When future doctors chant that Jewish blood will flow “like rivers,” the issue is no longer Jolani’s suit. It is a society still steeped in hatred.

I have always told my Israeli friends: don’t be naïve. They want you dead.

In Syria, it is not only Jolani’s fighters who chant “Death to the Jews.” A few days ago another video circulated. This time the voices were not those of soldiers lined up by a citadel. They were future doctors — medical students at the University of Aleppo — chanting: “We are coming, Jew. We will make your blood flow like rivers.”

This is where a society still soaked in hatred stands.

When I dwell on that hatred in my book A Syrian in Israel, I am sometimes accused of giving it too much space — as if it were an obsession, an obstacle to the “new Syria,” an inconvenient memory to be set aside so that we may talk reconstruction, sanctions relief, and peace. The video explains why I write about it. The hatred is real. And it is not confined to the Islamist militias now in power.

Jolani’s Islamists did not invent it. They stoke it and keep it alive. As under Assad’s dictatorship, Jew-hatred remains a political commodity. It is also........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)