is the battle lost?

Back in 2014, as Obama was dolling out an additional 50 million in funds to the Palestinians even as Hamas was launching rockets at Israel (history repeats itself, doesn't it?), I wrote about an exhibit at the NY Historical Society about the Joint Distribution Committee:

Anyway, a telegram displayed in the exhibit caught my wife’s eye. This message was sent from someone in Germany in 1933 to the JDC in NY, and it said (I’m sorry we did not copy it word for word) that the situation was not salvageable – instead of relief for those inside Germany, all efforts should be focused on getting as many people out as possible. My wife could not believe that already in 1933 there was such certainty of impending doom. Her own father’s family did not leave Germany until a few years after that. I told her it’s no surprise. 20 or 30 years from now G-d forbid people will look back at the articles in the news that we read almost daily about the situation of Jewry in France and other European countries, the articles we dismiss as alarmist, as right-wing extremism, the calls to get out that people have begun to act on in small measure while others delay, thinking there will always be time to run when things get really bad, and we will wonder why more was not done sooner, why so many failed to act when the anti-Semitisim was so clear, when the barely repressed violence was already evident.

And so we turn to today's news, where headlines declare that "prominent European Jews worry war against antisemitism is lost."  The article notes:

In light of dozens of incidents in Belgium alone in recent weeks, Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism, wrote that he doubts whether he will be able to continue living in the country with his wife and two children.

“I believed I could. Now I doubt I can,” Rubinfeld, a former leader of the CCOJB, the umbrella group of French-speaking Belgian Jews, wrote in an op-ed published Saturday in the Le Vif weekly.

Brigitte Wielheesen, a well-known journalist and counterterrorism expert from the Netherlands, wrote Thursday in an op-ed for the news site Jonet that after years of battling antisemitism, she has concluded that the activity has become useless. [emph mine]

At least in Europe they are slowly starting to see the truth.  Here in the US, we are even slower learners, unfortunately.