It was bold of Gov. Maura Healey to order the lowering of the U.S. and Massachusetts flags to half-staff in memory of those killed in Hamas’ terrorist attack a year ago on Oct. 7.

Healey put the blame for the Israel/Hamas War squarely where it belongs—on Hamas, which started it with its unprovoked and savage invasion of Israel a year ago on Oct 7.

She also brought up the rise of antisemitism because of Israeli’s legitimate response to the invasion.

On that day Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 men, women and children, including 46 Americans. It took 254 hostages, including 12 Americans

Healey lowered the flags while other left wing Massachusetts politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen Eddie Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, sucking up to the pro Hamas radical wing of the Democrat Party, put the onus for the war on Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was a striking thing for Healey to do, coming as it did following the protests of thousands of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstrators who shut down Storrow Drive and parts of Beacon Hill the day before.

The demonstration was a soulless, in your face insult to all those who were killed that day or taken hostage, including the Americans and their loved ones.

Those Americans and the thousands of Palestinians killed in the war would be alive today but for the Hamas barbarians who started the war in the first place.

In lowering the flags, Healey said, “One year ago, the terrorist group Hamas launched a horrific, indefensible attack on the people of Israel, as well as hundreds of Americans peacefully living there. Since that day, terror, grief and trauma have continued to reverberate throughout the Jewish community, coupled with a rise in antisemitism and hate both here in Massachusetts and across the globe.”

While there is not much Healey can do to combat antisemitism– much of which has been imported– the fact that she is speaking about it is the right thing to do.

It is nothing but an utter disgrace that antisemitism has been nurtured and allowed to flourish at colleges and universities across the country, like at Harvard and Columbia.

You might even wonder if American history is even being taught any more. If so, students might learn that patriotic Jews fought in the Revolutionary War that established the freedoms that today allow anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and antisemites to shut down Storrow Drive or Columbia University.

General George Washington made 15 of the patriot Jews officers. Adam Jortner tells all about it in his book “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution & the Birth of Religious Freedom.”  Washington believed that Jews (but not, at the time, blacks) had natural rights in America, a land where “everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make them afraid.”

Except for now, when American Jews are harassed and attacked on college campuses and elsewhere simply for being Jews.

Which brings up a 2016 speech the late English theologian and philosopher  Rabbi Johnathan Sacks gave  to the European Parliament. While it dealt with the future of Jews in Europe it equally applies to the United States today.

Everybody should read it.

Antisemitism,” Sacks said, “means denying the right of Jews to exist as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.”

Sounding as though he were speaking about America today, Sacks asked, “would you stay in a country where you need armed police to guard you while you prayed? Where your children need armed guards to protect them at school? Where, if you wear a sign of your faith in public you risk being attacked or abused? Where, when your children go to university, they are insulted and intimidated because of what is happening in some other part of the world?”

“The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews,” Sacks said. “Antisemitism is only secondarily about Jews.

“Primarily it is about the failure of groups to accept responsibility for their own failures, and to build their own future by their own endeavors. No society that has fostered antisemitism has ever sustained liberty or human rights or religious freedom,” he continues.

“Every society driven by hate begins by seeking to destroy its enemies but ends by destroying itself.”

Amen.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

People visit the site of the Nova music festival, where hundreds of revelers were killed and abducted by Hamas and taken into Gaza, on the one-year anniversary of the attack, near Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel, on Monday, Oct. 7. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)