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Lexington, Mass., is a peaceful town, famous for being an ideal place to raise children. Young couples move there from everywhere so that their children can attend its public schools, which in disproportionate numbers send students to the finest universities in the land. Lexington has a robust library serving its hypereducated residents, and its own symphony. It is a community of bake sales and charity drives and back-to-school nights.
A walk into Lexington Center one recent morning revealed that heart-wrenching posters had been pasted onto a window of a vacant store. They said "Kidnapped," and featured pictures of the Israelis, including Holocaust survivors, who had been brutalized by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7, and then rammed onto the backs of trucks and abducted into Gaza. These were the "lucky" ones, who were not butchered to death, blown to pieces or burned to dust by 3,000 Hamas killers.
Each "kidnapped" poster had a picture of an innocent soul who is now held at gunpoint in underground Hamas tunnels. It's hard to believe that anyone could fail to feel for them or to respect the idea of keeping them in the hearts of decent people.
Believe it.
By the next morning, the posters had been ripped down.
Ground zero for hatred-posing-as-progressivism is academia, where Jewish students and others who are disgusted by the Hamas massacre of Israelis have found themselves assaulted, bullied, surrounded, forced to run gauntlets of students screaming for the eradication of the Jewish homeland or otherwise harassed while faculty members and their fellow students stay silent, or urge it on.
At the University of Pennsylvania, one student speaker invoked the "joyful" images of beheaded and dismembered Israelis from the "glorious October 7th," and encouraged her audience to "bring it to the streets." Observed Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, "This is not a patient at a psychiatric hospital. This is a student at an Ivy League institution."
This is intended to destroy the emotional well-being of Jewish students. And it's working.
Those holding themselves out as progressives now closely resemble the racists marching at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Progressives who denounced the hate festival at Charlottesville are now staging hate festivals of their own. Their victims are Jews.
They believe they are really progressives.
That's what they tell themselves and each other they are. But what they really are is the new tiki torch carriers. And that is how history will remember them.