clothing stores, gift shops and anything resembling fun have been closed across the Netherlands. We’ve become the first European country to go back to lockdown life amid Omicron (until at least early January): It was “unavoidable,” said Prime Minister Mark Rutte. So here we are, looking over the borders enviously at holiday sales and seasonal celebrations in Belgian Antwerp. Once more, it doesn’t look a lot like Christmas.

The Netherlands’ lockdown stands as a warning to the United States, other European countries and COVID hot spots across the globe. 

But, the warning, though, isn’t just about Omicron — other countries have more coronavirus cases and worse vaccination rates than the Netherlands does, and they are not locking down (at least yet).

Netherlands Public Health

The warning is about policy failures — the failure to start a booster campaign sooner, to spin up free testing capacity quickly when needed, to persuade more groups of the benefits of vaccines and to ensure there are enough beds in intensive care. Now our hospitals are already full of patients who are infected with the Delta variant, and we probably won’t have enough beds for all of the people who need care if the Omicron wave hits vaccinated people hard too.

Think of the Dutch lockdown as a Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a Dickensian warning — in a country where the annual Dickens festival has been canceled — about the need for every country to be on its toes in the pandemic era.

So far this holiday season, Europe is trying to allow at least some festive cheer. While Austria enforced a sharp three-week lockdown and severe limits on the unvaccinated, many countries are still trying to avoid shutdowns. 

For example, in Germany, the vaccinated will be able to have up to 10 guests at New Year’s parties; Boris Johnson is determined not to have new British restrictions yet; Belgium is closing certain indoor venues; and France has largely closed restaurants to the unvaccinated — but these countries are not at crisis point.

In the Netherlands, we are, because of the lack of strong and consistent crisis management. Part of the reason is that the government resigned in January and the country took 271 days to form a new one after the March elections. But our troubles also stem from ever-more-unhelpful ideas about freedom — a word with great resonance and many meanings here as well as in the United States and across the West.

The current Dutch lockdown was triggered foremost by a record-breaking average of 22,000 new infections a day at the end of November (in a country of 17.6 million), with severe cases largely among people who have chosen not to get vaccinated, and a rapid spread among school-age children.

Hospitals gave dire warnings of “code black,” meaning they are running out of beds. Some patients were transferred to Germany. And on top of all this, Omicron — currently up to 15 percent of infections — is expected to cause another spike.

But haven’t we learned enough in the last two years to avoid stop-start lockdown as a gut-reaction pandemic response?

The recent history in the Netherlands helps show why the answer is frustratingly muddled. 

Although the country has seen frequent and sometimes violent protests against coronavirus prevention measures, vaccination compliance is high and 85.9 percent of people are fully jabbed.

However, the country has been criticized for going back to “normal” too quickly. In July, for instance, the government had to backpedal on an overenthusiastic loosening of restrictions, including on nightclubs, where high attendance led to “superspreader” events.

Then, in September, two days before the British National Health Service started its booster campaign, Dutch leaders canceled the country’s “one-and-a-half-meter-distanced-society” and told people it was OK to hug again. At the time, health minister Hugo de Jonge said confidently that “vaccine effectivity is high” so the country wasn’t starting a booster campaign.

Entry to events and spaces was based on a QR code for people who had been vaccinated, recovered from COVID, or could show a recent negative test. But the “test for entry” setup has been mired in problems.

The lesson from the Netherlands is that even an admirable level of vaccination is not enough: We need to think about long-term strategy, regular boosters and unlimited, free access to testing if countries want to avoid swinging between extremes.

Another trigger for this total lockdown is the Dutch adherence to freedom. Unlike in Austria, banning the unvaccinated from spaces and places is a hot potato for all political parties. Dutch personal freedoms are strongly protected in the constitution — but surely this ban would be better than lockdown, where we all pay the price?

Prime Minister Rutte has said repeatedly that he has “no intention” of imposing vaccination by law, at one point arguing that the Netherlands is a “slightly anarchistic country that doesn’t need a preachy government.” 

Yet, some people have had enough: Just 52 percent of Dutch people support a hard lockdown, while trust in government coronavirus policy is at record lows.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small businesses now risk financial ruin, M.P.s say. “There’s a silent majority in the Netherlands, that together with business owners, the Royal Dutch Football Association, music venues, the culture sector are asking for alternatives,” Jan Paternotte, a center-left member of parliament, said on Tuesday.

Perhaps, as Mr. Rutte says, Dutch lockdown is a sign of things to come elsewhere with Omicron — we just got here first. Or perhaps Omicron will prove less virulent and burn out the worse strains to save us all.

But  (if we aren’t already infected or in quarantine).

It being the Netherlands, though, there’s often a workaround. One in seven people claim to have had a sneaky manicure, hair trim or massage. And just as COVID crosses borders, hundreds have gone shopping in Antwerp.

*Ms. Boztas is a British journalist who has lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade and has written and worked for media including The Guardian, The Sunday Times of London and the BBC.

Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community (the herd) becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. As a result, the whole community becomes protected — not just those who are immune.