Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century – and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one's own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.

It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent – and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.

True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman's broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.

First, in demographic terms, the U.S. Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5-8 versus 1.6-1.7).

There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population.

Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews are not just secular or intermarried but no longer identify so strongly as Jewish, much less as supporters of Israel. More importantly, billions of dollars in the last few years from the Gulf states – primarily Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait – have flowed into American universities.

These enormous sums bankroll weaponized Middle East studies programs and enrich left-wing NGOs, nonprofits, and sympathetic politicians. The new antisemites talk nefariously of the money of "International Jewry," and "It's all about the Benjamins, baby," but in truth, Gulf money dwarfs Israel's lobbying budget.

An entire generation of young American elites has been groomed in universities to despise Israel and, by extension, to express hostility toward Jews. After October 7, the scab was torn away, revealing what had festered underneath for years.

Any visitor to a contemporary American campus who talks at length to protesting students quickly arrives at two general conclusions:

First, many have been taught to despise Israel and simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors – "apartheid," "genocide," "war crimes," "settler colonialism," and so on.

The result is that it is now "cool" on campus to trash Israel, utter the platitude that "hating Israel is not hating Jews," and then either make life uncomfortable for Jewish students or remain........

© Townhall