At Branham High School in San Jose this month, eight students formed a human swastika on the football field. A photo of the formation was posted online with a quote from Adolf Hitler:
I want to be a prophet again today. If international financial Jews inside and outside Europe were to succeed in plunging nations into a world war once again, the result will not be Bolshevization of the earth and thus a victory for Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. The world may laugh at this statement; many laughed at my words back then. But time will show that there is more truth to this prophecy than today’s adversaries can love. Nations will rise against those who push them into conflict, chaos and destruction.
The quote is from Hitler’s Reichstag speech on the “Jewish Question” in January 1939. In August of that year, Hitler signed a pact with Stalin, and in September, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics both invaded Poland, effectively starting World War II. During the Pact, Stalin handed over German Jewish communists to the Gestapo. Margarete Buber-Neumann described the transfer in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler.
Antisemitism is now surging on college campuses, but the Hitler quote and swastika pose takes it to another level.
Antisemitism is now surging on college campuses, but the Hitler quote and swastika pose takes it to another level. The websites of Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta offered no statement on the case, which they could have seen coming. (RELATED: Post-Identity Antisemitism: The New Obsession With Israel)
In May, the California Department of Education ruled that two teachers at Branham High School, in the Campbell Union school district, engaged in discriminatory conduct against Jewish students. The teachers imposed one-sided presentations of the conflicts between Israel and Hamas. That terrorist group dominates Gaza and was responsible for the attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The education department ordered Campbell Union to provide at least one hour of anti-bias training for all English language arts and social studies teachers by the start of the next school year. As parents and taxpayers should know, it’s going to take much more than that.
As Benjamin Ginsberg notes in The New American Anti-Semitism, the current surge is the result of toxic identity politics and anti-Israel sentiment coming from the political left. That helps explain why antisemitism finds a home in left-leaning media outlets, university campuses, and even high schools in affluent California school districts. (RELATED: Schumer and the Democrats’ Antisemitism Problem)
Ginsberg traces the history of the Jewish people, from the children of Abraham to current times, and urges Americans to learn the lessons of that history. The leaders of the Campbell Union district might also consult A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin, a best-seller in 2001. That volume should end all attempts to view the conflict in simplistic terms of oppressors and oppressed.
With Hitler again in play, teachers, parents, and students might read Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. Author Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, was able to survive because “unlike Jews, blacks were few in number and relegated to low-priority status.” The author recalls the Kristallnacht of Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazi thugs destroyed more than 1,000 Jewish places of worship, killed 91 Jews, and arrested some 30,000 others.
Consider also “Documenting History: Eisenhower and the Holocaust,” on the website of the National Park Service. On April 4, 1945, the United States Army liberated Ohrdruf, an extension of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. There, American troops found “scenes of mass murder … piles of naked corpses, dozens of train cars that were filled with decomposing human remains, and ‘walking skeletons.’”
General Eisenhower said what he saw “beggar description,” and as he told Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, “I made the visit deliberately in order to give firsthand evidence of these things, if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.” Antisemites specialize in denying or minimizing Hitler’s attempt to annihilate the Jews, as he explained in the 1939 quote, a caption to the swastika photo from Branham High School in San Jose.
The battle against antisemitism requires knowledge and courage. Both seem to be lacking in California.
READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley:
10 Years After San Bernardino Terrorist Attack
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.
