NEW YORK – Jews are facing a threat level unseen in the contemporary world, said WJC President Ronald S. Lauder during the keynote at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York as he addressed Israeli and American journalists, dignitaries, business leaders and community leaders with a detailed message about today’s grave challenges and critical solutions.
In remarks, Mr. Lauder argued that attacks on the Jewish community and the state of Israel by enemies on all fronts had boiled just under the surface on social media, factions in the United States and elsewhere, and were ignored by a variety of government and media platforms to the detriment of Israel and the Jewish people even before October 7th, but their coordination made these threats clear for the world to see starting in the days afterwards.
Among Lauder’s crucial takeaways, cited in his speech, and paraphrased below:
- On October 7th, the world showed sympathy and commitment to Israel and the Jewish people, as both endured the worst attack since the Holocaust, but within days, the world turned its back on Israel and the Jews as the first waves of an unprecedented, vile and terrifyingly effective social media campaign fueled by hate, lies and disinformation that has spread like wildfire – the first social media war against a nation and a people, and one that Israel, the Jewish people, the United States, and the West were totally unprepared for, perpetrated by Hamas-linked groups that turned colleges, universities and digital and traditional media platforms into cesspools of hate; 97% of coverage is hostile and only 3% favorable to Israel and the Jewish people.
- For the first time, social media has dictated the public framing and world response to a war after a sovereign nation and vulnerable people were brutally attacked, including driving a pernicious, antisemitic self-defense double standard, placing Israel in grave danger, and including hate-fueled attacks at the United Nations, IJC, and ICC that no nation has ever been subjected to that ignore rape, murder, and abduction of the elderly, young people, and babies by a terrorist organization that also places its own people in physical crisis with impunity and no repercussions from much of the rest of the world.
- It has been forgotten that great progress was being made to unite Israel, much of the Arab World, and the West—which Iran was desperate to stop—and that this war has been folded into a far-left, Marxist movement in vogue among radical professors who have flooded academia, who falsely divide the world into oppressed/oppressors; colonizers/colonized, and have disturbingly joined the far-left with illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian, anti-Western forces.
- Lauder closed by dedicating the final one-third of his remarks to a clarion call to action to summon the global Jewry to meet this moment, to stand on the shoulders of our giants, and to unify to confront a common enemy, yes, but to place our Jewishness first and not wait until we are in crisis to stand together.
- Finally, he exhorted the Jewish people to seize the moment and do something to advance our Jewish world for centuries to come, citing the example of education and his own record in founding Jewish schools in decimated eastern Europe, and made it clear that there is a role for every Jew who loves their Jewishness to play.
