I am a born-again Christian believer who is also Jewish. My mother is Jewish and I was raised on stories of the Holocaust.
Therefore, anti-Semitism hits me hard, at gut level. So the news of the massive Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed, including babies and the elderly, was absolutely devastating. Jews were raped, beheaded and burned alive – including infants. The people who did these unspeakable things were so proud of what they were doing that they used their victims’ smartphones to make videos of the horrors and post them on social media.
The next day, Israel started going after Hamas in Gaza. That always makes Israel look bad, because Hamas always hides behind “human shields” – women and children – and then Israel is blamed when there are civilian casualties. We have learned how Hamas has stored its weapons beneath hospitals, schools and daycare centers, how it has built a huge underground complex of terror tunnels large enough to drive vehicles through, and how the hospitals, schools and other civilian buildings have shafts leading down to those terror tunnels.
Unlike Hamas’ treacherous tactics, Israel takes pains to warn citizens before going after terrorists holed up in a hospital or school, giving them time to get patients or students to safety before the attack occurs. Why doesn’t the world understand that Hamas uses these facilities housing the sick and the young to avoid being attacked, thus literally using the vulnerable as human shields? And when the facilities are destroyed in the process of reaching the terrorists, the world points the finger at Israel accusing her of committing “genocide.”
The mainstream media doesn’t tell the public about those things. Instead, they make it look like Israel is cruelly attacking hospitals, schools and daycare centers. Largely because of the media’s distortion of the truth, there have been protests against Israel in many nations, beginning on Oct. 8, 2023. These protests have gone way beyond saying Israel is bad. They quickly descend into outright anti-Semitism – condemning all Jews all over the world because of what Israel is doing.
As a result, anti-Semitism has significantly increased worldwide, including here in America. In addition to seeing synagogues and Jewish schools and other Jewish things vandalized, Jewish people are being physically attacked. One American man was killed just for carrying an Israeli flag.
It’s gotten so bad that many Jews are moving to Israel in spite of the war that is going on there. For example, many New York Jews believe they will be safer in Israel than they are walking down the streets of today’s New York City, now run by communist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In London and Berlin, people have been painting large stars of David on the houses of Jews. A man got into one of those houses and stabbed the woman who lived there. Before leaving, he painted a swastika on the door.
Here in America, a woman who was the number-two person in her synagogue was stabbed over 30 times. It takes a LOT of hatred for somebody to stab a woman that badly.
There have been crowds of people in various cities around the world chanting “Gas the Jews!” – even here in America. As a Jewish person and a Christian believer who understands Bible prophecy and Israel’s role in it, you can’t imagine how that feels to hear this.
America is not immune to what happened in Germany. It can happen here – that was the whole point of Eric Metaxas’ bestselling book, “Letter to the American Church.” Most of the Germans were decent people. They never expected anything like that to happen in their nation. Many of them didn’t even realize the extent of the horror of what was going on while it was happening. They didn’t find out about it fully until after the war was over, when Gen. Eisenhower made them go to those concentration camps and see what had been done there.
Perhaps it was fear or apathy that caused the majority of them to turn their heads and look the other way when the Jewish population was being persecuted. But they had also been conditioned to resent, despise and even hate the Jews. There were many Lutherans in Germany at that time; and sadly, Hitler used the writings of Martin Luther, who had become very anti-Semitic late in life, to persuade the German people.
I have a friend whose family came here from Germany shortly after World War II. She often went to Germany to visit her grandmother and other relatives who were still there, so she learned a lot about what life was like under the Nazis, and how dictatorship began low-level and kept increasing. My friend told me that America reminds her of early-stage Nazi Germany. Clearly, she is seriously worried about what is going on here. And if the Jews get persecuted, then Christians will also be persecuted.
That happened in Germany. Hitler required the churches to have his picture up front where everybody saw it during the services. And he sent officers to the churches to force the people (including the pastors) to raise their hand in the Nazi salute and swear allegiance to Hitler. Anybody who refused to do that wound up in a concentration camp. Or else the men were sent to fight in the most dangerous areas of the war.
In addition, anybody who was not loyal to the government got sent to the camps. People were expected to obey orders without question. In America, that would result in having a lot of Christians wind up in those camps because they could not obey orders to do things that go against biblical morality.
Christians better get serious about praying for God to restrain this evil.
If Christians are able to do anything practical to fight this anti-Semitism (and other kinds of lawlessness), then they should do that as well. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
May we as Christian believers in today’s world not be deceived into thinking anti-Semitism is acceptable and even right. And may it not be thought of us in future generations that we were apathetic, indifferent and even hateful toward those who are called “the apple of God’s eye.”