After the 9/11 attacks 25 years ago, many Israelis declared, “We are all Americans now.” As I wrote at the time, they had it backward: Americans had become Israelis. We had experienced the horror of Islamic terrorism that they had endured for decades.
Of course, that is only the beginning of our common cause with the Jewish people. They are a wellspring of the values upon which our country was founded. That is why every American should be troubled by the hatred toward Israel and American Jews that has festered inside our country since 9/11 and has been driven to new heights by the radical socialist left.
In New York, Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called the Jewish political advocacy group AIPAC “monsters.” The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), now the ascendant force in the Democratic Party, has made anti-Zionism a litmus test for membership. Hasan Piker, the streamer who has barnstormed for DSA candidates, recently said that “eventually someones going to come around and take action” against American Jews if they continue supporting Israel.
MAMDANIS ANTI-ISRAEL AGENDA COMES AT NEW YORKS EXPENSE
Indeed, it is already happening. FBI figures show anti-Jewish hate crimes have soared and now comprise 63% of all religion-based hate crimes, despite the fact Jews are about 2% of the U.S. population. The radical left offers outrageous excuses. In March, after a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist drove a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into a Michigan synagogue full of sleeping preschoolers, Abdul El-Sayed, the current Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate from Michigan, dismissed the attack by saying that “hurt people hurt people.”
American Christians face a moment of reckoning: Will we stand with our Jewish compatriots, just as they stood with us 25 years ago? Will we speak frankly in their defense?
ISRAELI MEDICS TRAIN US SYNAGOGUES HOW TO RESPOND TO ATTACKS, AS HIGH HOLIDAYS APPROACH
We must. Our efforts to combat radical Islam and defend American values depend upon it.
We often speak of the Judeo-Christian principles that shaped our country, but we should remember the order of those words.
AMERICA AND ISRAEL: A COVENANT, NOT A CONTRACT
Christians alone did not invent the moral world from which Christianity emerged and on which America was founded. The tenets of Christianity are clearly based on the words of the prophets from the Old Testament. The God we worship is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The commandments we teach were given at Sinai. The language that shaped the American conscience was largely from the prophets of Israel.
The Hebrew Scriptures taught the principles that our Founders considered self-evident: that every human being bears the image of God, and that even the king answers to a higher moral law. These ideals reached our founding generation through Christianity, but not exclusively.
THE BEDROCK OF AMERICAN LIBERTY WAS LAID IN JERUSALEM
In 1790, the members of the Hebrew congregation of N
