When Joe Biden declared his candidacy for president in 2019, he began his announcement video with two words: “Charlottesville, Virginia.” With footage of marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us!” playing in the background, Biden called the infamous antisemitic rally a “defining moment for this nation.” He condemned the right-wing bigots with “veins bulging … chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s.” He was right.

Well, today, there are dozens of Charlottesvilles taking place across the country. But now, the marchers are left-wing bigots who openly celebrate the massacre of innocent Jewish civilians and call for the destruction of Israel.

This, too, is a “defining moment” for our nation — and for the Democratic Party, which needs to purge the antisemitism in its ranks. Yet the president has failed to adequately confront the antisemitic bile coming from the left.

Many people of goodwill on the left have been shocked by the outpouring of bigotry. As CNN anchor Jake Tapper put it last month, this has been “a real eye-opening period for a lot of people — a lot of Democrats, a lot of progressives — in terms of antisemitism on the left.” But while antisemitism exists across the spectrum, right-wing antisemitism is largely a fringe phenomenon. You don’t see students at Ivy League schools holding neo-Nazi rallies. Left-wing antisemitism, by contrast, is an elite phenomenon.

Recently, antisemitic marches have been taking place at some of our nation’s most prestigious universities. On campuses where kids complain that speech is violence, students have celebrated actual violence against Jews: women and girls raped and mutilated; children slaughtered and burned; fathers with eyes gouged out; victims decapitated with farm equipment; even terrorists’ mass slaughter of youths their own age at a music festival. “They’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang-gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!” a crowd of students at George Mason University chanted.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, dozens of students chanted “There is only one solution!” At Cooper Union in Manhattan, a group of Jewish students were locked in the library as pro-Hamas protesters banged on the doors shouting “globalize the intifada from New York to Gaza!” At George Washington University in D.C., students projected antisemitic messages onto the side of a school library named for Jewish benefactors. A Cornell University professor declared at a rally that he was “exhilarated” by the Hamas killing spree. A Columbia University professor called the Hamas attacks “awesome” and “astounding.” At Harvard, where there have been multiple rallies, a speaker declared to about a thousand demonstrators that the perpetrators of the massacre were “not terrorists” but “liberators.” At another Harvard march, pro-Hamas students physically pushed and harassed a Jewish student — echoing recent harassment of a young Israeli hostage in Gaza.

“It’s a love fest of hate,” Harvard professor emeritus Ruth Wisse tells me. “The people on the campuses shouting ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ … well, what they are really chanting is ‘Death to the Jews!’ because from the river to the sea is the land of Israel.”

A Harvard-Harris poll finds that 62 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 acknowledge that Hamas’s attack against Israeli civilians was “genocidal,” yet a 51 percent majority of that same age group said those attacks “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” And 64 percent said Hamas and Israel have “equally just causes” — even though 58 percent say that Hamas is “trying to destroy Israel.” That is horrifying.

Meanwhile, antisemitism festers on Capitol Hill without cost or consequence. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) declared at an Oct. 18 rally that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza, a claim that had been debunked as Hamas propaganda. She has faced no penalty for spreading this blood libel, nor for accusing her House colleagues of dual loyalty — a classic antisemitic trope — by declaring in 2019 that “they forgot what country they represent.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has said that pro-Israel politicians “push for allegiance to a foreign country” and that U.S. support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” Yet both remain members in good standing of the House Democratic caucus.

Responsible leaders on the left need to step up and purge the antisemites in their midst. Universities would never allow a neo-Nazi to teach, so why are professors who support the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel tolerated on their faculties? Banks and law firms would rightly refuse to hire someone who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville, so why would they hire students who chant “There is only one solution”? Foreign students and others who openly support the murder of Jews by a designated terrorist organization, or who bully and menace Jewish students, should have their visas revoked. And the Biden administration should use federal civil rights laws to investigate and prosecute those who threaten and intimidate Jewish Americans, as happened to the students at Cooper Union.

We all have a responsibility to police our movements. Democrats don’t get to criticize Donald Trump for failing to adequately ostracize fringe alt-right antisemites and then tolerate virulent antisemitism on their own side. They should heed the admonition of scripture: Before you point out the splinter in your brother’s eye, remove the beam from your own.

Follow Marc A. Thiessen @marcthiessen on X (formerly Twitter).