When I go to synagogue, I always smile and wave at the armed police officers stationed outside. I want them to know they’re appreciated, but also, at some level, I guess it’s fair to say that I’m trying to ingratiate myself so that the cop will want to put his or her life on the line to save us if a gunman decides to open fire on or torch our congregation, as happened in Pittsburgh (2018), Poway (2019), Miami (2019), Monsey (2019), Halle, Germany (2019), Colleyville (2022), Jerusalem (2023), Djerba, Tunisia (2023), Berlin, Germany (2023), Yerevan, Armenia (2023), Rouen, France (2024), Athens, Greece (2024), Melbourne, Australia (2024), Los Angeles (2024), Manchester, U.K. (2024), and New York (2025.)

Antisemitism is a poison like radon, always present below the surface in low doses, but sometimes rising to lethal concentrations. Except radon, being colorless and odorless, is hard to detect without special equipment. Antisemitism, by contrast, is unsubtle and requires deliberate choices to unsee.

We have whole industries devoted to unseeing antisemitism and other outrages perpetrated by our ideological allies.

In this competitive atrocity era, no good massacre goes to waste. In the hours after the mass killing of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah, right-wing rage merchants like Sen. Tommy Tuberville called for the mass deportation of all Muslims from the United States.

Sen. Lindsey Graham blamed Obama and Biden. And Rep. Randy Fine weighed in with this analysis: “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible.”

It’s possible that these guys are letting their amygdalas overwhelm their prefrontal cortexes. Violence does excite the fear/anger receptors in our brains and prepare us to respond in kind. When we see blood, we see red.

But people also have judgment and self-control. They aren’t lab rats robotically responding to stimuli. So unless they respond to every episode of violence — say, Dylann Roof’s murders, or the Christchurch massacre — with similar extreme proposals, it’s safe to assume that they are atrocity opportunists.

The left’s atrocity detectors are tuned to a different channel. They are activated by Israeli wrongdoing (which is real) but quiescent in the face of anti-Israel massacres such as Oct. 7 or the antisemitic attacks that have erupted worldwide.

Some on the left object that Jews are using the claim of antisemitism to attempt to silence criticism of Israel. But please tell me what Alex Kleytman, the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife, Larisa, from bullets on Bondi Beach had to do with criticism of Israel?

Perhaps some overwrought Israel defenders do overuse accusations of antisemitism, but it’s also true that antisemites use any perceived crime or error by Israel as permission for open season on Jews worldwide. Which is worse?

The murderers in Australia were Muslims who had been radicalized by ISIS. But the hero of the day, Ahmed al Ahmed, was also a Muslim, a bystander who wrestled the gun away from one of the terrorists and was then shot multiple times by the other. Al Ahmed, who is recovering in the hospital, is a Syrian refugee and father of two girls. His story defies the atrocity mongers who want to exploit this crime to quicken hatred in the world. His shining example is a beacon at a time of year when we celebrate miracles.