🇮🇱 לאל ✡︎ בת ציון 🕊

We’ve all watched the violations, suspensions and bans handed down to Jewish and Zionist accounts on X, and lately I’ve found myself seriously questioning whether I even want to continue here. After seeing @mosheIDFend banned for standing against terrorism, my disappointment goes far beyond this platform. I’m disappointed in America and in what we have apparently forgotten. I stood there and watched the towers being hit by Islamist terrorists. I watched them crumble. I remember what September 12th felt like. There was grief, anger and fear, but there was also this incredible sense that America had remembered who we were. We were united. We were going to stand together against terrorism and against the ideology that justified murdering innocent people. I believed that. Then October 7th happened. Jews were murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, and before Israel had even buried its dead, people around the world were already finding ways to justify it. Americans were marching alongside people glorifying “resistance.” Jews were harassed on campuses and in the streets. Terrorist propaganda was repeated by people who couldn’t find Gaza on a map a year earlier. And suddenly I realized how much hatred for Jews had simply been hiding beneath the surface. I know this is not the majority of Americans. I refuse to believe that it is. I also understand that bots, foreign influence campaigns and coordinated propaganda are very real. But we cannot blame all of this on foreign actors. There are Americans of every race, religion and political persuasion who know virtually nothing about the Middle East, Jewish history, radical Islamist movements or the history of Israel, yet somehow feel qualified to lecture Jews about our own history while repeating propaganda from organizations that openly celebrate our deaths. That should disturb every American, Jewish or not. What frightens me most is realizing how little we apparently learned from September 11th. Terrorism did not become acceptable because the victims this time were Jews. Extremism did not become liberation because someone put the word “resistance” in front of it. You can criticize Israel. You can criticize its government. You can advocate for Palestinians. None of that requires celebrating terrorists, excusing the murder of civilians or treating Jews as acceptable collateral damage in your political ideology. I thought September 12th taught America that lesson. October 7th showed me just how many people forgot it.