For the past few decades, Democrats have consistently demanded a strong response to the rising number of hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, ancestry or sexual orientation. Among other things, they have insisted on universal condemnation of the crimes and vigorous enforcement of federal laws that criminalize hate crimes.
Spurred by the brutal hate murders of James Byrd Jr., and Matthew Shepard in the late 1990s, the Department of Justice has prosecuted hundreds of these cases in recent administrations, including 70 convictions by the Biden Department of Justice as last September. As chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee years ago, I was involved in the push for stronger enforcement. It was a central part of the Democrats’ civil rights agenda.
But now the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem on its left flank, and its tune has changed a bit. Leftist professional organizers have mobilized student groups and mobs elsewhere to attack, harass and obstruct the free movement of Jews — all of which are crimes.
Many openly support Hamas and the October 7 civilian massacre, calling for the destruction of Israel and for the repatriation of Jews to places like Poland. One student leader at Columbia asserted that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” in a livestream video. (University officials took no disciplinary action until the video was widely publicized.)
Of course, the spike of over 8,873 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2023 — a 140 percent increase from the previous year — was somewhat predictable.
Numerous progressive groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (which counts among its supporters Democrats in Congress) and local chapters of Black Lives Matter celebrated Hamas’s genocidal attack as an act of liberation. A progressive Columbia professor called the attack “awesome”; one at Cornell was “exhilarated”; a Stanford instructor segregated Jewish students in an apparent slander of Israelis for being imagined “colonizers.” Democrats have largely looked the other way and declined to namecheck any of these bigotries.
What would Democrats say if paid organizers incited mobs to attack Black students, impede their movement and publicly demand their repatriation to Africa? What would they say if college professors and their curricula slurred the ancestral heritage of Hispanics? They would rightly be outraged and would insist on maximum legal consequences against the perpetrators.
In the case of Israel and the Jews, the left’s concern about racism seems less urgent and more qualified. Few if any Democrats have insisted on federal criminal prosecutions for the more than 1,500 reported antisemitic incidents on college campuses since the Oct. 7 attack, though hate crime laws specifically identify violence, intimidation and harassment on school campuses – including impeding free movement, as has repeatedly happened to Jewish students — as a federal crime.
When asked recently about antisemitic violence, President Biden’s reflexive response was to equate his concern with his concern for Palestinians — a pathetic “both sides” pander the type of which he previously denounced in the case of Charlottesville, and one that hopelessly confuses different issues while giving cover to the angry mobs.
Democrats seem to have lost the plot here. Fighting bigotry when it benefits only your favored voter groups is not fighting bigotry; it’s a cynical and opportunistic appropriation of a cause for narrow political gain that deprives you of any moral authority on the subject.
Since his recent equivocation, the president improved things a bit. His holocaust remembrance was clearer in its condemnation of antisemitism, even if belated. But it importantly fell short on specifics. The accompanying White House National Strategy plan so far consists mostly of small ball items — helping local authorities monitor and diffuse violent incidents and bringing a few more Civil Rights Act Title VI investigations in universities where antisemitism is already plainly evident. It’s a weaker response than we’ve seen than when other minority groups have been targeted.
What is needed is a more serious prime-time Oval Office address where the president not only condemns the antisemitic hatred to a national audience but pledges the full force of federal law enforcement to combat it, supplemented by Title VI federal funding cut-offs for universities that clearly tolerate it.
The president could also help address anti-Jew slander by reminding the country of the stakes in Israel’s war: a fight against terrorists who reject peace and publicly pledge to kill Jewish civilians, the single most persecuted group in all of history. The president could also remind us of the efforts Israel has made to protect civilians in Gaza, that the civilian-military casualty ratio there is lower than most urban wars, and that countries like Egypt could ease the crisis by stepping up to accept Palestinian refugees.
Such courage demanded of the moment would not only likely help Biden’s reelection aims — there are more voters in the “Nikki Haley center” than the small but vocal anti-Israel left — but also show the strong leadership demanded of the moment.
Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.