Time-honored wisdom holds that if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The explosion of venom, vitriol, vandalism and violence against Jews since Israel was attacked by genocidal killers on Oct. 7, 2023, begs the question: Is what certainly looks like anti-Semitism something other than anti-Semitism? Or is it a duck?

When, within hours after 5,000 Hamas gunmen doctrinally pledged to the genocide of Jews slaughtered 1,200 Jews while they were dancing at a festival or sleeping in their beds, cries arose on campuses and in other progressive quarters that the massacre of the Jews was the fault of the Jews, it sure seemed like classic anti-Semitism, fitting neatly the historical pattern of blaming Jews for everything, even their own suffering. Student groups blamed the Jewish state for attacks on the Jewish state while the Jewish state's medical personnel were still collecting their people's body fragments. Angry rallies accusing Israel of "genocide" materialized when Israel had barely begun its response to Hamas — which proudly celebrated the slaughter and vowed to keep on slaughtering Jews until the "job" was finished. Professors at prestigious universities hailed the massacre as "astonishing," "astounding", "awesome" and "exhilarating."

Posters of Jewish children, women and the elderly kidnapped by Hamas and held, tortured and shackled in Hamas tunnels — posters that simply asked that those held hostage be remembered — were ripped down. Jewish kids on college campuses were threatened, blocked, berated, surrounded and chased. And university presidents called to testify before Congress were unwilling to declare that demands for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' policies.

But wait! This isn't anti-Semitism, some say. It's something else entirely: it's "anti-Zionism" or "anti-Israelism," but in any event, not anti-Semitism. This, says David Harris, the venerated former longtime head of the American Jewish Committee, is worse than nonsense. Harris, once described by Shimon Peres as "the foreign minister of the Jewish people," has published a new book, "Anti-Semitism: What Everyone Needs to Know," which meticulously shows that the attempt to call the miasma of hatred aimed at Jews something other than anti-Semitism is BS. It is, he demonstrates, right out of the tragic, immoral historical playbook.

Harris ticks off just some examples of what is daily fare for Jews: "Death threats against Jews, thwarted attempts to target Jewish schools, centers and synagogues, neo-Nazis marching and chanting 'Jews will not replace us', the numerous attacks on identifiable Jews, menacing statements by pro-Palestinian individuals or groups for Zionists to get off the subway, (or to) identify themselves at a restaurant, or (calls for) Jewish students to go back to Germany or Poland, or chants of "Gas the Jews." Harris' litany could have gone on much, much longer.

Some of the most virulent anti-Semites around believe that if they angrily deny that they're anti-Semites, they aren't ones. Harris reminds us of the formulation articulated by the great Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, who remained in a Soviet gulag rather than renounce his faith. "The 3Ds — demonization, delegitimization and double standards," Sharansky wrote, "are the three main tools that anti-Semites employed against Jews throughout history." Presently, one of the principal tools is to label Israel, the victim of a genocidal invasion, guilty of genocide because its attempt to prevent the promised next attacks and to free the innocents taken and kept hostage killed a great many Gazans. These were deaths Hamas did everything it could to guarantee.

Then there's the demonization and the double standards deployed against AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies for the alliance between the two countries. It doesn't even rank among the top 100 lobbies in Washington. Still, it has become the most fashionable of bogeymen, the latest in a history of Jewish bogeymen supposedly responsible for some Jewish conspiracy or another. Never mind that those contributing to AIPAC are American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. And never mind that Qatar, for example, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked emirate, plows billions of dollars of foreign cash into America to purchase influence. Those singling out AIPAC couldn't care less. AIPAC is "dark money." Qatari cash is perfectly OK money.

Anti-Semitism is often described as "the oldest hatred." It is certainly the most resilient. And these days, it is extraordinarily potent and widespread. Which makes this a very difficult season indeed.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.

Photo credit: Clay Banks at Unsplash