Gal Gadot - everybody's Wonder Woman - stood on the stage at the Simon Wiesenthal Center dinner the other night and was supposed to say a few words.
She didn't get very far before her voice broke.
And then she said she was sorry.
She apologized for being moved. For standing in front of a room full of people and being afraid. Afraid of how quickly hatred of Jews is spreading, and how openly it is being said and received, after the massacre of October 7 and the war that followed.
Notice who is apologizing.
The woman crying over the hatred.
The ones shouting their hatred in the streets never apologize - for anything at all. Not for the hatred. And not when they smash one big city after another.
She asked a question. How far can it go, if people get used to hearing and seeing the hatred and teach themselves to look the other way? Where does it all end then?
She didn't answer it herself. She just said that our shared history gives us every reason to take the question seriously.
I can answer it for her.
It ends where it has always ended. The hatred has always been there, and that is not what is dangerous in the beginning. What is dangerous is the habit. The moment a poster saying "Free Copenhagen from Zionism" is just something you walk past on your way to the bakery.
On Monday it was 88 years since Kristallnacht.
That night didn't come out of nowhere.
It came after five years in which people had grown used to it, in which enough of them were blown out enough that they needed a scapegoat. Once again. Just like now.
"It must be somebody's fault." And so they dig out the ancient lies, the badly designed pamphlets and books of fabricated reality, to animate the Liar and the Murderer in the individual.
That's where it ends.
So I stand behind her. And in front of her.
Behind her, because she is right. In front of her, because she should not have apologized. And so nobody can get to her without going through me first.
That is what men in the West were put in this world for. To guard what is beautiful and what is innocent, by ideas we were handed down from the very root of the tree she herself comes from.
We have failed at it before.
On Monday it was 88 years ago.
Not again.
Tears need no apology.
Silence does.
❤️🔥🪽
