The oldest hatred is back: How it’s consuming Europe and crossing the Atlantic

I live in Brussels.

Not the Brussels of postcards and European summits. The real one. The Brussels where Jewish schools sit behind armed guards, where synagogues are built like fortresses, where Jewish parents quietly tell their children to tuck the Star of David inside their shirts before they leave the house. 

I know what antisemitism looks like when it stops hiding. I have spent my life watching it return to a continent that swore it never would.

So let me ask the question no one seems willing to ask out loud:

Why can’t I, as a European who lives here and sees this every single day, look across the ocean and tell America exactly what is coming? Why can’t I warn you that the thing I am living through is already arriving at your door? And why should that warning be addressed only to Jewish leaders, when it concerns every single American who still believes this can’t happen here?

WESTERN LEADERS MUST CONFRONT ISLAMIST-INSPIRED ANTISEMITIC VIOLENCE BEFORE IT TARGETS EVERYONE

It can. It is. And I am not speaking only to the Jewish community. I am speaking to all of you — mayors, governors, senators, police chiefs, university presidents. Anyone with the authority to act and the temptation to look away.

Wake up.

In Europe, antisemitism did not come back wearing a swastika. It came back wrapped in slogans. It marched under the banner of justice. It called itself activism, and it dared anyone to object. And it did not arrive alone. It arrived alongside a violent extremism that European leaders spent 20 years insisting was a fringe — a misunderstanding, a problem that would dissolve on its own if only we were patient and tolerant enough. It was none of those things. It was a warning we refused to read, and we are paying for that refusal now.

We told ourselves we could manage it. We told ourselves it was someone else’s neighborhood, someone else’s children, someone else’s problem. We were wrong on every count.

Look at what a single weekend can now do to a great European capital. Look at Paris, where order collapsed overnight, where hundreds were arrested, where a mob laid siege to a police station in one of the most elegant districts in the world, where the Eiffel Tower itself shut its doors because the authorities could no longer promise the center would hold. 

The specific spark hardly matters. The lesson is always the same: a free, confident, modern city can lose command of its own streets faster than anyone in charge will admit. And when the streets are already lost, the Jews are always the first to feel it.

Americans watch these scenes the way you’d watch a storm over a distant sea. Terrible. Tragic. But far away. Foreign. Unrepeatable here.

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That is precisely what we told ourselves in Europe.

For generations, America was the opposite of this continent. A Jew could walk down any street in Brooklyn or Boca Raton without doing the math on his own safety. A child could wear a yarmulke to school without a parent’s stomach tightening. A synagogue did not have to look like a bunker. America was the place that proved it did not have to end the way Europe always seemed to end. That was not luck. It was a civic culture that treated Jew-hatred as disqualifying, not debatable.

That is the confidence now beginning to crack. And the people accelerating the crack are not a fringe in masks. They are winning arguments. They are shaping what counts as acceptable on campuses, in city councils, in the feeds where your children form their opinions. They are teaching a generation that some hatreds are sophisticated and forgivable and that the oldest hatred of all is simply one more political position.

When antisemitism is excused because it wears the right political colors, the danger spreads. When violent extremism is rationalized because confronting it is uncomfortable, the danger spreads. When the people in charge offer statements instead of standards, the danger spreads. And every extremist hears the same message we heard in Europe: no one is going to stop you.

I am not asking America to become afraid. Fear is what they want. I am asking America to become honest — while honesty still costs you almost nothing.

This is not about disagreement. Democracies are built to argue, and a healthy one argues fiercely. It is about whether a society confronts hatred consistently, even when the source is fashionable, even when the people spreading it claim the moral high ground, even when it would be easier to call it something gentler than what it is. That is the test Europe failed. The proof is on my street, in my city, in capitals across this continent, every single day.

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So here is my question to America’s leaders, and I want you to sit with it:

You can see what has happened here. I am telling you plainly, as a man who lives inside it. So knowing what Europe has become — knowing the guards, the fortress synagogues, the families who have already packed and gone — how could you possibly choose to let it happen there?

I am offering you what my own generation of leaders never got in time: a warning, delivered early, while the door is still open and the price of acting is still small.

Europe has already seen this movie. We know exactly how it ends.

America still has time to write a different one. But not much.

Do not wait until you need my experience to finally believe my warning.