Biden warns of ‘ferocious surge in antisemitism’ amid continued campus protests over Israel-Hamas war

President Joe Biden on Tuesday forcefully condemned antisemitic demonstrations and downplaying of the 7 October terror attacks as echoes of Nazism. He assured Jewish Americans of their place in the country amid the continuing protests over Israel’s seven-month-old war against Hamas, telling them: “You’re not alone, you belong. You always have and you always will.”

In fiery remarks delivered at the United States Capitol to an audience that included multiple Holocaust survivors, Mr Biden recalled how his father had taught him and his siblings about “the horrors of the Shoa” around the dinner table as they grew up in Delaware, and said he has looked to impart the same lessons on his children and grandchildren, including by taking them to the site of the Dachau concentration camp “so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence in the face of evil”.

The president explicitly compared the motivations of the Nazis who perpetrated the mass murder of Europe’s Jews with the Hamas militants who committed the October 2023 attacks which constituted the worst slaughter of Jews since 1945.

He warned that the “ancient hatred of Jews” did not end with the fall of Nazi Germany, but “continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world”.

“That hatred was brought to life on 7 October 2023,” he said. “Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and a half months later. And people are already forgetting or already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror”.

“It was Hamas that brutalised Israelis, it was Hamas that took and continues to hold hostages,” he continued. “I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget!”

The president also warned of a “ferocious surge