We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.
— Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize speech
Members of white hate groups who blame Jews and non-white minorities of all kinds for all of America’s ills used to feel so disenfranchised that they never bothered to vote.
Not until candidate Donald Trump came along. Following the clarion call of KKK icon David Duke, they all rushed down to register to vote, they all came out in massive numbers to vote for Trump, and they all support him still — and quiet openly.
Jewish writer Talia Lavin noted this in The Washington Post last year about the constant lies and demonization of George Soros by Republicans:
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The far right has ecstatically embraced the spectacle of elected political figures such as Trump … theorizing about Soros. After Trump’s Soros tweet about (then Supreme Court nominee) Kavanaugh, the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer echoed and surpassed Trump’s assertion that anti-Kavanaugh dissent was a nefarious, paid-for plot.
“It is impossible to deny that subversive anti-American Jews were the primary force involved in a sinister plot to destroy (Supreme Court nominee Brett) Kavanaugh,” Lee Rogers wrote on the site a couple of days later. “These Jews do not represent the interest of America. They represent the interest of their diabolical and evil race first and foremost.”
(See Lavin’s full story here.)
But then there’s Louis Farrakhan, who is admired and embraced by a lot of liberals and civil rights leaders who are quick to say they don’t share his views on Jews, but insist that he’s an admirable man.
Just last year Farrakhan boasted at his Million Man March anniversary in Detroit that “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.” And that is by no means the most hateful thing that Farrakhan, who was invited by Aretha Franklin’s family to his funeral, has ever said.
Oddly a lot of civil rights leaders including celebrities also give him a big fat pass on his hatred of homosexuals and his far less-than-liberal views on women and how they dress and behave themselves.
Read the list of his Greatest Jewish Hits here and help me to understand how so many civil rights leaders and celebrities can give him a pass on his hate speech
And now for a few cold, sobering facts on this International Day of Holocaust Remembrance:
Two faces of American hate: David Duke and Louis Farrakhan.
Read how black women organizers of the recent Women’s March strained at gnats to defend Farrakhan here.
— A study last year found that 22% of American millennials haven’t heard of, or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust. More than 4-in-10 respondents (41%) did not know what Auschwitz was.
(According to Newsweek, another poll conducted in seven countries in Europe had similar findings. Among the people who were surveyed, 20 percent of people, who ranged between the ages of 18 and 34, had never heard of the Holocaust.)
— Everyone remembers the Pittsburg Synagogue slayings from a few months ago. But anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds have been rising sharply, and especially in schools and on college campsuses, for years.
Last February, for example, the Anti-Defamation League released its annual report, finding that “the number of anti-Semitic incidents was nearly 60 percent higher in 2017 than 2016, the largest single-year increase on record and the second highest number reported since ADL started tracking incident data in the 1970s.”
The report continued: “The sharp rise, reported in ADL’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, was in part due to a significant increase in incidents in schools and on college campuses, which nearly doubled for the second year in a row.” The ADL tabulated “1,015 incidents of harassment, including 163 bomb threats against Jewish institutions, up 41 percent from 2016; 952 incidents of vandalism, up 86 percent from 2016; and 19 physical assaults, down 47 percent from 2016.”
— One in 20 British adults (2.6 million Brits!) do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day. (Story here.)
— And then there’s Germany, where neo-Nazism is a real and scary phenomena. (More here on the extreme right, anti-immigration party there.)
Here’s another word from Elie Wiesel, who said in his Nobel Prize lecture this:
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
