Surveying recent physical and political assaults on Jews from across Europe and America, Bari Weiss notes a perhaps even more disturbing tendency to ignore or downplay them: from the media’s indifference to violence against the ultra-Orthodox, to a French court dropping charges against an anti-Semitic murderer, to the invective directed at Jews with the temerity to criticize Jeremy Corbyn’s hostility toward them. And often the desire to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism comes from those who consider themselves greatly sensitive to every other kind of bigotry:

If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as “just anti-Zionism,” you can all but guarantee it will be.

Jordyn Wright is a Jewish sophomore who sits on the board of the Students’ Society of McGill University. Over winter break, she is planning, like hundreds of other North American Jewish college students, to go to Israel [in a trip organized by her campus’s] Hillel society. As a result of that trip, the student government voted to call for her resignation. . . . Never mind that another student-government leader is also going; apparently because that student is not a Jew, no resignation was required.

Jew-hatred is surging and yet . . . does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. Unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, discrimination against them, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.

When you look at each of these incidents, perhaps it is possible still to pretend that they are random bursts of bigotry perpetrated by hooligans lacking any real organization or power behind them. But Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects in Britain tell a different, far more distressing story—that a person with some of the same impulses as those hooligans can stand within spitting distance of the office of prime minister.

On Wednesday, Elliott Abrams testified before Congress about the Taylor Force Act, passed in 2018 to withhold U.S. funds from the Palestinian Authority (PA) so long as it continues to reward terrorists and their families with cash. Abrams cites several factors explaining the sharp increase in Palestinian terrorism this year, among them Iran’s attempt to wage proxy war on Israel; another is the “Palestinian Authority’s continuing refusal to fight terrorism.” (Video is available at the link below.)

As long as the “pay for slay” system continues, the message to Palestinians is that terrorists should be honored and rewarded. And indeed year after year, the PA honors individuals who have committed acts of terror by naming plazas or schools after them or announcing what heroes they are or were.

There are clear alternatives to “pay to slay.” It would be reasonable for the PA to say that, whatever the crime committed, the criminal’s family and children should not suffer for it. The PA could have implemented a welfare-based system, a system of family allowances based on the number of children—as one example. It has steadfastly refused to do so, precisely because such a system would no longer honor and reward terrorists based on the seriousness of their crimes.

These efforts, like the act itself, are not at all meant to diminish assistance to the Palestinian people. Rather, they are efforts to direct aid to the Palestinian people rather than to convicted terrorists. . . . [T]he Taylor Force Act does not stop U.S. assistance to Palestinians, but keeps it out of hands in the PA that are channels for paying rewards for terror.

[S]hould the United States continue to aid the Palestinian security forces? My answer is yes, and I note that it is also the answer of Israel and Jordan. As I’ve noted, PA efforts against Hamas or other groups may be self-interested—fights among rivals, not principled fights against terrorism. Yet they can have the same effect of lessening the Iranian-backed terrorism committed by Palestinian groups that Iran supports.