A recent novel has brought renewed attention to the real-life incident from which it takes its inspiration: the 1974 kidnapping of a successful American Jewish businessman named Jack Teich. In the rhetoric of his kidnappers, one finds a familiar mixture of racial and class resentment, anti-Semitism, pro-Palestinian sympathies, and justification for violence that wouldn’t be out of place on a college campus today. Teich, in his memoir, describes the rantings of the captor he dubbed “the Keeper.” Daniel Edward Rosen writes:

The Keeper wanted Teich to confess to being a member of the Jewish Defense League, which he was not, and insisted that Teich and the JDL were “going to kill Yasir Arafat,” the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Keeper’s rants against Jews would continue throughout Teich’s captivity. He called Teich a Jew slumlord. He blamed “Jews and the whites” for causing the “plight of the poor people in America, Africa, and the Middle East.” The Keeper set the ransom for Teich’s release at $750,000 ($4.7 million in today’s dollars)—one of the largest in U.S. history.

The Keeper referred to the ransom as Teich’s “fine” that, once paid, would be sent overseas to “feed hungry poor people in other lands. It’s going to help the Palestinians and poor black people.” He tells Teich: “This is going to teach you and your people not to keep all the money for yourselves.” [The kidnappers] signed their ransom note with “Death to racist capitalism.”

The Keeper’s anti-Semitic rants . . . were a gateway justification for a more malignant form of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, which has reemerged after Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.