This yr, 2025, will finish in a swirl of sorrow, soaked in blood. Whereas the inventory market is up nearly 14 %, so are inflation and unemployment. With the Supreme Court docket’s assist, Donald Trump will raze the executive state.
The rule of legislation is being rubbished. The president pardons criminals with relish, together with the January 6 mob, and indicts critics with not a lot as a sugarcoat of impartiality. In the meantime, his “Division of Struggle” is within the eyes of many as committing extrajudicial homicide on the excessive seas.
A few of us could also be immunized to the Grand Guignol of Trump’s tantrums, however the bloody December of latest days actually shocks the conscience. We recoil in horror at the killing of two college students at Brown College, the bloodbath of at the least 15 Jews at Bondi Seashore exterior Sydney, Australia, as they celebrated Hanukkah, and the homicide of Rob Reiner and his spouse, Michele, allegedly by their son, who has substance abuse and psychological well being histories.
In fact, it’s too early to know the Brown assault motivation. We all know extra about Bondi Seashore. The Australian authorities say it needed to do with antisemitic Islamic State ideology, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, vowing even tighter gun management, proclaimed antisemitism was “a scourge, and we are going to eradicate it.”
Eradicating antisemitism is a fraught aim for many who care, not to mention those that have been cavalier like the federal government in Canberra. Antisemitism is a centuries-old virus. Jews symbolize “different,” a susceptible, identifiable individuals on the middle of conspiracies. Earlier than the state of Israel, Jews had no military and no technique of protection. Their reliance on others’ goodwill proved misplaced.
Bondi Seashore was no remoted incident. The Fight Antisemitism Motion (CAM) documented 5,118 antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2025 as of October 1, with over 5,000 in the USA, 1500 in the UK, and incidents in Australia reaching historic highs.
In 2025, Trump stated he wished to eradicate antisemitism in American universities by withholding wanted analysis grants from such iconic studying establishments as Harvard and Columbia. The effectiveness of such an method has been significantly questioned, and the injury to American scientific management is profound. Trump’s motives appeared to have much less to do with defending Jews on campus than pandering to his anti-intellectual base.
The Brown horror, like Bondi Seashore, provokes the same old Kabuki “ideas and prayers” requires extra gun management and extra psychiatric help. No less than 75 faculty shootings have unfolded this yr in the USA. And Trump’s “One Large Stunning Invoice” drastically cuts total Medicaid and federal well being spending, impacting behavioral well being considerably by way of practically $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, resulting in potential lack of protection for hundreds of thousands, together with these needing psychological well being companies.
Jew hatred lengthy rested on prominence in finance or the killing of Christ. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, such shopworn, virulent antisemitism was changed by the conflation of Israel with Jews.
To justify assaults on Australian Jews primarily based on the warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is specious. Final I checked, Bondi Seashore is just not in Israel. Nor are Washington, D.C., or Boulder, Colorado, websites of different antisemitic slaughter.
The Holocaust occurred earlier than there was an Israel. Violent antisemitism is just not brought on by something Israel does or doesn’t do, which, after all, doesn’t insulate the Israeli authorities from simply criticism.
The miserable reality this vacation season is that unalloyed rage appears all over the place. Social media has develop into the conveyor belt for virulent racism. So is the presidential podium.
President Trump used alleged fraud by Minnesotans of Somali origin as a pretext to demonize American Somalis. There isn’t a reply for this aside from to talk out. John Lewis, the late congressman, who was knocked unconscious on the Selma bridge, famously stated, “Once you see one thing terrible occur, you’ve bought to talk up. You’ve bought to face up. Democracy is just not a state of being. It’s an act.”
Whereas Trump has declared warfare on medication, he has pardoned or reprieved main drug sellers. One, fairly notably, is former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took hundreds of thousands in bribes and used his police and army to guard drug shipments and crush rivals. He was convicted, however Trump allowed Hernández to stroll free from a 45-year jail sentence.
As a result of it’s all about him, Trump mocked the Reiners, harshly blaming the killings on the victims’ “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” posting on social media that Rob Reiner’s dying was “reportedly as a result of anger he brought on by others by way of his large, unyielding, and incurable affliction.” Trump’s callousness impressed uncommon pushback from conservative lawmakers. In 2025, add those that cheered or wouldn’t condemn the homicide of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Homicide, which in 1967 was characterised by the Black militant H. Rap Brown as “American as cherry pie,” is in the present day politicized.
As Stephen Bush writes in The Monetary Occasions, these “from throughout the political spectrum” have “created the circumstances for previous hatreds to flourish freely within the twenty first century.” It’s a murderous December.
