The phrase "Never Again," the rallying cry of post-Holocaust Jewry, describes the imperative that Jews don't repeat the naive belief that Hitler wouldn't carry out what he had declared he intended to do. Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in 1968, popularized the saying in America, which also served as the title of his 1972 book, "Never Again! A Program for Survival."

As Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Philip Martin recently recounted in his column on the Nazi era, denial and wishful thinking in the face of explicit threats proved catastrophic. The lesson of WWII is that when evil people say they intend to do awful acts, believe them.

Last week, I detailed two troubling cases of antisemitism right here in Arkansas. The first involved postings by University of Arkansas- Fayetteville professor Mohja Kahf of the King Fahd Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She affixed to her office door vile invectives equating the Israeli viewpoint with some of history's worst racists, alongside the now-infamous mantra calling for Israel's destruction: "Palestine, from the river to the sea."

To grasp Kahf's worldview, I also recounted the poem she maladroitly published shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews by Palestinian terrorists. In her diatribe, she claimed the dispute over the Jewish homeland is merely 75 years old, has nothing to do with Biblical Israel or Judaism itself, and stems solely from European Jewish "invaders." Every assertion is demonstrably false--ignoring millennia of........

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