The sights and sounds emanating from the once-prestigious Columbia University in New York City over the past week have been about as low and vile as one could imagine. The anti-Israel encampments that have taken over the campus quickly moved from posters to threats, with participants vocally calling for terrorism against Israel and even violence against Jewish students there on the campus of Columbia.

Things got so bad so quickly that the Orthodox Rabbi serving Columbia University and Barnard College sent a message to hundreds of Jewish students telling them to flee the campus because neither campus security nor the NYPD could guarantee their safety. (https://www.foxnews.com/us/columbia-rabbi-tells-jewish-students-leave-campus-warns-school-nypd-cannot-guarantee-your-safety)

Anti-semites at Yale University, apparently unwilling to be outdone by their counterparts at Columbia, stabbed a female Jewish reporter in the eye with a Palestinian flag. The most maddening part of that episode is that when she tried to report the assault to the police, she was told there was nothing they could do. (https://nypost.com/2024/04/21/us-news/jewish-yale-student-stabbed-in-the-eye-with-palestinian-flag-during-protest/)

And in a scene reminiscent of Nazi Germany, protesters at one point formed a blockade to keep a Jewish student from entering a building.

In The United States of America. In the year 2024.

If you want to know where this is all very shortly headed unless it is stopped in its tracks and ruthlessly eradicated, here is your answer. “To Hitler, as he had publicly declared a thousand times, the Jews were not Germans, and though he did not exterminate them at once (only a relative few – a few thousand, that is – were robbed, beaten, or murdered during the first months), he issued laws excluding them from public service, the universities and the professions. And on April 1, 1933, he proclaimed a national boycott of Jewish shops.” (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer, P. 203)

America, for all her modernity and technology, is well on her way to joining Nazi Germany, Spain of 1492 with her abhorrent Alhambra Decree, ancient Persia under Ahasuerus and Haman, and countless others through the years who have persecuted the Jews because of a “horrible thing” the Jews were doing – being Jews.

And we will not be the last in that long line of wretched legacy. The book of the Revelation describes a time yet future to us, during the Tribulation Period, when the Jews will once again be the favorite punching bag of the nations of the world. Revelation 11:2 says, “But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.” Revelation 12:15 says, “And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood [a flood of people] after the woman [Israel], that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.”

But while anti-semitism is endemic in the past, present, and future, the fact that it always has been and always will be does not absolve us of our responsibility to be different. Throughout all of the periods of fierce Jew hatred on earth, there have always been those who stood against the rising tide of satanic filth, often at great risk and great cost to themselves.

It would be nice to be able to rely on “the authorities” to keep the sons and daughters of Abraham safe, but if history has taught us anything, it is that the authorities tend to either enthusiastically participate in the persecution or just sit quietly by and do nothing while it takes place.

And that means that it is up to us, all of us, to make Never Again more than just a slogan.

The day is already here when, at universities, the football and basketball and baseball and soccer teams, along with the wrestling squads and medical students and philosophy majors need to come out in force and physically confront anyone harassing Jewish students. Mind you, it means that you will be confronting others of your own student body as well as off-campus agitators, but so be it. You have looked back at history and wondered why others did nothing; others will one day read history books about this exact moment in time and either wonder the same about you or praise you for being different.

Nearly 3000 years ago, Solomon wrote words that should resonate through all of this today.

Proverbs 24:11-12 If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?

God is watching, and history will be watching. Let’s make sure the history books written about our time don’t include any chapters asking why we let the Jews be victimized all over again while some of the survivors of the last Holocaust were watching with tears streaming down now aged faces.